Jerry Lewis teaches others to laugh through the pain
By Aline McKenzie, Staff Writer
The old cliché has the clown laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.
For legendary comedian Jerry Lewis, it was a case of being active while suffering from excruciating pain for 37 years.
"There's no way to explain it," he says. "You lose your eyesight. Everything gets very, very thick. The pain gets so that if you walk by a table, and you hit your hand like that, you'd scream. And every part of your body from your toe to your head, you'd walk praying that the wind wouldn't hit it. Everything."
But now, thanks to an implanted pacemaker that stimulates nerves in his spine, the 76-year-old king of the pratfall has been pain free for 11 months.
And with the same determination that he used to create the Muscular Dystrophy Association's $1.8 billion telethons, he's traveling the world to spread the word to both patients and doctors about ways to treat chronic pain.
The motto: "Laughing Again."
He's giving media interviews, appearing on talk shows, talking to groups of doctors, anything to inform people. He was in Dallas last week for a few days as part of his national tour.
"I was blessed with 100 percent relief," he says. "So now on my campaign as spokesman for Medtronic, I'm hoping to make people aware that there are alternatives and options." He approached the company after his own positive experience and is now a paid spokesman.
Fame gets attention, and attention gets things done.
"My voice is heard more than some strange man that got hurt," he says. "How could I not be an advocate?"
Dr. Ralph Rashbaum, medical director of the Texas Back Institute, says of Mr. Lewis, "He's smart, rich and famous, and nobody told him, so how is the average Joe on the street expected to know unless somebody tells him? Not in-frequently, I'll have a patient come in, you evaluate them, they're an excellent candidate [for treatment], and the first thing they say is, 'How come my doctor didn't tell me about this?' and they've been suffering three, five, seven, 10 years."
Medtronic Inc., based in Minneapolis, manufactures various medical devices, including heart pacemakers, neural stimulators and implantable pumps that deliver drugs directly to the spine.
Researchers estimate that about 70 million people in the United States suffer from chronic pain, defines as pain that lasts more than six months and doesn't respond to treatment. Isolation, depression, unemployment, divorce and suicide often go along with it.
Medtronic has gotten together with several advocacy groups for people with chronic pain to create a campaign called "Tame the Pain" (www.tamethepain.com).
Mr. Lewis' talks mix humor and encouragement, but also a challenge for doctors.
"I'm a little adversarial, because they need to be shaken out of their 'this is my point of view' syndrome. They understand medicine, but they don't understand pain," he says. "They'll write a prescription for Vicodin or Percodan before they tell a patient 'go see someone in pain management.' Why don't they do that? I'll have to find that out and do something about it."
The device that Mr. Lewis wears is about the size of a pager, but thinner, and is implanted under his skin, while an electrical lead travels to his spinal cord. Using a control that resembles a television remote, he turns the stimulator on as needed, creating a tingling sensation and blocking the pain signals from reaching his brain.
His talk includes a video montage of nearly 60 of his pratfalls. He estimates that he's done about 1,900 in his life.
"It was meant for comedy, but put it all together, it's terribly dramatic, and not too funny," he says.
In his career as a clown, doing all his own stunts, he acquired a variety of aches, pains and injuries. But the one that did him in happened in 1965. While falling off a piano, he his a steal microphone cable, chipping his spine and nearly paralyzing himself.
The decades to come led to cycles of painkillers and despair. More than once, he contemplated suicide.
Being able to perform helped keep him going - the adrenaline of being onstage would temporarily overcome the pain, which would return as soon as the performance was over.
Recently, his doctor in Las Vegas was giving him steroid injections for the pain. This was on top of prednisone that he takes for a lung problem (prednisone gives people round faces - he joke that he looks like Orson Welles these days).
"The shots were helping for a couple of months, then they were only helping for six weeks, then they helped for a month, and then not at all," he says. "Then the pain in 37 years had gotten so severe that I just didn't want to live any more. And he said, we have one option."
In April, he had the stimulator implanted while in Houston. On average, people's pain drops about 50 to 60 percent with the device, says company spokesman Joe McGrath. About 100,000 people have it implanted.
"At the place I was at the time, I'd have been happen with eight percent, or four, or any percent," Mr. Lewis says. He was one of the lucky ones to get complete relief.
Doctors these days need to regard pain as one of the vital signs, along with blood pressure, pulse, respiration and temperature to gauge a person's health, says Dr. Rashbaum and Dr. Richard Weiner, char of the department of neurosurgery at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, where Mr. Lewis spoke.
"It's not enough to give some narcotics and some them away," Dr. Weiner says.
"We're obligated to bring those people's pain down to about four [on a scale of one to 10], which is distressing, but they're still functioning," Dr. Rashbaum says. "If you don't do that, you're culpable and can be accountable in court."
Aside from educating doctors, another major problem is how to pay for treatment, which costs about $40,000 total. Insurance companies regard the treatment as experimental, or refuse for other reasons.
Suicide rates are so high among people with chronic pain, however, that treatment can be as much of a lifesaver as, say, an expensive heart transplant.
"We think it saves lives," Dr. Rashbaum says. "He would have killed himself."
