Notes on a Lion Among Us

Shervin Firouzi is home again. It’s not the same home he had before the accident, but home is home, and you don’t whine over what you can’t do anything about.

At that, it’s a pretty good-looking place, done in a black and white motif with gray highlights. Shervin’s paintings ornament the walls, splashing abstract lines of color into the living room.

Three paintings are the sad faces of women in a perpendicular row. They’re done in shades of green and blue, with lips of iridescent red. In the last painting, the lips trail off toward the bottom of the canvass, like a Dali watch on a fantasy landscape.

“I don’t have much time to paint anymore,” Firouzi says. “I teach nurses about respirators 14 hours a week and work with a new organization we formed. On top of all that, I’m starting classes at Valley College.”

“You’re as busy as ever,” I say, meaning it.

“I’m coming back to life,” he replies.

He whistles suddenly. Once, then twice. He sees the confused look on my face and explains the whistle is for the phone. A mouthpiece rests around his neck.

“It was ‘off the hook’ for some reason,” he says. “When I whistle, it hangs up. I can get an operator that way too.”

He smiles slightly and says it’s just one of the many benefits of being a quadriplegic.

You don’t think about the handicap when you’re with him. He doesn’t talk about it unless you ask. He’s too full of all those other activities, too glad to be home again.

Even paralyzed from the neck down, he’s busy helping others in the same fix. That’s the way I first met him two years ago at Northridge Hospital. Another quad called and said you ought to see this guy, he’s something else.

He’s something else, all right.

A restaurant worker at the time, Firouzi’s life changed in a blur of red in 1986 when he was 20 years old. You’ve heard this before. A kid dives into shallow water, hits his head and never walks again.

They told him he’d be on a respirator the rest of his life. He’d never move anything but his head.

Right from the start, Firouzi busied himself making life easier for others in the same fix. He told them to take it easy, that their food would taste strange at first, that they’d smell nonexistent smells. He told them not to give up, not ever.

Then he began to paint, holding the brush in his teeth, and pretty soon his work embroidered the bleak walls of his hospital room.

“I’m not done with this life,” he said to me one day. “I’m never going to be a vegetable.”

He learned to work a motorized wheelchair with a chin control and got to leave the hospital once in awhile, but that didn’t satisfy him. He wanted to leave it for good. He wanted an affirmation of life hospitals can’t provide.

When Medi-Cal denied him full-time home nursing, he sued the state. It costs Medi-Cal $60,000 a month to keep him in a hospital, he said, but only a quarter that much to send him home. It didn’t make sense to keep him.

A judge thought so too, and Shervin Firouzi came home for good.

He lives with his sister, a legal secretary. Three licensed vocational nurses trade shifts around the clock.

With help, Firouzi does his own shopping and pays his own bills. A bright man, he learned the operation of his respirator in detail and now teaches its fundamentals to staff members at a nearby convalescent hospital.

“The machine is keeping me alive,” he says matter-of-factly. “It was important for me to know how it works.”

He was told that if the respirator stopped, he would be dead in five minutes. But when it did stop once, Firouzi used his neck muscles to take in air for the 5 1/2 minutes it took to repair the device.

“I saved my own life,” he says. “It isn’t much, but I have a little more control over what happens to me now.”

The organization he helped found is Project Support for Spinal Cord Injury. It raises money for those in Firouzi’s fix.

Next month, specifically Oct. 7, it will hold a “cut-a-thon” and dinner at the Hilton Hotel in Canoga Park. Firouzi is busy trying to line up celebrities and sports heroes to take part.

“Everyone responds to heroes,” he says.

Twenty hair stylists have volunteered their time to cut hair for $15 a head. That, and the $45 dinner tab, will go toward helping those with spinal cord injuries.

Hustling for charity isn’t what I do best, and that isn’t my intention today. But there are lions among us, and I wanted you to know of one. Courage isn’t always exemplified by those who stride off to war.

Sometimes just breathing takes everything you’ve got.