Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Henriette Thompson: Nonagenarian Pianist and Marathoner

Harriette Thompson, a classical pianist and cancer survivor who started to run marathons when she was 76 and ran the fastest time in a marathon for a woman over 90, died on Monday, October 16 in Charlotte, N.C. She was 94. NY Times Obituary.

[In the past few years, she ran] while wearing white tights to cover the open wounds on her legs from radiation treatments for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma. Over the last seven years she had also dealt with a recurrence of oral cancer, which first struck her in 1986. The short and instructive New York Times obituary has many teaching points and is inspirational.

1. This 94-year-old musician and athlete died from a fall at the facility she was living in, not from her cancers.
2. Although she had squamous cell carcinoma of her legs and was being treated with radiotherapy the skin cancers were not proximate causes of her demise. This corroborates the work of E. Linos on “Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer in the Elderly.” In my opinion, we pay far too much attention to skin cancers which are billable to Medicaid and Medicare than to having patients use canes or having 94-year-old people being extremely cautious about stairs.
3.  This remarkable woman was a pianist until her death, she was an athlete. She had great meaning of her life.

For me, as a dermatologist, this reinforces the fact that treatment of non-melanoma skin cancer in the elderly, especially people over age 85, is not likely to improve their quality of life. Before recommending therapy, we may need to step back and not scare our elderly patients into having unnecessary surgery but, as experts, we should have honest discussions with them. Lesions in certain areas are best treated (around the eyes, nose, ears); but lesions on the torso and extremities can often be followed by active surveillance.These short You Tube videos will interest some of you.

 

 

Kahanamoku: Man and Legend

Historian Michael Beschloss has a fine piece about Duke Kahanamoku in the August 23, 2014 NY Times.  It captures the spirit of this Hawaiian icon who is universally beloved in the Aina until today.

Duke, left, with brothe, Sam

 

Slomo: A San Diego Legend

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work."  H. D. Thoreau

Thoreau sequestered himself at Walden.  The erstwhile neurologist, Dr. John Kitchin, fled a medical practice to in-line skate on the boardwalk.  On any given day, "Kitchin [can be seen] meticulously skating up and down San Diego's promenade. Disillusioned with a life that had become increasingly materialistic, he abruptly abandoned his career and moved to a studio by the beach. The locals call him Slomo, knowing little about his past life, but cheering and high-fiving him as he skates by in slow motion. He has become a Pacific Beach institution."

If you missed the provacative and, for some, inspirational NY Times article, click on SLOMO.

"I Can"

[From the NY Times;] Tatyana McFadden, a 24-year-old college senior, was born with spina bifida, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. She is now a decorated wheelchair sprinter, and she has 12 medals — three gold — from the last three Paralympic Games, in Athens, Beijing and London.

McFadden grew up in an orphanage in St. Petersburg, where she was never given a wheelchair. She spent her first six years walking on her hands before Deborah McFadden, then the director of the International Children’s Alliance, adopted her during an overseas trip. After taking to sports in her childhood, Tatyana McFadden fought through the courts in high school in Maryland to compete against able-bodied runners. 

Her mother says that when Tatyana arrived from Russia, she used a phrase that meant “I can do it myself. And that’s just what she’s done. She’s never been afraid to try anything.”

McFadden has become the preeminent wheelchair marathoner and hopes to....  Tatyana was featured in an inspirational article in the NY Times on October 11, 2013.

 

 

 

 

Return to O.M.O.*

"When I was 8, my parents divorced and my mother married a man whose career took us from Washington to Melbourne Beach, a town on the “Space Coast” of Central Florida, where I learned to surf..."  

Read:  "After the Agony of Youth, The Ecstasy of Surfing" by Thad Ziolkowski from the NY Times.  A paen to Hanalei.

*O.M.O.  equals "Our Mother Ocean"

Basil D’Oliveira, a Symbol for Cricket and for Equality, Dies at 80

By Douglas Martin

NY Times, November 27, 2011

"Just as Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson pursued their athletic dreams and developed superlative skills before altering history, Basil D’Oliveira, who was classified as colored under South African apartheid, wanted only to play at the highest levels of his sport, cricket. His struggle to do that in a country of government-enforced racial segregation became a powerful symbol in the ultimately successful fight against apartheid."  Read this moving obituary.

Sensei Keiko Fukuda

Banzai!! Banzai!! Banzai!!! to Sensei Keiko Fukuda of San Francisco. She recently became the first woman to earn a 10th degree black belt in judo, at the age of 98. Only three others have this martial arts highest ranking - all men living in Japan. Fukuda started learning judo more than 75 years ago in Japan and still teaches three times a week. Earning this black belt was her lifelong dream.  You can see an inspiring YouTube segment on Sensei Fukuda.

Swimming Through Grief

Every day, no matter the weather, Gary Atlas runs six miles and takes a dip in the cold ocean water.This is an amazing article about a Brooklyn resident "who, since September 2007, while unemployed and tending to his dying mother, sought relief from depression by running on the beach and swimming in the ocean every day.  The article is worth reading and the Times video is moving -- especially when Atlas says he hasn't seen a doctor in 37 years! See: Swimming Through Grief.  There's a video on the site which is inspirational as well.

 

To a Surfer Dying Young

Andy Irons World Champion Surfer (1978 - 2010)

To An Athlete Dying Young

AE Housman 

The time you won your town the race   
We chaired you through the market-place;   
Man and boy stood cheering by,   
And home we brought you shoulder-high.   
 
To-day, the road all runners come,         
Shoulder-high we bring you home,   
And set you at your threshold down,   
Townsman of a stiller town.   
 
Smart lad, to slip betimes away   
From fields where glory does not stay         
And early though the laurel grows   
It withers quicker than the rose.   
 
Eyes the shady night has shut   
Cannot see the record cut,   
And silence sounds no worse than cheers         
After earth has stopped the ears:   
 
Now you will not swell the rout   
Of lads that wore their honours out,   
Runners whom renown outran   
And the name died before the man.          
 
So set, before its echoes fade,   
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,   
And hold to the low lintel up   
The still-defended challenge-cup.   
 
And round that early-laurelled head        
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,   
And find unwithered on its curls   
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Faces at the Finish

There were 45,344 runners who participated in the 2010 New York City Marathon. Here are 99 of them right after they crossed the finish line.

Each one tells a story.  See 99/45,322 (from the NY Times Journal of Sports)