Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2012/04/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]With no warning I lost someone important from my life last weekend. He was my surgeon who put together my shoulder after our car accident, replaced my left knee and my right hip. I trusted him absolutely and it was clear that so did everyone who who worked around him. But he had a bigger influence than merely working on my bones. When I first saw him it was for extremely sore knees. I weighed almost 350 pounds. He talked about steroid injections and how those would relieve the inflammation for a while and then about knee replacement because even in 2005 my knees were pretty much bone on bone. He talked about the expected life-time of a knee replacement, how the studies were based on people with a body weight in the neighborhood of 180 pounds for men, how the materials would degrade with increased load, how a 2nd replacement would be more difficult, more risky and probably not be as effective as the first. But there was no judgement, only facts. That office visit lead to my weight loss effort, and to my wife's as well. It changed my life completely. After the accident Dr. Lubin told me the shoulder was "a mess" but that the injury was actually fairly common. He'd had a great deal of experience dealing with exactly this sort of thing in his residency in LA. He hoped for a reasonable outcome but wasn't sure how much use of the shoulder I would have. But the outcome was great. I cannot swim freestyle or backstroke any more but the physical therapist says I have "low normal" use of my shoulder. There is never a day I'm on my bike that I don't think of Dr Lubin. I ride normally because of his skill and perfectionism. I do not know the depth of his pain but I have been awfully close to it myself in the past. I'm sorry he succumbed to it. He was a fine doctor, a gifted surgeon. He will be missed. <http://adam-bridge.smugmug.com/gallery/22288982_39qLkn#!i=1780877614&k=x9MS64L&lb=1&s=A> Leica M8, 35mm f2.0 summicron. I'm sharing this here, I guess, because it's a community of people who may understand and I want to honor him beyond the local community. Adam Bridge