Looking Back To Find The Future

Just finished reading a book given to me as a gift by my youngest daughter. The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell was a good Sunday’s read.  

It is a fictional but very believable account of a young man born with a genetic abnormality, ocular albinism, that causes him to have red pupils for eyes. He is confronted by insensitive schoolmates and judgmental teachers in his Catholic school and is called “Devil Eyes”. However, he was the brightest student and did find solace in new and lifelong friendships with Ernie, a likeable African American who went on to be a sports jock and with a spirited gal friend who had few unexpressed thoughts.

Sam Hill, also known as Sam Hell, was not good with girls and, so, he had to be “taught” along the way to manhood. However, it was not until his father had a stroke and Sam had to keep the family pharmacy going that actually turned him into a man. After getting his mother on firm ground running the store, Sam went to college, became an eye doctor, returned home for awhile until tragedy struck, then started a bit late on a Life’s journey to discover what is really important.

Author Robert Dugoni’s premise is, “There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.” At first, I thought that was a surrender to aging or thinking old which I resist. But, upon reconsidering Sam Hell’s life and what he did after no longer looking forward but rather relying on what got him there in the first place, I now realize that reflecting on our past, good and bad, does indeed help us complete our lives, in whatever direction we are looking.

I have been critical of past efforts or lack of successful effort to find a cure to the dream killer that is DMD. Such criticism has served to vet frustration over my beloved grandson’s unfair genetic and lethal condition. I will retain some of that skepticism but am rededicating my attitude towards looking forward, having learned from the past … sort of a pivot from the Life navigation of Sam Hell.

Looking forward, I ask those constituents involved with DMD who are equipped with doing something positive about it not to tread old ways but rather to venture out into new thinking and techniques, to think out of the box, but at the same time to revisit old data and former results of clinical trials to see if perhaps we missed something … some clue that, if cultivated with today’s technology, may pave the way to new findings for a cure or, at least, life changing mitigation.  

Like Life itself, Duchenne research does not have to be linear. It can be circular … in concentric circles. Each spiraling ring can take us further out but closer to the solution as the rings of experience and lessons learned expand. What in the Sam Hill, we just may be able to cure Duchenne in the near future by learning more from our past!

Kindly, Papa,

Franklin, Tennessee