Crutches

About the first week of May, if all goes well, 52-year-old Sheila Brashear of North Kansas City, Mo., will have trekked to the base camp on Mount Everest. On crutches.There, at 17,500 feet, Brashear will celebrate 32 years as a cancer survivor.She was just 20 when she lost a leg to bone cancer. Never comfortable with a prosthesis because of a high amputation, Brashear has walked on crutches ever since."I was very lucky. The odds were against me," said Brashear, about her cancer, a tumor on the upper thigh.

A 17-year county police veteran moonlighting as a security guard at an Annapolis shopping center lured a drugstore clerk into his office then raped and sodomized her, a prosecutor said yesterday.Michael Dennis Feeney, 41, used the woman's interest in her Native American heritage to gain her trust, offered her a ride home the night of Dec. 9, 1995, then raped her in his office, Kathleen Rogers, an assistant Anne Arundel state's attorney, said in her opening statement.T. Joseph Touhey, Feeney's lawyer, said the alleged victim "is neither credible nor reliable," and that her story is inconsistent.

Managing District Court Commissioner Salvatore N. Butta has retired from the front lines of Baltimore County's criminal justice system after 26 years, leaving murder and mayhem to chase punk pigeons from his backyard bird feeder.At 5 feet 4 inches -- some liken him to actor Danny DeVito -- Mr. Butta has plenty of tales to tell, including the time he confronted an angry juvenile almost a foot taller."He was young -- from the old Maryland Training School. There were no police and we didn't have a cage -- just a room with a metal door.

It all began a couple of years ago in Washington, when Steven Saleh called up Craig Kraft, an artist who makes sculptures using light, and asked him to make a pair of neon crutches.Out of that grew "Light as a Helping Hand," the exhibit now on view at the new Merrick School of Business building at the University of Baltimore. It's a show that uses light to address communities with special needs -- among them the sight- and hearing-impaired, people with seasonal affective disorder and people with AIDS.

CHIMAYO, N.M. -- Casey Stevens made his annual pilgrimage Friday to a humble adobe sanctuary, its walls lined with candles, statues of saints and castaway crutches.As he emerged beneath the low doorway, he winced, as much from the pain that forced him to lean heavily on a cane as from the brilliance of the sun. The fingernails of his sunburned hands were encrusted with remnants of earth he had scooped from a small pit inside El Santuario de Chimayo, its soil reputed to have curative powers.

Due to circumstances I'd rather not discuss -- but inevitably end up discussing anyway -- I am now limping around on crutches and have one knee in a gigantic brace.For those of you who have never been visibly injured, but may be someday, here's a little piece of advice: You better have a good story ready.Because the first thing people say when they see you on crutches is: "What happened?"And if you don't have a good story for them, they get very disappointed.The first few times that people inquired about my injury, I told them the truth.

A Glen Burnie man was killed Saturday morning when he was struck by a truck as he tried to cross Ritchie Highway on crutches, county police said.Charles H. Evans, 31, of the 100 block of Marie Ave. was crossing Ritchie Highway at Eighth Avenue about 2 a.m. when a southbound 1986 Ford truck hit him. He was pronounced dead at the scene.The driver of the truck, Joseph Anthony Fiorino, 17, of the 8000 block of East Shore Road in Pasadena, told police he had not seen the victim until he was several feet away.

Sandra Keeney can't stop talking about her daughter Michele's determination and spirit.Reliant on crutches since the discovery of a spinal tumor at 17 months, Michele still learned to ride a bicycle, drive a car and roller skate."

LOS ANGELES -- Throughout Los Angeles, there are hundreds, probably thousands of them. Just look down and you'll see them -- the most common victims of the earthquake.Feet.Feet crushed by falling furniture. Feet slashed by shattered window glass or broken china. Feet fractured from panicky, pre-dawn leaps out of bed. By far, the appendages were the most vulnerable body parts when the land underneath them trembled.Hour after hour -- all night and all day on Monday as well as yesterday -- men, women and children hobbled into emergency rooms leaning on friends and family members.

IRVING, Texas -- There was yet another set of crutches in the Dallas Cowboys' locker room after their trashing of the New York Giants Monday night. And with those crutches came an offering of perspective."

Lakers@Celtics 8 p.m. [TNT] No Andrew Bynum (pictured with crutches), no problem. At least when the Lakers played the Knicks - though it always helps to get 61 points from Kobe Bryant. I'm going out on a limb and predicting Bryant doesn't get 61 against Boston. Which reminds me of how "Hot Rod" Hundley used to talk about the time he and Elgin Baylor combined for 73 points - Hundley scored two of them.

PHILADELPHIA - If the Philadelphia Eagles make it to Jacksonville and there's a water polo championship played in the team hotel's pool, you can probably count Terrell Owens in. But it remains a mystery whether Owens will or will not be able to play football on his surgically repaired ankle Feb. 6 if the Eagles are in Jacksonville, Fla., for the Super Bowl. "The next step would be to be able to run and change direction," Eagles coach Andy Reid said yesterday as his staff began preparations for Sunday's NFC championship game against the Atlanta Falcons.

Given television's fondness for sex and violence, it's no surprise that in the coming weeks, dozens of programs mark the 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's death by emphasizing two things: his assignations with women and his assassination in Dallas. In some cases, Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe get more air time than Fidel Castro and Nikita Krushchev. In others, the wrenching images of the widow in black, John-John saluting his father's coffin and the streets of Washington lined with grim and saddened faces so dominate the program that it seems as if Kennedy was killed as soon as he took office.

For Dick Edell, one of the most successful coaches in the history of men's college lacrosse, the statistics only tell part of the story. In nearly two decades at the University of Maryland, he led teams to three Atlantic Coast Conference titles, 13 NCAA tournament appearances and three championship finals. To appreciate the impact he had on the lives of his players and fans, though, you would have had to have been at Byrd Stadium in College Park yesterday, where nearly 500 people showed up to help a man who has meant a lot to them.

Americans are aging, and so are their joints and bones. As rickety bones have made walking harder for millions of the elderly, countless companies have created medical devices to make getting around easier, creating a thriving industry in the process. Consumers spent $31.2 billion in 2000 on durable medical devices, which include artificial limbs, canes, wheelchairs, crutches, canes and hearing aids. That's nearly double the amount spent 10 years before, according to federal figures. Invacare Corp.

Sometimes, love is a war best viewed from the sidelines. The mind games, the cutting words, the deceit - people can't really enjoy this stuff, can they? But hey, at least in Two Can Play That Game, the story of a woman trying to teach her man a lesson, and her man's refusal to learn without a fight, the carnage is leavened with a few laughs. Shante Smith (Vivica A. Fox) is a woman with her act together: She's smart, she's beautiful, she's got a big-time position with a big-time company, and she's got herself one fine specimen of man. She's so all-that, in fact, that she's the idol of her friends, who come to her for relationship advice.

Baltimore heavyweight Hasim Rahman had surgery Friday to remove an abscess on his spine, which could keep him out of action "for at least six to eight weeks," according to a spokeswoman for the University of Maryland Medical Center. The two-hour operation, conducted at the medical center, forced the postponement of Rahman's 10-round fight with Danell Nicholson, an elimination bout scheduled for Oct. 7 in Connecticut for the International Boxing Federation's No. 2 ranking. "He had compression of the nerve roots of the spinal canal, causing leg weakness," said Dr. Barbara Lazio, chief resident in neurosurgery, who described the growth as "a collection of infectious material or pus, which is a staph infection."

About the first week of May, if all goes well, 52-year-old Sheila Brashear of North Kansas City, Mo., will have trekked to the base camp on Mount Everest. On crutches.There, at 17,500 feet, Brashear will celebrate 32 years as a cancer survivor.She was just 20 when she lost a leg to bone cancer. Never comfortable with a prosthesis because of a high amputation, Brashear has walked on crutches ever since."I was very lucky. The odds were against me," said Brashear, about her cancer, a tumor on the upper thigh.

A 17-year county police veteran moonlighting as a security guard at an Annapolis shopping center lured a drugstore clerk into his office then raped and sodomized her, a prosecutor said yesterday.Michael Dennis Feeney, 41, used the woman's interest in her Native American heritage to gain her trust, offered her a ride home the night of Dec. 9, 1995, then raped her in his office, Kathleen Rogers, an assistant Anne Arundel state's attorney, said in her opening statement.T. Joseph Touhey, Feeney's lawyer, said the alleged victim "is neither credible nor reliable," and that her story is inconsistent.

Managing District Court Commissioner Salvatore N. Butta has retired from the front lines of Baltimore County's criminal justice system after 26 years, leaving murder and mayhem to chase punk pigeons from his backyard bird feeder.At 5 feet 4 inches -- some liken him to actor Danny DeVito -- Mr. Butta has plenty of tales to tell, including the time he confronted an angry juvenile almost a foot taller."He was young -- from the old Maryland Training School. There were no police and we didn't have a cage -- just a room with a metal door.