It sounds weird to say, but unlike Joe Biden, I wanted to be in East Palestine, Ohio, last week.
I would like to think there is a good chance I would have made it there under normal circumstances. Ohio is my home state. The train derailment is a huge, strange and compelling story.
I made it to Wellington, Ohio, when Donald Trump first reemerged after the 2020 election and after January 6th. I interviewed Enrique Tarrio and wrote about the black leader of the allegedly white supremacist group the Proud Boys, in November of 2020. And I witnessed the events of January 6th and wrote a story that I am confident continues to be an increasingly more accurate depiction of one of the most politicized and propagandized days in our nation’s history.
Somewhere over the course of the last few years, with the constant impression that those in power and those in the media fundamentally were not telling the truth and were not doing their job, doing nothing no longer seemed palatable, and I started writing again.
So, in my heart of hearts, I believe I would have made it to East Palestine – for Trump, for Sen. J.D. Vance, for Erin Brockovich and even for Mayor Pete – except I had the peculiar experience of watching this strange story unfold from a hospital bed in the neurological unit of the Cleveland Clinic, perhaps 70 miles away as the crow flies.
The Friday of Super Bowl weekend I went to the gym, and I could barely hold onto the dumbbells I usually use when doing one-arm rows. The following day I started losing feeling in my feet and the ability to walk.
Stubborn – and assuming it was soreness from working out all week, being sick the week prior and perhaps just overdoing it – I waited until Wednesday to call a friend for a ride to the emergency room.
Over the course of a week, I went from running or being at the gym four to five days a week to not being able to stand up – much less walk, cut a steak, twist the cap off of a water bottle or turn on the hot water.
I would like to say I walked into the hospital – the still mask-enforcing and vaccine-touting Cleveland Clinic – but the truth is, it was more like wheeled in.
I say this only to articulate how very little I wanted to be there, with the full knowledge that I very much needed to be.
A doctor, thankfully, almost immediately suggested Guillain-Barre Syndrome, or GBS, based on my symptoms. It’s a rare autoimmune response, often after being sick, where your body attacks your own nerves and nervous system.
“We will see this sometimes when someone is recovering from an illness, after the flu shot or other vaccines,” the initial doctor explained.
I got EKGed, CT scanned, MRIed, spinal tapped, poked, prodded and QR scanned with every single interaction. And for the first time in three years of COVID, I took my first and second COVID tests.
I had no idea what was going on and I needed help.
I imagine the residents of East Palestine have similar feelings right now.
The other overwhelming feeling I experienced in the hospital and since my release a week ago was a determination to fully recover.
Many people fully recover; some do not.
“My old boss had that (GBS) and she still has symptoms,” a coworker ominously said.
I joined a GBS survivors group on Facebook with 12,000 members worldwide, simply to discuss tips on recovery. It was both horrifying and eye-opening – an 18-year-old who spent three months paralyzed and in the ICU from Australia, a heartbroken wife who shared her own frustrations with her husband’s illness and another person who discussed driving their car for the first time in three years.
Many of these people are far worse off than I am. Some are resolved to disability, some of whom refer to themselves fondly as “turtles.”
Respectfully, I am not a turtle.
This may define my next few weeks, my next few months. It will not define my life.
Right now I simply do not want to, nor can I afford to entertain the negative.
If you are not helping, if you are not part of the solution, then get the heck out of the way of the people who are.
And so it goes in East Palestine. If you are not helping, get out of the way of those who are.
To say “there is work to be done” is an understatement.
From a hospital bed, I watched as Biden inexplicably made his way to Kyiv – and the staged sirens went off as he walked with Zelensky. Across the ocean, East Palestine residents and Ohioans were slapped squarely in the face with “America Last” policies on President’s Day.
The idea of white privilege is oftentimes a myth in places like East Palestine.
These are very much the forgotten men and women that Trump talks about. If privilege exists, there is little evidence of it here. These Ohio River towns can resemble shelled out versions of their former selves. The opiate epidemic ravaged much of America The evidence is sometimes unmistakable in small towns dotted throughout rural Ohio.
So, Trump showed up in East Palestine when initially few other agencies or individuals would.
He brought water; he joked with McDonald’s workers that he probably knew the menu better than they did; he talked openly with residents and reporters … and he brought hope.
And the very next day he forced Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to show up as well.
People like Joy Behar of “The View” still took their potshots. She implied East Palestine got what they voted for by voting for Trump. Co-host Sunny Hostin took it further and said, “I think this is Donald Trump’s fault.”
With all due respect to the ladies of “The View” and Joe Biden, the residents of East Palestine need clean water and the knowledge that they are breathing clean air. There is work to be done, and if you are not helping with their recovery, then at least get out of the way of the people who are.
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