Restless Patient Discovers RLS
     From Nightwalkers Winter 2008 Issue
     Robert Yoakum has been a journalist for most of his life so it was natural for him, when diagnosed with restless legs syndrome, to write about the puzzling disease.  His first magazine article on RLS, which carried the subtitle “The most common disease you’ve never heard of,” ran in Modern Maturity and generated more than 40,000 letters from readers which flooded the offices at the RLS Foundation.  This was, by all accounts, the moment that the RLS Foundation officially entered the national scene.  In the piece to follow, Mr. Yoakum reflects back on his early years with RLS and why awareness was such a huge part of what he felt called to do – so that no one else had to live with a disease, and live without help for that disease, again.
     The first objective of the Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation is awareness.  It was essential to acquaint the public with knowledge of this little known and often misdiagnosed disease.
     It won’t go down as a major event in the annals of American medicine, but my encounter with Nurse Blanchard belongs at least as a footnote in any account of attempts to further awareness among doctors, researchers, patients, caretakers, and the public at large.
     With one exception, my relations with nurses have been amicable.  That exception was with Nurse Blanchard (or at least that’s what we’ll call her) who played a brief but important role in the awareness campaign for RLS.  My operation at Johns Hopkins that led to my troubled encounter with Nurse Blanchard involved loss of sleep, that I was to learn later on, was caused by restless legs syndrome.  I learned that one of the pills dispensed by Nurse Blanchard permitted sleep – in part because it stopped the creepy-crawly sensations brought on by RLS, but it was certainly a mistake to congratulate Nurse Blanchard for what seemed to me like a medical miracle.  She promptly eliminated that magical pill from my nightly medications.  She feared that I would become addicted.  I took the loss of the helpful pill to the residents who visited my post-op bed, morning and night.  Neither the night nurse (Blanchard) nor the residents knew that RLS existed.  What Nurse Blanchard was sure of, however, was that I shouldn’t continue to get a pill that actually subdued the sensations in my legs that prevented sleep.
     My repeated protests merely irritated Nurse Blanchard, but they intrigued the residents in the spirit of scientific research.  The young doctors were trying to identify the source of my torture.  One of them said that he had heard about a syndrome that resembled my symptoms.  But his curiosity and sense of scientific inquiry did not soften the stance of Nurse Blanchard.  Her nighttime embargo of my helpful pill remained in place.  However, it wasn’t the interest of the residents or the obstinacy of the nurse that opened the door of knowledge.  It was, rather, that the door was opened for me by a startling coincidence.
     To quote from my book on the subject:
          While still in the hospital I was plagued as never before by both restless legs and another condition known as PLM.  Unknown to me, progress on both disorders was being made by neurologists in that very same hospital.  Not long after the operation, I received a copy of the Hopkins Medical News and was riveted by an excellent description of my nightly anguish in an article entitled “Rest for the Weary.”  I recognized my enemies immediately.  They were called RLS and PLM.  The article cited Dr. David Buchholz, associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins:  “People with restless legs syndrome get what Buchholz calls ‘creepy-crawly’ sensations in their legs when they lie in bed and try to fall asleep.  The feeling, centered mostly in the calf muscles, is ‘very distressing, and it drives people crazy to try to lie still.’  Moving – pacing, massaging or stretching the muscles, or bicycling the legs in bed – provides temporary relief.  But then it comes right back as they try to lie still again.  It’s a plague for the people who have it.”
     I decided not to share my discovery with the disagreeable Nurse Blanchard, feeling certain that my revelation would be taken as another salvo in our pill dispute.  I did, however, share my discovery with the agreeable residents.  Years later, I was to learn that traumas, and especially operations, could trigger restless legs syndrome.  Even so, I didn’t regret my failure to share this medical finding with Nurse Blanchard.  Some readers will think of me as being churlish and, worse, violating scientific protocol that calls on all of us to share new knowledge.  It was foolish of me, or course, to leave the nurse in an ignorant state.  After all, it would be the other patients of Nurse Blanchard who would suffer.  In a sense, I was punishing myself in the unlikely event that Nurse Blanchard is reading this article.  I want her to accept my apology.
     Her campaign played an unwitting role in my discovery of RLS.  A discovery that doesn’t belong in the annals of medicine but did serve as a first step in my own awareness of this now widely recognized disorder.
 

Our speaker this evening, Russell Baker, was called  in a 1979 TIME Magazine cover story,  “The Good Humor Man.”  The  article celebrated Baker’s winning of his first Pulitzer prize, for commentary. That same year he also received a George Polk award.
 

Ten years later in another Time article, this time noting the publication of his book, The Good Times, R.Z.Sheppard wrote of him: 
 

“For satire, parody, and burlesque on short notice, he has few equals.  He has had what many journalists would consider a dream career, and nobody tells him what to do.  Or so it would appear.”
 

On the publication of another Baker book Jacques Barzun wrote,
 

“One of his great merits is that he breaks with the excessively verbal tradition of American humor and deals with things.”
 

And David Halberstam wrote of Baker in 1997, in Vanity Fair,
 

“  He is simply the most talented New York Times journalist of one and quite possibly two generations, and his column in the Times has been a National treasure.”
 

What lead to this extraordinary writing career ?
 

         Bob wrote the following poem for an article regarding spring cleaning for the Lakeville Journal’s April 19, 2007 edition. 
      My wife suggested that I clean out the garage.
     “It’s springtime,” she explained.
     “We could even use it to keep the car in.”
     Could that actually come to pass? 
     Everest has been scaled. 
     Oceans have been spanned.
     So why not our car in the garage?! 
     Okay, what must go?
     The horse, of course. 
     Thirty years of National Geographics. 
     Six bicycles, flat and rusty and several other toys with wheels.
     Plastic Christmas tree with star and wreath with squads of mice. 
     Ornaments in boxes with tangled strings of lights.
     Stack of tires, mostly worn. 
     Science projects from school. 
     Tools, including those that were never used.
     Skis, boots, and poles.
     Neighbor’s borrowed garden hose.
     Three dead cactus plants.
     Cracked aquarium with sailing ship in a bottle.
     Clothes from every era.
     A tuba and a set of drums.
     Two treadmills and other body builders.
     “Springtime,” I said, “comes too soon!”

The late S.J. Perelman (he might have written) was always punctual, and (as another humorist wrote of him) “sui generis to a fault.”

Sui generis he was. There isn’t another American writer who could perform such stunning and daring acrobatic feats with words.

Articles written about Perelman in life, like the obituaries printed last week, often contained an acrobatic simile because there was no better way to describe what the humorist did so superbly.

“For more than 50 years,” wrote Robert Taylor in the Boston Globe obituary, “Perelman hurtled through the air without a net, executing dazzling triple and quadruple somersaults and landing on his feet effortlessly as he reached the swinging platform at the end of a sentence.”

Ten years earlier, in the New York Times Magazine, William Zinsser made the point that “Life today has become so outlandish that it outstrips the writer’s comic imagination…Against such odds the miracle is that Perelman keeps going out on the wire.”

Zinsser – a friend of Perelman’s and author of that sui generis gag – wrote that his admiration of the great humorist was based on his courage: “No other kind of writer risks his neck so visibly or so often on the high wire of public approval. It is the thinnest wire in all literature, and the writer lives with the certain knowledge that he will frequently fall off.”

It was with Bill Zinsser that I first med Sid Perelman. The encounter was in a Manhattan Chinese restaurant. The food was good and the conversation both comic and competitive.

We had all traveled a great deal, but neither Zinsser nor I could hold our own against Perelman’s travelmanship. The three of us might have been to Bangkok, for example, but only Sid would know about the opium-addled and alcoholic Scotsman who ran a bakery specializing in scones (I asked whether he ever sold cold scones sober) and haggis. Or perhaps an obscure bookshop in Rangoon that specialized in 13th century religious erotica.

Years later, at another dinner in London, I asked Perelman whether he had ever heard from a famous woman editor who had been ridiculed and rapiered by him in a piece called “The Hand That Cradles the Rock.”

He chuckled. The editor had, like Perelman himself, moved to London. A notorious party-giver and namedropper, she must have been torn between Perelman as the cause of her punctured pride and Perelman as a social prize.

The latter won out, so she sent him a party invitation that began, “Dear S.J.” – something Sid was never called by those who knew him well. After he had told the end of the story, I wondered: Was he correct in assuming that it was funnier to sign his note of regret “S.J.” as he did, than to hoist her by her gaffe by signing “Sid?” Later I decided he was right. She would eventually find out and wince.

“Generally speaking,” Perelman told Zinsser in that magazine interview, “I don’t believe in kindly humor…One doesn’t consciously start out to be a social satirist. You find something absurd enough to make you want to push a couple of anti-personnel bombs under it.”

Perelman was a tough specimen, who; if he had been told that a heart of gold beat beneath his flinty exterior, would have demanded a transplant – if only to avoid aiding and abetting a cliché.

He appraised mankind’s activities with the cool eye of a jeweler at work. What he saw was a world filled with poltroons, boobs, brigands, blackguards, gold diggers, social climbers, fanatics, and fakes.

(He found them all in Hollywood, which he learned to loathe. Writing about the movie “Sweethearts,” starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, to which he had contributed some dialogue, Perelman said, “My name never made the crawl on ‘Sweethearts,’ for which I still beam eternal gratitude. The two stars were not called ‘The Iron Butterfly’ and ‘The Singing Capon’ inadvisedly; their archness made toes curl all over the world.”)

Sentiment made him nervous. One couldn’t picture him decorating a tree on Christmas Eve. He was no Scrooge, but he was certainly no Santa.

It was possible to imagine him wassailing, though – in part because of the drinking ceremony’s association with England, which he loved, and in part because it was a neat word, which he loved even more.

Every now and then I look with envy on the success of columns devoted to astrology and other forms of soothsaying, so I float a few predictions of my own.  One thing is certain:  I can’t be wrong more often than Jeane Dixon and some other columnists.On this occasion I’m going to predict some great discoveries that will be made in the next decade. Not easy, you say? It sure isn’t, but here goes anyway:

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WILL DISCOVER WHERE CONGRESSMEN COME FROM.
The late Margaret Mead, anthropologist, wrote about a Pacific isle where natives had not made the connection between sexual intercourse and the birth of babies.  Nine months is a long time and it simply hadn’t occurred to the islanders that the two events were linked.

In the same way, Americans still have not, as they emerge from the 1970’s, made the connection between their own political apathy and ignorance on one hand and, on the other, a Congress crowded with felons, loonies, jingoists, buffoons, demagogues, fanatics, and scoundrels.

Call me a giddy optimist, but I predict that in the 1980’s Americans will find out that they themselves are the ones who elect the Congress (for which only 15 percent of the voters have any use, according to polls); that congressmen are not brought by storks or chosen by court astrologers or left by the tooth fairy, but are conceived in polling booths all over the nation.

THE REST OF THE WORLD – AND THE SOUTH KOREANS THEMSELVES – WILL DISCOVER WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON IN SEOUL. 
The South Korean capital has been the scene of a murky tragio-comic opera – the cast and plot of which cannot be sorted out by reporter or computer.  It will not all come clear in the 1980’s, but at least some sense will emerge.

JEANE DIXON, THE SEERESS-ASTROLOGER-CRYSTAL BALL READER, WILL BE RIGHT ABOUT ANOTHER LONG-SHOT PREDICTION, BUT THE PUBLIC WILL DISCOVER THAT 3,749 OTHER FORECASTS WERE ALL WET.  AND THEY WILL IGNORE HER.
Impossible, you say?  The public has always been gullible?  Well, just wait and see.  But I will admit that this is my long-shot prediction for the decade.

IRANIANS WILL DISCOVER THAT EVERY EMBASSY IN  TEHERAN, AND, INDEED, EVERY EMBASSY IN THE WORLD, SENDS SECRET INFORMATION BACK TO ITS PARENT COUNTRY, AND EMPLOYS SPIES.
If the people holding hostages in the American Embassy are really university students, they must have cut class when the history of diplomacy was taught.  Had they gone to school they would have learned that all embassies perform several functions:  giving parties, encouraging business deals, issuing visas, providing information, and obtaining information.  And of all these functions, the last is the most important.  When the Iranians discover the truth about embassies, they will, of course, apologize and lower the price of oil.

PARENTS WILL DISCOVER THAT ADOLESCENTS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN, AND WILL ALWAYS BE, SLOPPY.  AND THEY WILL RELAX.
This prediction will be greeted with understandable skepticism by youth, but I see signs of

Another Look:
A Typical TV Ad Family
by Robert Yoakum
     Have you been curious about the lives of those families you see on television?  I don’t mean the families in situation comedies, but the folks you see in commercials.
     Here, in anticipation of a new TV ad season, is an interview with one of last season’s families:
     “How does it feel,” I asked Mr. William Random, “to be the father in a typical TV ad family?”
     “Well,” Mr. Random replied, jumping into the air and snapping his fingers, “I smell clean!”
     “You what?!”
     “I smell clean!  With Lifebuoy I’m not just clean.  I smell clean!”
     “He’s gone bananas,” interrupted Mrs. Random, smiling.  “He’s shower-happy.”
     “Oh, by the way,” Mr. Random said, “this is my wife, and she’s quite a woman.  We’ve been married for a lot of years now, and she looks better to me all the time.”
     Mrs. Random smiled affectionately at her husband and said, “That’s because I do the right things and take good care of myself.  I try to get my rest, I exercise, and I take a Geritol tablet every day.”
     “My wife,” Mr. Random said fondly.  “She cares about herself.  And I love her for it.”
     “So I could say you’re a family without problems, right?”
     “Well, not exactly,” Mr. Random said.  “When I went bowling yesterday I had nothing but gutter balls.  Nagging backache.  Ruined my sleep, too.”
     “That’s right,” Mrs. Random agreed, “but I told Bill to try my Doan’s pills because they sure help me.”
     “Jean also helped me get back in the swing today when I didn’t feel like going shopping with her,” Mr. Random said.
     “It’s true,”  Mrs. Random said.  “When my husband is out of sorts because he needs a laxative, I get one that’s not harsh:  flavored Haley’s M-O.  It’s the gentle way to get back in the swing.”
     “And when I had trouble sleeping last night,” Mr. Random added, “my wife gave me Sominex.  It really does make me drowsy so I can get to sleep.”
     “I’m confused,” I said.  “Earlier you told me it was Doan’s pills that helped you sleep because they fixed your nagging backache.”
     “Oh, I took a lot more than that last night!”  Mr. Random exclaimed.  “Jean also gave me Bayer’s microencapsulated timed-release aspirin because it helps me wake without that morning stiffness.”
     “Your wife gave you Doan’s pills and Haley’s M-O and Sominex and Bayer aspirin?!”
     “And I love her for it.”  Bill said, squeezing his wife’s hand.
     “Don’t forget Alka Seltzer Gold, dearest.  You said it washed your heartburn away.”
     “Right.  And I almost forgot Dristan nasal mist.  And Bufferin.  And Sine-Off.  And Excedrin P.M.  And Sinutab.  And .  .  .  Yaarrch!  Waasgh!  Bruuop!”
     Mr. Random leaped into the air, snapped his fingers; and collapsed.
     “I think you’ve overdone it, Mrs. Random!”  I exclaimed.  “You’d better call a doctor!  He needs help fast!”
     “Then what he needs is Anacin,” she replied.  “While all the leading pain relievers reach an effective level in the bloodstream in minutes, only one of them hits and holds the highest level. And that’s Anacin.”
     But it turned out to be curtains for Bill Random.  His wife took his demise philosophically, however.  “Well,” she said, shrugging, “no more ring around the collar.”

New York Yankee fans were depressed after their team was trounced four games in a row by the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series, but did you ever hear of a fan who was depressed when his team won?
The word “fan” comes from “fanatic,” and my friend Herb Kupferberger was a fanatic on the subject of the New York Giants. He might not have been willing to die for the giants, but I suspect that he would have been willing to be mutilated.

* * * *

Herb is now senior editor of Parade, the Sunday supplement, but 25 years ago, when a giant victory in the National League pennant race almost broke Herb’s heart, we both worked for the New York Herald Tribune — Herb in New York, me in Paris.
Here is what happened to Herb during that historic contest — a game that is still talked about wherever baseball nuts gather:
The Giants were playing the despised (by Giant fans) Brooklyn Dodgers for the pennant. It was the final game — Oct. 3, 1951. New Yorkers thought and talked of nothing but The Game. Divided loyalties split the city, and even families.
Herb was sitting in the press box, knotted with tension as the game stood at 1-1 at the top of the eighth inning. Then the Dodgers began to hit, driving singles through the infield, and Herb says, “every one was going through my heart. One runs, two runs, three runs.”

* * * *

When the game stood at 4-1, the pain was more than Herb could stand. “I decided to go back to the Trib and compose myself so that I could write an editorial. I had to go out on the right field line, past the Giants’ bullpen. There was a relief pitcher, Larry Jansen, warming up. I said to myself, half aloud, ‘Go sit down, Larry. Save it till next year.’ “
As Herb sat on the subway train, wrapped up in bitter thoughts, a miracle was shaping up back in the Polo Grounds. A ninth-inning rally began that still brings goose pimples to the arms of hardened longshoremen.
The first batter, Dark, singled. The second batter, Mueller, singled. The third batter, Irvin, popped up. One out, two on.
Then Lockman doubled, scoring Dark, and leaving runners on second and third.

* * * *

Herb, at that moment, had emerged from the subway and stopped at an automat “to get a cup of coffee to steady my nerves before going to the office to write an editorial. I was standing there, feeling awful, when I heard this incredible noise from behind the wall of the cubicles that held all those foods.
“Guys were yelling and screaming, so I stuck my head around the end to ask what happened.”
What happened, as any baseball buff can tell you, was that Bobby Thomson had just hit one of the sport’s most famous home runs — a home run that drove in three runs, won the pennant for the Giants, and won Thomson a secure spot in baseball legend.

* * * *

And where was the young newspaperman, who was such a passionate Giant fan that he couldn’t bear to watch his team lose the pennant? Standing in the middle of an automat, miles from a scene that he would have treasured forever, along with his marriage, the birth of his children, and his first paycheck. And, since there was no television, there would be no replays on the evening news.
The lead editorial in the Herald Tribune the next morning was entitled “The Last of the Ninth.” Herb pulled himself together enough to write the victorious piece, but even now — a quarter of a century later — he refuses to confirm the office rumor of the time: that the paper on which he wrote about the famous victory was damp with tears.