That summer I was playing football for the Junior Varsity team at Covington High School. Weighing in at 135 pounds, I surprised a lot of folks when I made first-string fullback. We were a small team with a “rabbit” backfield. Our leading scorer was only 5’6” and weighed about 120 pounds. Yet we only lost one game that year, in the rain. A rabbit can’t run too fast in the rain.

We were over in West Virginia playing the Greenbrier Military Academy, and I was running around left end. The coach had repeatedly told me, with great frustration in his voice, to just keep going to the outside and run along the sidelines, but I had this bad habit of cutting back in between end and tackle. Just as I cut back in, I twisted my ankle and was on my way down, and at that very moment, a 235 pound defensive tackle decided to assist me. He came down on both of my shoulders as my ankle was buckling up. I tore a ligament and chipped a bone.

This should not have been a big problem, but ignorance is a cruel thing. My two granddaddies were as good as gold, and either would have given me the world if it had been his to give, but they were uneducated and living behind the times.

They saw me limping but for some reason never sent me to a doctor. Furthermore, the coach of the team, who should have sent me for X-rays, just kept calling me lazy and a slacker. It got to where I had to wear tennis shoes to play in, and they would tape my ankle with a thick wad of tape. When we get caught up in the midst of something we love, and I loved football, we forget about the pain or the sickness, the price we may have to pay, and the joy of the game takes over. I even ran a 65 yard touchdown with a torn ligament and chipped bone, in tennis shoes.

After football season ended, I found myself still hobbling around. Progressively, the injury got worse, even to the point where I had to walk sideways down the steps at school, letting my left foot down and then bringing my right foot down beside it and then putting my left foot down on the next step followed by my right foot. It eventually got to where I slept with a crutch beside my bed and would use it at night when I had to go in and change Pop’s diapers. You see, it was at this time that my great grandfather fell while bringing a bucket of coal up the steps. Bud was nearly crippled by now with the syphilis rampaging through his nervous system, and I was at school when Pop was bringing up that coal. He fell and broke his hip.

When old people fall, they don’t get back up. Pop went to his bed and never moved from it again until they took him to the hospital to die. I watched him waste away and long to die in a weak and quiet voice, late at night, usually around 3 a.m. when I would go in on my one crutch and clean him from where he had messed himself. We were a sorry lot: Pop at age 86 with a broken hip, Bud at age 65 barely able to walk, and David, Pop’s “Baby Boy,” on crutches with his ankle on fire.

That is what arthritis feels like: a fire in your bones. The pain is constant, 24-7. It never goes away. Not a throbbing pain, it’s a constant pain. Finally, my mother saw me and took me to see Dr. Ellis. He took one look at me and said, “My God, how long has this boy been this way?” He was immediately my friend when he uttered those words. He diagnosed me with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, and within a week, I was over in the Roanoke Rehab Hospital with a cast on my leg. It was at that time I received a telephone calling telling me Pop had died, and my life was going to change.

I went on to live with my mother for the next four years, as Bud couldn’t take care of me; he could barely take care of himself. At one time, I was taking 16 aspirin a day to reduce the inflammation. For the next two years the pain lessened until it turned into a migratory kind of annoyance, where it would hurt one day in my shoulder and the next day in my knee. And after four years, it became a light enough pain that I felt blessed to only have to deal with what I judged a mild discomfort by this time.

The only good part of all this was that it kept me from going to Vietnam. I was 1-Y, but a lot of my friends were not . . .