Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Strange days...

My life has been, up to this point, comparatively eventful by most people's standards. Still it was something of a surprise when, 5 minutes after arriving home from my training session this morning, I was heading down the street at 100 miles per hour with a dying toddler in my back seat.

Why does this stuff happen to me?

I had LITERALLY just pulled into my parking space. I was going to clean up and then buy my last Christmas gift, then spend the rainy day inside reading. As I got out of my car I saw a guy sprinting down the alley with limp child in his arms. He was talking to her in Spanish and her legs were flopping up and down in time with his feet, there was clearly something seriously wrong.

I yelled after him and asked if he needed help, but he either didn't hear me or didn't understand, he simply kept running full speed down the alley. I looked to my left and there was a lady running down the alley after him. She was a heavy-set Latina and was clearly struggling to keep up. I stopped her and asked what was wrong, she blurted out:

"Baby start shaking, baby high fever, baby dying!!!"

She was panicked and was wildly gesticulating the entire time. Now it was clear to me at this point that English was not this lady's first language, but if 2 out of 3 of the statements she had just made were even REMOTELY accurate this was a serious emergency.

I have a trait I fortunately inherited from my late father: I don't panic easily. It seems like the worse a situation is, the calmer I react to it. This is a useful trait to have if you want to make a living in a combat-related field, but its even more useful in a medical emergency. Given the average response time to a 911 call and the clearly life-threatening nature of the situation, I did some quick math.

"Do you need a car?" I asked
"We no have car." she responded, her hands shaking like butterflies
"I do, get in."

She hopped in the front seat and I took off! I was a valet at a few hotels when I was younger, that experience REALLY comes in handy when you have to pull out of a parking space at full speed. I raced down the alley and followed the path the guy and taken to the left. He had been running to the fire station a block behind my apartment. No one was there and he was standing outside with a "what am I going to do now" look on his face and an unconscious little girl in his arms.

I pulled the car up to the front of the station and told him to get in. A guy in a pickup had parked in front of the station and I stuck my head out the window and asked him where the nearest hospital was (I've only lived there a few months). He told me where it was (only a couple of miles away) and I hit the gas.

Occasions where you aren't concerned about the law or your own person safety are pretty rare, but in my opinion they are to be used to the fullest. So-Cal is in the middle of a Noah's Ark level storm at the moment and it was coming down in buckets this morning and here I was speeding through red lights with my pedal to the FLOOR, horn blaring. I figured if we spun out, at least an ambulance would come either way.

We had to stop at a major intersection and turned around to see how our patient was doing. She was still out and her (I assume) father was holding her on his lap. I put my hand on her back and she was as hot as a furnace. She was breathing, but it was VERY shallow and labored. It sounded like she was breathing through mud. I gave him my sweater and he wrapped it around her. He was constantly talking to her. He didn't speak any English and my Spanish isn't good enough to pick up what he was saying. I can only assume he was saying what any parent would say to their child at that point:

"Just hold on, you are going to be OK. Everything is alright, we are going to take care of you."

I didn't need a translation for that, I just drove, FAST.

We made the hospital in less than 2 minutes. I just left the car running and we bolted into the emergency room. There was one woman in there talking to the receptionist. The (once again I assume) parents were trying to get her attention and she said something along the lines of

"Cant you see there is a lady in front of you?"

Look, I can appreciate the civility behind "first come-first served", but I'm sure an exception could be made FOR A DYING TODDLER!!! Fortunately a nurse came out immediately and I didn't have to put my fist through the receptionist's window. I explained the situation as best I could: 1. unconscious kid 2. high fever 2. possible seizures. They took us back to see a doctor who immediately began inserting an IV into the limp child's arm.

I had done everything I could do, all I was going to do at this point was get in the way. I wished them good luck and took back my sweater. They started crying and thanked me profusely. I told them it was no problem and wished them a merry Christmas. I get the feeling that no matter what happens on Christmas morning, they are going to have a lot to be thankful for.

I still have to buy my sister's Christmas gift, but I'm sure she'll understand if its a few days late...

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Burning at both ends

"All of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you."
"But not to last."
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly Roy..."
-Conversation between replicant Roy Batty and his creator Dr. Eldon Tyrell
Blade Runner

I love Blade Runner. Its an awesome movie with a visual style that was WAY ahead of its time. The basic plot, for those who haven't seen it, is the struggle of a small group of genetically engineered androids (replicants) to find a way to extend their life-spans. They are smarter, faster, and stronger than regular humans, and yet have a pre-set 4 years to live. When the leader, Roy Batty, finally gets to meet his maker, the preceding quote is the response he receives.

I think the conversation reveals a central human truth in many respects. I recently watched a documentary on steroids entitled "Bigger, Faster, Stronger". It was a fairly even-handed look at steroids and, in a wider sense, the culture of athletic achievement in America. One of the claims that keeps popping up in the film is that the effects of steroids are temporary and reversible and that the damage to the health of anabolic steroid users is greatly exaggerated by the media.
The problem with that assertion is that, as the film admits, there simply aren't any studies of the health risks associated with long-term usage of steroids. The sticky ethical problem of having someone juice up for 20 years to find out what happens to their internal organs is understandable.

The simple fact is that MOST drugs, legal and illegal, have temporary and reversible effects. Despite all the Len Bias talk I got when I was a kid, unless you have a coronary condition of some kind, one line of cocaine will not kill you, one hit of acid will not leave you a babbling wreck, and one hit of speed will not turn you into the meth-whore on the billboard. Long term usage is an entirely different story, and once the ball starts rolling, it rolls FAST.

I once heard that the average age that a retired NFL player dies at the age of 53. That sounded incredible to me, so I started paying attention. Every time I heard on the news that an ex-NFL player passed away I would make a mental note of their age. My good friend's uncle played for the Raiders, he died at 51. Defensive legend Reggie White was 43 when he passed. Chris Mims, a friend of my ex and a former defensive end for the Chargers, was 38. I studied statistics, and the previous examples certainly do not constitute an appropriate sample with which to draw a conclusion, but it did raise some questions in my mind.

Im not saying that all of these and other comparatively young NFL players died from steroid use. What I am saying is that the human truth uttered by Dr. Eldon Tyrell is very much alive in professional sports. The candle that burns twice as bright really does burn half as long.

The human body has certain limits. As an athlete you are conditioned to push and/or ignore those limits. What I tell the fighters I train is that the body is essentially lazy. Your body does not want to be a champion, it wants to sit in 98.6 degree water and get tube fed. Its your mind that wants to be a champion. Your mind must push your body and let it know who is in charge in order to overcome your physical limitations. That can work for a certain amount of time if one has the proper mental and physical conditioning, but the body is ultimately in charge. If you watch Sian Welch and Wendy Ingraham literally CRAWL across the finish line at the 1997 Ironman World Championships you will understand what I am saying. Both women were desperate to run, walk, or even stand up, and were mere yards from the goal they had trained so hard for, but they couldn't. Their bodies were spent and they had to crawl on their hands and knees across the finish line.

The steroid issue is, in my mind, basically an extension of that desire to overcome physical limits. Athletes on steroids can train harder, longer, and recover far more quickly than their non-chemically enhanced competitors. What has to be kept in mind is the idea that there is a REASON for your body's limits. Constantly push those limits and there WILL be a price to be paid, ask any number of limping former athletes. Bones, tendon, and muscle only repair so much and for so long, after that they will painfully remind you of your abuses every single day. Steroids can only delay the inevitable.

Steroid use also presents some unique ethical questions as well. The film repeatedly asks the question:

"Is it really cheating if everyone is doing it?"

One of the problems is that we don't know if everyone is doing it. Doping tests are too easy to beat to rule out those that pass them, in fact athletes that later confessed to a career of doping have passed YEARS of regular exams. Also, the fact that athletes that piss hot for steroids often cloud the issue by claiming everything from contaminated supplements to herbal teas, makes determining who is guilty a bit more difficult that it would seem. To hear whistle-blowers like Jose Canseco and Floyd Landis tell it, everyone and their mother is on the stuff and has been for years. Until everyone comes clean the idea of universal guilt is a difficult case to prove.

Steroid users follow a very different path than most illegal drug users. To begin with, they are not taking drugs for recreation, but to achieve a specific result in a particular area. They don't choose drugs due to childhood trauma, genetic pre-disposition, or social acceptance and they haven't learned the behavior from addicted parents. No one gets their start down the path of steroid abuse because they were at a party and someone was passing around a syringe of stanozolol.

Unlike many other illegal drugs, the social costs of steroid use are difficult to quantify. As the film points out, more people go to the emergency room with bad reactions to vitamins than steroids and while we might not like the idea of our kids looking up to doping sports heroes, the simple fact is that Mark McGuire never held up a liquor store to feed his habit. The people who are generally hurt the most by steroid abuse are the users themselves and its hard for the average American to get too worked up over it.

I think its important to keep in mind that the choice to use steroids or any other PED is HEAVILY influenced by a lifetime of training. As I mentioned before, no one grows up using performance enhancers to get through the day. When most athletes first consider doping, usually late high school or at the beginning of their college careers, they have already been training for the majority of their lives. A third-string kicker doesn't worry about shooting up a little extra advantage, if you even consider doping you are usually an elite athlete who believes you have a future in the sport.

Imagine putting 10 years of your life into football, from Pop-Warner to a solid D-1 program, and someone tells you that you need to dope or throw all of that hard work away. It easy to see why so many pick up the needle. Dreams die hard, why let a little ethical dilemma get in the way? Im not condoning PEDs in ANY way, its just easy to understand the thought process from an athlete's perspective.

My own experience with PEDs is comparatively limited because, well, Ive never done them. No, REALLY, I've never done them. Im not bragging or getting on some moral high-horse mind you, I just never needed them to compete at the level I competed on while I was fighting. Against other Gladiator Challenge/King of the Cage level fighters I was technical enough to overcome any physical advantages my opponents had. I was never faced with the choice I mentioned earlier, before I could really move to the next level I got a call from the Discovery Channel and here I am. I've seen members of my former jiu-jitsu school try the stuff. They put on some muscle, got bad skin, and their BJJ still sucked. Im sure i trained with doping fighters, but I never saw them use with my own eyes, and they never encouraged me to get on the stuff. When I was training for fights I would always forget to take my supplements, never mind regular injections.

MMA has had its share of doping controversies. Chael Sonnen, Josh Barnett, and Sean Sherk all tested positive for PEDs and had to pay the financial and professional costs. All of them actually denied taking them, further adding to the muddied waters of actual accountability in professional sports. Did they actually take them? Did they perform better if they did? Do they regret taking them after the test results were made public, or do they just regret not beating the test?

Only the fighters themselves know the answers to these questions but EVERY professional athlete who pushes their body to the limit knows that, steroids or no steroids, the candle is burning and once it's out, its out for good...