<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The human body is a remarkable machine.\u00a0 Our built-in self-repair mechanisms are tested throughout one\u2019s life and looking back, I can only wonder why humans are so determined to thoroughly test the limits of these systems.\u00a0 My father and mother both smoked when I was growing up.\u00a0 Thankfully, my mother quit cold turkey when I was in Junior High.\u00a0 If you ask me why I laid low and stayed out of trouble during that period of early teen rebellion, that would be one of the big reasons.\u00a0 My mother wasn\u2019t a large woman, but with her dander up, she could be a force of nature.\u00a0 Even in my clueless early teens, I knew not to kick that hornet nest.\u00a0 During the first phase of her quitting, she was, dare I say, a bit touchy and on edge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even though dad gave up the habit a few times (for many months at one point), he was a harder nut to crack.\u00a0 Well into his 70s, he ended up hospitalized with a serious pneumonia that reminded him of his younger years when he was afflicted with chronic emphysema.\u00a0 He was giving the attending doctor a hard time about keeping him in the hospital.\u00a0 Dad was a little shaken when the M.D. said, \u201cYou can go home anytime, but if you do not stop smoking, you will be back in worse shape.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t want to die gasping for breath, then I suggest you stop right now!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My father had taken up the habit when he worked underground in an iron mine in Wakefield.\u00a0 His partner used to bring one cigarette with him to smoke after lunch each day.\u00a0 Dad asked him some questions about smoking so one day he brought two so he could give it a try.\u00a0 From age nineteen on, dad spent more than fifty years smoking various brands.\u00a0 The dangers of this nasty habit were not widely known yet and I am sure he did a lot of damage to his lungs smoking unfiltered Camels and similarly unfiltered roll-your-owns.\u00a0 He always told us kids (my brother, sister, and I) to never start smoking (a parental instruction which we thankfully obeyed).\u00a0 This advice did not prevent him from setting us up with his little mechanical device, rolling paper, and bulk tobacco we used to manufacture unfiltered cigarettes to refill his empty Camel packs.\u00a0 The older we got, the more we nagged him about quitting but it took the prospect of his breathing problems as a young boy returning to get him to shake his habit for good.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Amazingly, dad walked out of the hospital after the doctor gave him the old one-two punch about his health and never smoked again.\u00a0 No aids, no nicotine laced gum – just a cold turkey stop.\u00a0 I am sure that he went through a good deal of discomfort, at least during the initial stages of quitting, but the longer he went, the easier it became.\u00a0 When his persistent cough began to disappear, the benefits of quitting started to emerge.\u00a0 Even after more than a half century of abuse, his lungs began to improve as did his stamina.\u00a0 Late in his 80s and into his early 90s, COPD began to affect him more, but one can only speculate how severely (and how much earlier) it would have affected him had he continued smoking.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Growing up, I had more than my fair share of bad sinus and lung infections.\u00a0 It occurred to me later in life that mild allergies coupled with exposure to cigarette smoke were the source of many of these childhood illnesses.\u00a0 After mom quit smoking, dad was compelled to do his smoking anywhere but in the house.\u00a0 The indoor smoking ban and prolonged absences when I was working away from home during the summers helped keep me from getting extremely sick with every head cold I contracted.\u00a0 The first six years of my teaching career coincided with a return of the sinus and lung problems I thought I had grown out of.\u00a0 The main contributing factor here seemed to be the blue cloud of smoke that hovered in the teacher\u2019s lounge.\u00a0 By the middle of the 1983-84 (the first year the Ontonagon Jr. High students had moved into the high school building), I stopped eating my lunch in the lounge.\u00a0 I even stopped hanging my coat in the \u2018smoking lounge\u2019 because the smell it absorbed had the same irritating effect on my sinuses.\u00a0 Not long after the move to the current K-12 building, cigarettes were banned from public buildings and I again found myself battling less smoke induced complications every time I got sick.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When my classes began working on improving the nature trail west of the OASD school building, many former students reminded me that this area used to be \u2018the smoker\u2019s trail\u2019.\u00a0 Back in the 1980s, it was not uncommon to see small groups of students heading out there before school or during the lunch hour.\u00a0 The school administration tried to combat teen smoking for many years, but it remained a problem.\u00a0 As more people reminded me that this \u2018used to be the smoker\u2019s trail\u2019, I began to realize that I hadn\u2019t seen any students heading out to the woods for a long time.\u00a0 I will not say that there are no teen smokers these days, but it certainly isn\u2019t as common as it used to be.\u00a0 One JH class actually didn\u2019t believe me when I told them students used to go out to the woods trail to smoke during school.\u00a0 If people forget that there ever was a smoker\u2019s trail, that will be a great sign that perhaps teen tobacco use is on a permanent decline (and never becoming the \u2018vape trail\u2019 would also be great).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As the NFL (and eventually other sports leagues) became more concerned with concussions and their lasting effects, I thought back to whether or not I had ever had one.\u00a0 Not playing organized football past sixth grade more than likely saved my noggin some wear and tear, but many times our pick up games without helmets were just as brutal as \u2018the real thing\u2019.\u00a0 I eventually recalled two instances where I can say that all the signs that I was \u2018concussed\u2019 were present.\u00a0 The first time my bell was truly \u2018rung\u2019 actually happened on the playground in early elementary school.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The back of Whitman Elementary School faced a large yard with a playground on one end and an expansive lawn in the other direction.\u00a0 There was a paved service driveway that looped around the school to the back door near the gym and janitor\u2019s room.\u00a0 In first or second grade (pardon my hazy memory of the exact year), I was chasing one of those red rubber playground balls down this paved area.\u00a0 I tried to stop it by stepping in front of it as I had seen other kids do.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I stepped ON the ball and when my foot bounced forward off the top, my body went horizontal to the ground.\u00a0 The back of my head impacted the ground first and my field of vision went completely white.\u00a0 After my vision cleared, I sat up and realized everyone else was heading back to class.\u00a0 The rest of the day was kind of a blur and my mother was somewhat concerned that I took a nap after school (something that never happened when there were adventures to be had before dinner).\u00a0 Had I looked in the mirror, I am betting my eyes were bloodshot as they can be with this type of impact to the head.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I managed to wait until tenth grade before collecting my second concussion.\u00a0 It was in Jerry Pangrzi\u2019s gym class.\u00a0 I can still remember the concerned look on his face when he asked me, \u201cAre you okay?\u201d\u00a0 We used volleyballs as our missiles instead of those big rubber playground balls.\u00a0 The lighter volleyballs could be thrown with a lot of speed, but they had less mass than those heavy rubber jobs.\u00a0 One could get hit in the head with volleyball and it hardly registered.\u00a0 Those rubber balls had more mass, but they also gave a double whammy when they hit.\u00a0 The compression upon impact followed by the ball springing back to shape would give one\u2019s head a double shot.\u00a0 Ball compression, however, is not what caused a concussion in this case.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We were playing on the sports deck above the main Marquette Senior High gym floor.\u00a0 The wrestling mat was rolled up and stored against one end wall.\u00a0 The team guarding that side of the floor would routinely sit on the rolled up mat when they were put out of the game.\u00a0 The day I literally hit the wall, the guys sitting on the mat had caused it to migrate three feet out on the floor.\u00a0 Near the end of one game, Mr. Pangrazzi called, \u201cGo and get \u2018em,\u201d which meant the remaining players could go anywhere on the floor to hunt down the last survivors.\u00a0 I was furiously back pedalling to avoid an onrushing attacker when my lower legs encountered the mat, now unexpectedly a yard from the brick wall.\u00a0 When my legs hit the mat,\u00a0 momentum carried the rest of me over the top and into the wall.\u00a0 Naturally, I hit it with the back of my head and as with my earlier concussion, my vision went completely white.\u00a0 The next thing I remember is Mr. P holding my shoulders and peering into my glassy eyes.\u00a0 I answered his question with several seconds of blank stare and a mumbled, \u201cYeah, I think so.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWell, at least you didn\u2019t crack the wall,\u201d\u00a0 Mr. P replied which gave me a little hint of how hard I must have hit.\u00a0 Being one of those hard headed Finns, if either of these incidents did any permanent damage, it hasn\u2019t surfaced yet (I think).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I often kid my brother that we split up our bumps and bruises growing up.\u00a0 I seemed to be the one who collected stitches and he was the one who broke bones.\u00a0 The first time I remember him being in a cast was when he was tripped in the hall in Junior High and broke his arm.\u00a0 I was pretty young because I vaguely remember him wearing a sling after it first happened.\u00a0 The injury I remember with greater clarity came on my ninth birthday, meaning Ron would have been fifteen or sixteen.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We usually celebrated birthdays as a family but were given the opportunity to have one party with invited guests.\u00a0 For my ninth, we had some of the neighborhood kids over for grilled hamburgers and cake.\u00a0 When the food and gifts were done, we went to the next door neighbor\u2019s bac yard to play a little two hand touch football.\u00a0 Ron was the biggest kid playing so he was more or less fooling with us smaller kids.\u00a0 The south end of the neighbor\u2019s lawn sloped up a good five feet to the next backyard and I can still see the fateful moment in my mind.\u00a0 Ron was halfway up this slope and he pivoted to his left just before he went down like a ton of bricks.\u00a0 The grass was a bit wet and it looked like his foot slipped and then stopped dead against a clump of grass.\u00a0 Thinking it was a sprain, dad and our neighbor got him up and helped him to the couch in our living room\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It didn\u2019t take long to realize he had actually broken his femur because his leg began to swell above the knee.\u00a0 The next time I saw him, he was in a hip to ankle cast.\u00a0 The first night home from the hospital, he tried to roll over in his twin size bed and the cast pulled him right to the floor.\u00a0 He spent the rest of his recuperation time sleeping on our full size roll-away bed in the living room.\u00a0 Once he got out of his cast, it took a long time to rehab his shrivelled leg to get the strength back.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps my dad caught the leg breaking disease from my brother.\u00a0 The first time I remember him breaking anything was in his seventies.\u00a0 He missed the bottom step going to the basement and broke his leg just above the ankle.\u00a0 The doctor put a plate and screws in it and he was almost as good as new in a few months’ time.\u00a0 Dad was a lot more cautious from that point on but somewhat self conscious about this leg.\u00a0 Then he did brother Ron one better and broke his leg again a couple of years later.\u00a0 The same leg!<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Dad was in the habit of meeting some old buddies for coffee every morning.\u00a0 In the winter, he would use a walker to get back and forth to the car when the driveway was slippery, just in case.\u00a0 Returning with a travel mug of coffee one morning, he made the mistake of trying to navigate the icy driveway with his coffee in hand.\u00a0 He hit a patch of black ice and the walker went one way and he went the other.\u00a0 Dad landed with his back to the basement door (that side of the basement was at the driveway level).\u00a0 He could see his foot was pointing at a right angle from the rest of the leg.\u00a0 Dad used his other let to push it back into a \u2018normal\u2019 position before figuring out what to do next.\u00a0 Mom was upstairs watching TV so he knew she wouldn\u2019t hear him yell, so he hatched a plan.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Dad reached up and opened the door and then used his arms to pull himself across the basement (of course the stairs were on the opposite end from where he had fallen).\u00a0 He then pulled himself backwards up the stairs until he could reach the doorknob.\u00a0 He opened the door and told mom to get the wheelchair they had kept after his first break.\u00a0 He called his family doctor and only to find out that he was out of town until the next Monday.\u00a0 Being this happened on a Friday morning, he resolved to simply wait at home until he could see his doctor after the weekend.\u00a0 It took the threat of calling an ambulance to get him in the car and to the ER, but in the end, that is what happened.\u00a0 Not only had he broken the same leg in the same place, he had managed to bend the plate that had been used to repair the first break.\u00a0 That\u2019s my dad:\u00a0 never do things halfway!\u00a0 He was disappointed they did not let him keep the bent plate trophy.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My mother-in-law, Ruth Ahlskog, also broke her ankle twice when she was still working as an RN at the Ontonagon Hospital.\u00a0 The first time, she was going to drive herself to work until her kids talked her out of it.\u00a0 The second time, she actually did drive to work.\u00a0 Her coworkers found out and hauled her to the E.R. before one of them called to ask if I had a camera.\u00a0 They said,\u00a0 \u00a0 \u201cBring it to the E.R., we need you to take a picture of Ruth.\u201d\u00a0 I was a little baffled why, but they were so flabbergasted by her coming to work with a broken ankle they wanted to document the moment.\u00a0 I can still see her laughing about everyone making such a fuss over a little broken bone.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I can only summarize from my own family that Finns are a tough bunch.\u00a0 We aren\u2019t superhuman by any means, as the broken bones and stitches we collect attest.\u00a0 The \u2018tough\u2019 part seems to come from how we handle those hard knocks that life dishes out from time to time.\u00a0 As a youngster, my dad was helping my grandfather split rails with a mall.\u00a0 They were facing each other working from opposite ends of the same log.\u00a0 Dad got a little too close to grandpa and nicked the top of his head with his splitting mall.\u00a0 Grandpa went down, out cold.\u00a0 Dad ran to get his older brother to come and help him out, scared that he may have killed his father. \u00a0 By the time they got back to the woods, grandpa was back to splitting logs.\u00a0 \u201cHe never said a word about it,\u201d dad explained, \u201cand I wasn\u2019t about to ask.\u00a0 I did learn a couple of pretty good lessons that day.\u201d\u00a0 Maybe this was a hint as he was in the process of teaching me how to split wood.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video – The definitive\u00a0Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room<\/em> by Brownsville Station – if you are going to write about smoking, might as well make it a hit record!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The human body is a remarkable machine.\u00a0 Our built-in self-repair mechanisms are tested throughout one\u2019s life and looking back, I can only wonder why humans are so determined to thoroughly test the limits of these systems.\u00a0 My father and mother both smoked when I was growing up.\u00a0 Thankfully, my mother quit cold turkey when 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