Many blessings to old man Nick Wells

K, I didn't realize that Nick Wells is your dad. He was a great amateur fighter,and will have a successful surgery and recovery.:good

 

He's doing all right. (I trust your father has also come out of surgery in good order as well.)

That infection happened back in 1992. His legs were previously the one impressive aspect of his physique, and there's something of a story behind that as well.

When my father was a toddler, he became afflicted with rickets. One day, his grandmother (who's really the one who raised him) was bathing him, and his chest suddenly collapse under her hands, and his chest has remained sunken ever since. But he also developed bow legs as a result, and there are early photographs of him with this classic sign of rickets. Fortunately, one of the boyhood indulgences of he and his friends growing up in the city during the depression and WW II was to footrace street cars from the sidewalks. As a side effect of all this running, the muscular development actually straightened out his growing legs perfectly. (The surgeon who replaced his hips and knees was surprised and impressed when I told him about the rickets, saying he never would have guessed my father ever had this ailment. The muscle building from all that sprinting actually corrected the shape of his leg bones.)

Anyhow, my father had muscular legs (especially calves) until arthritis began troubling his knees. Following recovery from the infection which nearly killed him, his calves withered from over 19 inches in circumference to around 14 inches, his thighs also lost a few inches, and he's never regained that former mass. (It's not likely that he ever can now, as he also has severely arthritic feet. He spends his winters in Florida though, where the balmy heat soothingly counteracts what would otherwise be a discomfort he sometimes likens to walking on glass.) But while his legs are now withered compared to what they once were, and he does use a cane on some more extended walks, his mobility is essentially intact. (And he qualifies for meter free handicapped parking, a convenient perk he enjoys as well as needs, and takes full advantage of.)

In the years after he recovered from his infection in 1993 (getting back from that whammy took several months), he was tipped off to the surgeon who eventually replaced his knees and hips one by one over a period of some years. Fortunately, he delayed long enough so that he's not likely to ever need a second replacement of any of those four joints, but was still young enough that he could recover full mobility rather than being confined to a wheelchair, like his 90 year old uncle who got a hip replacement last year. (My father will be 79 in February, and likes to be physically active, always puttering about. Of course each successive joint replacement is not as good as the previous one, so I have some concern as to whether a knee replacement at just 59 will be too early to last a lifetime.)

 

Certainly that it was the right kind of natural exercise mattered greatly. Prepubescent heavy weight training is not necessarily a great thing for the long bones of a growing body, but vigorous outdoor activity like running, skipping and jumping certainly does the trick. (His father was an amateur boxer in the 1920s, but my father had a glass jaw and never could have made the grade doing that.) As children, we move in that delightfully unaffected way nature intended, but all too often lose those qualities as we grow older.

As might be expected. This is more than a successful arthroscopic procedure, where laborers sometimes return to work in a few days. That his knee was so bad isn't terribly surprising either, given what he's been doing. For all the medical scanning technology available today, there's still no substitute for actually opening up a patient and seeing what's inside with one's own eyes.

My father actually pushed to expedite the process of replacing his hips after his knees were done. His surgeon wanted to hold off a bit, but acquiesced to my father's pleas of undue discomfort, and was surprised to discover that my father was right, that his hips were more degraded than X-rays and other imagery scans indicated.

Later, my father began experiencing pain in his hips which led him to suspect that the replacements had slipped out of place. When his surgeon reevaluated him however, he determined that the problem was with my father's back instead. Sure enough, he then made some appointments with his chiropractor, which corrected the problem and eliminated the hip pain.

Having mentioned his arthritic feet (which originally began as gout, a condition my arthritic kid brother never had) as his main obstacle to optimum mobility now, I've been looking for ways to address this, since all the doctors he's met with say there's nothing they can do for his feet. Three of the books I've most recently read are "Chi Walking" and "Chi Running" by Danny Dreyer, and "Running with the Whole Body" by the late Jack Heggie, the latter a Feldenkrais based approach to movement reeducation.

Not much instructional material is out there on walking and running bio-mechanics, and "Chi Walking" in particular has been cited by some consumers on-line with the same arthritic feet my father has as a helpful resource for successfully addressing this condition. I have therefore decided to purchase support material available through Dreyer's website as a Father's Day gift for after my Dad returns north from Florida, as instructional CDs and DVDs are easier for him to follow along with than literature would be. Some of the reviews I've read on the value of this instruction for purposes of physical rehabilitation have been positively glowing.

Dreyer's website:

www.chiwalking.com

The source for material by Heggie and other Feldenkrais oriented instruction:

www.achievingexcellence.com/index.html

In the current thread on Palomino, "The Best I Faced," Carlos admits that he's addicted to running, but that all those marathons are starting to take a toll on his knees. As a college graduate, he might be just the sort of student who could benefit greatly from information like this. Exercises like running should build a body up, not break it down. One of the vignettes in "Running with the Whole Body" (page 41) is titled, "The Problem in the Knee is in the Shoulder," and it's a revelation to understand how one part of the body can so profoundly effect a seemingly remote and unconnected other part of the anatomy.

 

Nick Wells was a accomplished amateur. He beat many great amateurs. He KO'd Holmes at the prime of his amateur career and I felt he Wells, because of his power would have had a better chance against Stevenson for the Gold. The shame of the matter was Wells would have had the needed professional guidance and connections had he gone with Duva...Nick Wells for being one of the best amateurs and a WHITE heavyweight who should have been a commodity was completely misguided as a pro....Funny but Willie Dewitt was also ruined as a pro by a TX outfit....I wish I could get some of the old amateur fights of Wells especially his 2 brutal KO's of Holmes, Wells was a vicious puncher....I wish Nick Wells the best...

 

If you google:

"in the shoulder" Heggie

exactly like that, you will get directly to that vignette excerpt from "Running with the Whole Body" on Google books, and in fact be able to read pages 15-54 of Heggie's manual for yourself.

While running, I originally lived in the country, and had dirt roads to work on. There was some pavement, but the pounding was lessened considerably because virtually all the running I was doing on those surfaces was uphill, therefore lower impact than a level or downhill grade. But when I moved to a more urban environment with exclusively paved roads, my legs couldn't tolerate it, leading to me giving it up where I have previously been wavering on whether or not to continue.

Running and other exercise regimens failed decisively to make me feel better, in fact left me severely drained and listless. Within the last few years though, I've discovered that I have severe sleep apnea, have always had it, and that this combined with a series of decades old blood infections like staph and EBV have been largely responsible for the fact that physical activity has reduced rather than enhanced the quality of my life. Part of my interest in running bio-mechanics has to do with somehow making it less strenuous so I can somehow attain some benefits without having it leave me completely depleted of energy.