WEDNESDAY, Nov. 13, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Jerry Lewis may be 76, but his firm grip still sits on your hand long after the shaking. He is a genial host in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, where he has been staying "since I could afford it" and where he has come to discuss the plight of sick people without a champion.
They're not children with muscular dystrophy, a cause Lewis made his own in 1948 and for which he's raised $1.8 billion. Although Lewis won't discuss why he adopted "Jerry's Kids" as his philanthropic mission -- he says it's the only secret he's ever kept -- he talks freely about his interest in chronic pain. While he can't speak personally about the debility of muscular dystrophy, Lewis counts himself among the 70 million Americans who wake up every morning and go to bed each night in pain.
A map of any conversation with Lewis resembles an airline route chart: all red lines inevitably return to the hub that is his 10-year-old adopted daughter, Danielle. It was Dani, he says, who saved his life at the moment two years ago when he was about to end it.
Tapped out physically and emotionally, Lewis thought he was alone in his Las Vegas house when he sat in the bathroom at arm's length from his revolver. But Dani walked in, surprising him. "She looked up at me and said, 'No, Daddy, no,'" the entertainer says.
Pain was the wage Lewis paid for his success in show business, a Faustian bargain with the comedy gods that made him rich and famous beyond belief. His brand of humor is pure goonery, borne of the recognition that the body is as funny as the tongue. Lewis spent much of his celebrated 16-film partnership with Dean Martin crawling up from breakfalls of corrugated cardboard, only to plunge gleefully back if the sight gag worked. He has tumbled from cars and off two-story buildings, on the promise that audiences will love him for the trouble.
"When you get a laugh, go for it," Lewis says.
The falls continued after he and Martin split, and the list of injuries mounted -- he has broken both legs, both arms, both shoulder blades, and sundry other bones at least once.
The worst happened on March 20, 1965. Lewis was playing the Sands in Las Vegas, closing out a show whose finale was an elaborate fall from a piano. To impress his orchestra, Lewis did "the best double flip of my life" directly onto a metal microphone connector. "I thought I was paralyzed," he recalls. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors told him he'd nearly severed the end of his spine.
Lewis says the pain was all but intolerable, except when he was on stage. "It's the adrenaline," he says.
However, adrenaline can do only so much, and the curtain eventually falls. Over the years, Lewis became a Percodan addict. He started on low doses, but ultimately, he says, he still ached even after a dozen pills a day. At the nadir of his habit, while in London for a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II, he found himself in Soho buying 10 tablets of the stuff for $200 a pop. "I was a doper of the first rate," he says.
In May 2001, Lewis was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, scarring of the tissue separating the lungs' air sacs. Doctors put him on the steroid prednisone, which helps him breathe but left him 50 pounds heavier and ballooned his waist from a trim 33 inches to 51 inches. "I looked like a Jew sumo wrestler," he says.
By Labor Day that year, he felt so ill he had to sit through the annual Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, and his uneasy puffball visage prompted an outpouring of concerned letters from viewers. One woman even added $75 to her yearly contribution earmarked specially for his care.
In April of this year, one of Lewis' doctors suggested that he consider trying the electronic neurostimulator. After a four-day dress rehearsal in which he was pain-free, Lewis had the device implanted permanently.
Lewis is easily excitable, especially when the topic under discussion is himself, his family, or himself. He curses with the fluency of a street hustler. He was born in Newark, N.J., which "looked like Beirut" the last time he visited there, he says with a trace of regret.
As he talks, he coughs into his fist, an effect of the lung disease.
Now, brought back from the unthinkable by filial admonition, Lewis is never out of reach of another device, one he also credits with saving his life. It is a red remote control about the size of a cell phone.
When he brings it to his side and pushes a button, an electric stimulator embedded in his abdomen floods his spine with low-voltage current. These pulses prevent pain impulses from reaching the brain and muzzle the otherwise crippling discomfort.
The device, called an electrical neurostimulator, is made by Medtronic and is now used by roughly 110,000 Americans. Medtronic hired Lewis as the headliner for its "Tame the Pain" campaign to raise awareness of the problem of chronic pain and its treatments. The American Pain Foundation and the National Society for Chronic Pain are also involved in the effort.
"There's hope, there's help, there are answers for people with chronic pain," says Helen Dearman, founder of the National Society for Chronic Pain, a Houston-based nonprofit. Dearman has been dealing with daily pain since 1975, when she fell four stories onto her back. She says patients need to know they "have to seek the right for care. Lots of people do not realize that they can see a pain management specialist."
Dearman wears a different sort of implant from Lewis', this one an opiate pump that doses her spinal cord with painkiller when she needs it. Both Dearman and Lewis stress that implants aren't for everyone, and that many people in chronic discomfort do well on much less aggressive treatments such as muscle relaxants and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.
When Medtronic approached him about becoming a spokesman for the "Tame the Pain" campaign, Lewis quickly agreed. "I can't stand the thought that there are 70 million people suffering with chronic pain," he says. Lewis is getting paid for his time, though he says all the money is going into a corporation he established for his daughter.
Lewis views his celebrity as a kind of planetary law, and he has a point. His efforts on behalf of Jerry's Kids have earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, he says, and the children he has helped have looked to him as a "hero." He is confident that his status as a household name, both as an entertainer and through his work with MDA, makes him the perfect, the only, pitchman for pain awareness. So does his frankness. "I don't have a problem telling people I'm in pain," he says.
Lewis is now well into the rough draft of a two-volume memoir of his time with Martin, which he considers to be "the greatest love story ever." He has five pictures in the works at the moment. His doctors are weaning him off prednisone, which he hopes will help him shed some weight and leave him looking less like Orson Welles in his later years.
Finally, after nearly four decades in pain, Lewis says he's feeling "100 percent" better. And that's the message he hopes to convey to others who suffer: A better life is possible. "We're living in this incredible medical and technological revolution. You have every reason for hope," he says.
What To Do
Turn to the American Academy of Pain Management and the National Pain Foundation to learn more.
