I am not what happened to me.
I am what I choose to become.
- Carl Jung
I don’t know everything and the line from a U2 song “the older I get the less I know” resonates deeper and deeper within me as I age. But one subject I know for sure is, that we humans are outrageously creative adapting critters when we are summoned to answer “the call.” Each of us answers “the call” uniquely when it comes to dealing and healing “life’s, quakes, shakes and crevasses while holding tightly to the hope ropes dangling over the abyss.
Read Part 2 here.
After dangling without hope for a stretch following my spinal cord injury (SCI), I was lowered, hungry for answers, on to the Long Beach State campus during the late 70’s. There I found “my people,”
all securely on be-lay, with headlamps illuminating new perspectives. As I rolled through disabled students services there they were MacGyver-ing adaptations enabling them to continue summiting their dreams from entirely different directions without feeling the dream had been downgraded.
I was strengthened by the sustenance they offered me. But their explanations of answering “the call” didn’t quenched my hunger, if anything I became ravenous for more ideas of what deals are struck so that disability doesn’t suck the air out of our dreams. So why not share some of my fav adapting critters in this venue. May I introduce you to Jon Arnow, whom I met July of 2002 immediately following his 4-month stint in Craig Rehabilitation Hospital. If not for our “in common SCI” we would never have met or been friends, we were that different. Funny, how life bends and twists us together.
Jon and his brother grew up in Syracuse NY, the sons of a father from Poland who had lost his first family while fighting on the Russian Front. Jon was inspired to be a physician from the beginning by his father a psychiatrist and his mother a social worker and physical therapist. Jon was positive of his life path into academia from Brown University to Yale School of Medicine, positive that is until a 2-month rotation on a Navajo reservation in Colorado shifted his perspective from indoors to outdoors.
It was during that rotation Jon felt the mountains and rivers call him. He made the decision to alter his academia life path and become a surgeon, the ear, nose and throat kind. After a 6 year medical residence in Denver Colorado, supplemented with
skiing (becoming the only resident in Denver to ski 80 days in one year,) ice climbing, bagging six 6000 meter peaks, rafting Southwest Rivers and marrying his wife, Debbie they relocated in Reno, Nevada.
The next 18 years Jon grew his practice while extending his expertise as a hiker, biker, telemark skier, helicopter-skiing yearly in Canadian Rockies and spring ski traverses in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range of 80-90 miles lasting 6 to 10 days. On February 21, 2002 Jon fixed his mind on a few afternoon turns at a local ski area after packing his gear required for a mountain traverse in Europe that covers 75 miles of alpine terrain called the
Huate Route.
Jon had skied the Keyhole, the times 3 Black Diamond run, a 5 foot wide couloir lined with rocks, on numerous occasions successfully. After one turn Jon knew he misjudged the snow conditions in the Keyhole. As Jon lay bleeding out on the snow, waiting, he looked at his friend and stated, “You know, I’ve skied that better” then slipped into a coma. Jon had fractured his pelvis, tore his colon from his rectum, experienced massive soft tissue damage and burst his T12 vertebra becoming an incomplete paraplegic with chronic neuropathic pain.
Please go to part 2, now for Jon Arnow interview. Thank you!
ripple, grateful dead
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