therapist gave me a copy of run, don't walk. she didn't give it to me, she lent it to me. and said please read this, you will find it very very interesting and which i did immediately. .. >> it also is the world's

leading hospital in treating this. and i thought that adele had just the right mix of compassion and humor with a long hard days that she spent the veterans in her care. it allowed her tremendous sympathies and she shared her vulnerabilities and she asked so much. her greatest survival tool, she will tell you, is her sense of humor, which is why i found her painful story such a delight to read. and adele has written some 30 pieces of humor for "the washington post." when she is not working, she is also a a long-distance swimmer. she has swim across the chesapeake asics times. but today she will be talking and here she is to talk about her book, "run, don't walk."

[applause] >> am so grateful for that very nice introduction and grateful for you for having me here today. i'm going to talk about how it happened that i wrote a book because i am sure that many of my friends are still in disbelief that this happened. in 2003 i own the car that my friends nicknamed the "rustang." but i love the car and despite of the fact that i had to use a screwdriver to a mock i think they'll come i never going to stop driving my car. except that one day i was driving home and i was going down georgia avenue and i was about a half-mile from my

apartment and my car all of a sudden caught on fire. and i didn't know what to do. so i quickly rolled my window down and unlock my seatbelt. and i kept driving my car. and i managed to get it home and i wasted into the parking lot behind my building and after that they might hargis never drove again. and i felt terrible about it and didn't have the heart to call a tow truck and have them come and drive my car away so i kept it out as it rusted away. and then i was at home and reading "the washington post" that had the article about local eyesores. and at the end of the article there was a query, if you know of an eyesore, let us know and we will send a reporter out to write about it.

and i thought, yeah, i know an eyesore that is parked out back. so i thought, well, i'm not going to bother "the washington post" reporters with my tragic our story. so i said i'd write about myself. so i wrote it up and then i sent it into the post and then i went out with some friends herriot and when i got home that night, there was a message from the editor that said that he loved my story. and he said if i had anything else that i ever wanted to send them, go ahead and send it in. and then he added especially if it was about this. and so here is a person that is definitely taking the bus, he figured. for the next three years whenever something funny what happened to me, i would write it up and i would set it on transcended to "the washington post" and i was looking for a

couple of reasons. i was lucky because i got my feet wet and believe me, this book never would've happened. i never would've written this book if my car had not caught on fire on georgia avenue. so mostly i was lucky because during those three years, it really gave me and i'll let. because at that time things at walter reed started to get really tough. i worked as a physical therapist in the mpt section and at first we mostly saw single leg amputees and patients who have lost their legs below the knees. but as the war went on, the injuries got worse and worse. we went from seeing single leg amputees to mostly patients that were double and triple amputees, meaning they had lost two legs and an arm. and then we watched the amputees

move up the body, they went from being below the knees and elbows to above the knee is and above the elbow and we saw patience and started to lose their life at the groin and patients with partial public imputations and by the time that walter reed closed in 2011, almost all of our new patients are double or triple amputees and we had rebuilt a the three men who had lost all four of their limbs. and i was lucky because i had a hobby after work at force me to look to the sunny side of life. and all of my coworkers who made it through those years at walter reed had some sort of out let, whether it was baking cakes or treating for 100-mile running races, keeping up with the highly complicated world of celebrity news. and all that's shared a very

dark sense of humor. you can go to the biggest thomas center in the country and you might see one amputee. but at walter reed, we regularly ruled will dilatation rehabilitation and they let for groups all day long always looking out the glass in my coworkers used to say that, oh, this is how it must feel like to be an animal at the zoo. don't feed the animals. but i always felt like it was a dark sitcom and these groups always looked horrified and on the other side on our side of the class, we were always joking

and laughing and the patients especially would make fun of each other and call each other names like ugly stumble or princess if someone was having a hard day. and they wore t-shirts that said things like i had a blast in afghanistan and marine for 40% off. the staff wasn't much better. we would consume whatever junk we saw on late-night tv, including ordering a snobby for the clinic. and this was normal as the feeling. and we were all going to move through it together. and this was the longest war that our country has ever been in. as my coworker and puts it, this is our generation but it affects so few people. and on a personal level i remember how completely astounded i was the day i lost a

patient who lost both of his legs after doing six deployments. and until one walter reed began to shut down in 2010, it coincided with the surge in afghanistan. that year the caseload at walter reed tripled and unfortunately walter reed was also in the process of moving to bethesda. the first thing that happened was that they started to shut down the employee parking lot and so in order to find parking you have to get to work no later than 6:00 a.m., which we all did. we worked through lunch and we stayed late and we worked and stayed late that night in my dreams come everyone wasn't amputee, even me. and i know my friends over the years have gone really sick of hearing me say that i was going to quit walter reed. i was always going to quit, this is that, i was done, i was going to find a job with parking and

better hours. in the next time they saw me i was still out walter reed and they would get irritated. but i could never quite explain it. and the reason i say this because i was part of something that i was part of something that was much larger than myself and i was trying to find something to write about to send you "washington post" and i took my mind off of what i was seeing at work. and then one day my partner actually surprised me and said something that blew me away. she said, you know, you're wasting your time writing those stories for the post. and i was shocked. she said that she thought my articles were cute, and funny. but you are missing the real

story. and she said that i should be writing about walter reed. and i thought, that is a crazy idea and completely insane. the reason i'm writing in the first place is to get my mind off of work. the last thing that i'm ever going to do when i get home from work is right about work. but then like a week later it was on a specific kind of planet. the editor that i work with at the post called me and he said with walter reed shutting down a would-be interesting if i were to write a few articles about my job. and i said pretty much the same thing to him but probably in a nicer way. and i said that i have been so comfortable doing that. another was a reporter from the post who said that he was going to be writing an article about the clinic that i work in.

and i tell you, i was so mad when i heard that. i was just seething on the phone and he was asking me questions and i was just getting angrier and angrier and i could tell that he just didn't get it, and how could he? he didn't work in the clinic and he seemed to be hunting for what i felt was a grotesque shocking story and he was talking about this station. in spite of all the devastation and we that we really did see at walter reed, it wasn't a depressing place at all but a happy place where we celebrated life. in our kernel there always refer to our clinic as the happy place and she was right. it was a happy place. so i decided that i was going to write an article and i wrote it and i wrote about it pretty

innocuous, what i thought was an innocuous article. about taking some of our patients swimming for the first time. and i didn't think that this was a really fantastic article and i had deliberately kept it pretty mild. so i was surprised by the reaction i got. people called me, people e-mail me. one day at work is all -- this overtly woman stopped me and shs probably in her 80s and she handed me this envelope and then she walked away. when i opened it up, there was a letter from her and she said that she was a retired army physical therapist and she had read my article in the post and she knew that she had to come to the hospital and hand deliver it so i would know how much it meant to her to read about it. and so when i read her letter i realized at that moment that she was right. but this was a story that people wanted to hear and also that i

was the right one to do it and that i would be able to write about walter reed in a humane and humorous way with the insight that maybe an outside writer would not have. and i was part of the new group to transfer to the walter reed hospital at bethesda and i wrote the book. and so before i turned this ministered into my publisher, i ran it up the chain of command and i had some of my coworkers read it and then i had to give it to the department head area and in this is a guy whose management style is not here. i would classify it as being highly unpredictable. and not slightly insane. i was really nervous about giving it to him and i thought that he is going to blow his

top. and i thought, well, i will wait until friday and give it to them at the end of the day in that way he will have the weekend to hopefully cool off. so friday came and i gave it to him and i just took a step back and he got really sentimental and he said that he had this new hospital in this nice facility and that most of the staff had stayed on. but he said that he always felt that something was missing and he couldn't put his finger on it. one day he realized what it was and he said it was a spirit and a ghost that you could actually feel at the old walter reed and i think of my coworkers who are here can attest to that. that there was a feeling or and there had to be. 150,000 people were treated at walter reed.

was the oldest military hospital in america. and it is exactly 2.8 miles away. i thought about coming here on my lunch break, but i never had a lunch break. but if you drive past it, it is catty corner from rock creek park and if you drive past it, before they knocked it down and turn it into a supermarket, new condominium, i hope you think about that spirit and that you enjoy the book. and so i'm going to read an article that i wrote first for "the washington post" about taking our patients swimming for the first time. i revised and extended it and it later turned into this book. and i love this. i actually wrote large parts of my book downstairs at the big

table. so okay. >> was a leg or two, it is hard to exercise. sometimes you gain a belly and more. especially at walter reed where we were surrounded by trees of homemade chocolate chip cookies. thanks to the generosity of the administration and local athletes, our patients were constantly being introduced to unusual sporting event said they couldn't do, like rockclimbing. the centerpiece of the clinic was the larger-than-life climbing wall that was two stories tall and whenever there was a news feature about the mpt clinic, the cameras zoomed in on that wall. it was easily the most photographed east of equipment in the entire hospital. yet weeks and months would sometimes go by without a patient ever climbing it. when new patients saw the climbing wall, their eyes look up and they got immediately

excited. and i knew what they were thinking. losing two legs must not be that bad if i can climb this while and i'm going to get new legs and climb this and do everything just like i did before. and i was guilty of facilitating this kind of deception. the climbing wall was the first thing that i showed new patients. i did it because it tears him up and it was a way to get them to buy into physicals and trimmed . a patient was frequently limited with his prosthetic leg. they frequently slipped off has some but this is something i thought he could do and you didn't have to worry about falling. and you don't need fancy equipment or special water or prosthetics. just goggles and some bravado.

we started training at a few nights a week and we practice at a community pool close to walter reed. i asked the pool manager if it would be okay we brought some patients and i thought that he would say no or charge us but he said that it would be fine and that it would be free. so for the next week we drove five guys. i am no swim coach and had no idea how to teach anyone to swim. but i am a physical therapist, which in a patient's eyes puts me on the same level as genghis khan. everyone suggested it to get out of their wheelchairs and no one argued with me. it was shallow, only 4 feet deep. if you had a leg, you didn't necessarily have to be able to swim. but for the other ones, the ones that had no legs at all, my only strategy was for them to cling to the wall adventure across the

pool in any way that they could. we learned some surprising things. it's impossible for a person that is missing both legs to sink. you can do back flips off the side of the pool and you can lift your arms to spring into the air and even if you are a triple amputee missing both legs and an arm, you can pull yourself gracefully a half dozen times back and forth across the pool with your one good arm. i figured that the program would gradually lose its appeal, but the next week when we brought the van around, eight patients waited and then a lebanon. and i consulted with a coach for my swim team and she volunteered her services. she didn't have a car but medicine the middle of the day and she was a serious coach. she would listen fiercely to the feedback before pushing off to swim another lap under her guidance. doing modified flip turns up to

500 and 92,000 yards of continuous swimming. this gave legitimacy to the program and for two hours once a week the soldier stopped being patient and were transformed into a swim team of sorts. we were still in mali crew at the pool and i was convinced that her time there was limited. in addition to their obvious battle injuries, most of the patients had semi-offensive tattoos. they were loud and boisterous lying around the pool deck and in between sets they would splash one another under the water and create an appropriate pool chaos. but no one ever got mad at us. instead, a strange thing began to happen. people started to swim with us and they would get out of their lane and they would say man, you are doing a good job. keep on swimming. you can do this.

and one day we got to the recreation center in the elevator going to the pool was broken. i thought that some of the guys could thump down the stairs on their behind, but it was to fly to, would they have enough energy to lift themselves back up the stairs later? we were getting ready to leave when the pool manager and two of the lifeguards came running up and begin caring for injured guys down the stairs. it happened so fast that i didn't get the chance to second-guess a and an hour later when we got out of the pool, they were standing at the stairs waiting for us. i had seen a lot of this in my years at walter reed, but nothing at this level, reaching out and carrying another person and in my world of heroes and uber heroes, i put those lifeguards up there with firefighters and ambulance drivers. and so thank you for coming here. [applause]

>> okay, we have just one microphone today over here. >> it sounds like you all do great work. how does walter reed approach spiritual and religious questions from the patient? >> we have a chaplain in our clinic who handles most of those questions. [inaudible question] >> that's right. [laughter] >> you showed the book to many of the actual patients that you

have been treating and what did they think about it? >> i did not. no surprise that a lot of them ordered it and read it and i thought that they wouldn't be interested. but if they are interested in what we do when we are not giving him a hard time, they've been very supportive. >> do i still keep in touch with them? yes, on facebook where everyone keeps in touch. and i'm meeting one of them tomorrow. and there is a relatively notorious guy who lost both legs in an accident on washngton

where he was caught in a cave. he has gone on to redeem himself by developing very advanced skills for below the knee and beauties that allow him to climb walls. i wonder if you ever ran into people who were able to use this climbing wall. i have forgotten what his name was. >> we did have an amputee come visit us who is a below the knee amputee. but we have so many and beauties come visit us. and we have access to all the latest and greatest prosthetics. but it's really the work that he's put into it. you can have -- the nice thing about this, i know that for climbers the smaller your foot is, the better you can fit it.

so one of the advantages of being an amputee is that you can get a really small foot. but there is a world of difference between being a below the knee amputee and above the knee amputee. most of them can pretty much get back everything they were doing before. with some on a vacation. they might walk a little funny going up the hill if your ankle doesn't been that much, but otherwise they can run, ride a bike and definitely it becomes a little bit more difficult when you are missing both legs below the knee. that missing her leg below the knee versus above, it is such a different world. but i do think that i remember him coming. [inaudible question] >> the question was what was the purpose of this.

well, i don't know, i think that we were under the spotlight at walter reed. and we were in a smaller clinic before and we used to have a lot of visitors like uso and celebrities and media that would come in to our room and it was just so crowded in there to begin with. so i don't think that they started out to build it for us to be under the spotlight like that. i think they really wanted to do that and still allow visitors to come. but then it started to become amputee tourism. [inaudible question] >> how would you describe your approach? >> the question is what is your advice for writers and my advice is to get a coffee maker with a timer on it. seriously. get up at 5:00 a.m. and write

every day. because for me i just found it became easier and i got sort of into the habit. and what else are you going to do that early in the morning two you're not going to post a status on facebook. hey, it's 5:00 a.m. and so that is just my opinion. getting up every day. i would run for the coffee maker. >> you mentioned the dances in prosthetics and you must have seen quite a few over the niners a were doing this. can you talk about that and what more you think needs to be done to it? to improve it? >> does come i think that most of the advances have been below the knee and the knee is just a hinge joint. so it is the simplest and the

arm prosthetics are still fairly civil war era. even though you see it all the time, they were showing mind-body connection that can respond to your thoughts or actions, but in reality they are not very functional and most people i know who have those don't need them and again, nothing can really replace your hands. but at walter reed we started all of our new above the knee amputees, it was called this the leg, which is the first microprocessor knee and then and now there is the x2 and now the x3. but you really have to throw your leg out there to make sure that latest street because if it

wasn't, it was going to go down. the same thing would happen maybe if you took a step backward. so he went down hell anyone constantly focused on where your foot was and where the knee was, and they put about 70% undertow of their leg. and you can see patients when they have new walkers and as they become better they are able to walk and talk at the same time, which is something that we don't really ever think about.

and i think that that really helps because then they don't have to worry all the time that they're their knee is going to give way underneath them. remember, you can't feel the floor under your foot, so it's a lot of strength and control that is going on and if you are doing that is up i'll amputee come you're doing that twice as much. so they are also working on power prospects and i have to say that those are much more gimmicky and heavy and more of a money maker. [inaudible question] >> oh, yeah, everyone had seen that. in the beginning, things were --

patients were little bit more irritable. and they had more trouble with sequencing at times. >> i know your world is physical therapy and working within beauties. but walter reed also works with traumatic brain injury. is there any crossover in the approach you take for both types? >> we worked as a big team at walter reed so that the tbi or press were also there as well. if they had a bad traumatic brain injury, they would go to rehab facilities first. and so you sort of stabilize this and then they would come back to the amputee rehab.

>> you mentioned that some of these [inaudible] was there a prosthetic developed to help them? >> they have one that is kind of like a padded bucket that they would set in. and it depended if it was part of their polis or if they are missing both of their legs at the hip. obviously walking is going to be consuming so much energy for them but it's not that practical for them to be walking around all day. but a lot of them wanted to try, and so we would try it out. and also we would have special wheelchair cushions are kind of mold it to them as well.

>> what are you doing now? >> i work for myself now. >> so if anyone wants to hire me. [laughter] >> i'm not sure that i know how to verbalize this. living where we live, there is this connect where my husband was in the pentagon on 9/11 and we lost a lot of friends. we have gone where that small part of the world has been affected. i'm wondering if you were ever a part of this. which includes assumptions about the type of all who join and fight in the military.

with assumptions about who they are, versus what you are finding at walter reed, if you are ever in an odd position that way. >> oh, totally. my husband was at the pentagon and they were like oh, he works at the pentagon and he must love books. and i'd be like well, no. >> am wondering if that happens to you a lot? >> definitely. i think that they might see him as a traitor or something. i don't know. [laughter] >> i know my partner has a family that is very liberal and i think that for a long time they beat me has some conservative republican. and also i was asked, you know, do you treat iraqis are people from afghanistan. and i was like well, no. because we are in america and

this is an american military hospital. but sometimes i felt bad. i always felt like this. we are all good people. and sometimes we would have some good-natured teasing between some of my patients who are definitely more conservative than i was and they knew it and i knew it and we would make fun of each other during elections. but i think it opened my eyes up two different kinds of people and i also thought it was very interesting and you are surrounded by people from all walks of life and from all over the world.

and you'd think that you wouldn't get along but you actually do. and so instead of letting politics get in the way, we all sort of pull together and i wonder if we were really homogeneous, if that would've happened. and i had to fill out this reading group and that was one of the questions they asked. and it was much more political before i worked out walter reed and i just don't watch the news that much. >> in the old hospital at walter

reed, did that change? >> the new hospital has such a different feel even when you look at it, it's very sterile and modern looking and they had these hundred-year-old brick buildings with multipane class and what you would walk up the stairs there were some steps, but they were worn in the middle so it seemed like a sack and i always just loved that. i thought of how many people have been walking up and down the stairs before me. and unfortunately it won't be after me. but there was a feeling there and also a lot of pride. it was a different feel.

>> i wonder about what happened [inaudible] >> wonder if schools and the academic programs don't prepare people the question is was i prepared for what i was going to see and the answer is no. i was in no way prepared. i had no idea what i was doing when i walked in. i was completely floored. and i remember the first patient i saw who was combat injured and how completely blown away i was when i saw him. and i remember it was a physical reaction and i felt my heart speed up. i couldn't understand why i was feeling that way because i had seen bad injuries before and they would see who would fain in school. but i think it was because it was the first time that i've ever seen anyone lusciously and liberally hurt. so i wasn't prepared, but i work

with a great team of people and everybody pitched in and helped each other out and there was a lot of education. and nobody has ever seen injuries like this before. we sent our soldiers and the marines and ground troops off to battle carrying their own turn kids. you know? and the combat medics carried powder and cauterizing bandages so that they could stop the blood flow immediately. so they were able to save so many lives that normally never would've been saved and we saw injuries to people very easily would've died from just 10 years prior. so they got worse and worse because the medical care.better and better. but nothing can prepare you for that. but luckily we work as a team.

>> i'm very interested in your comments about walter reed. because i won't claim that i've read everything about it, but the articles i did read were extremely negative and they were about the scandal of the conditions of some of the wards and all. do you think that this facility should then retained? and self debilitated? >> oh, of course i think so. as far as the scandal they were talking about a building that wasn't on base, it was off-base and it was outside the gates. i never saw it myself. so i cannot attest to the conditions. but, you know, the original hospital was 102 years old. it was in use as an

administrative place. but the new hospital was built in 1977. that is where we were. my house was built in 1943 and i hope that nobody's going to come and knock it down because it is so old. my mother says they have buildings in switzerland's country where they are a thousand years old. now you have a big bureaucracy and i think that things were or when they're a little smaller. that's just my opinion and i am not an administration person. but i know that i was sad to see it close and i think that i speak for most of my coworkers who are all very sad. >> particularly when you hear now about the shortage of facilities and veterans and all, it does not seem like a terribly good decision. >> the veterans hospitals are different because they are not active duty. we are an active duty military

facility. >> did you ever have any qualms about about those are so gravely injured? >> i mean, i felt bad for some people. and what will their life be like when they leave. but i guess that we were all about business as usual to get them up and get them walking. >> most people don't have experience with others who have lost limbs. so it can be kind of awkward when you meet someone like that.

do you have advice would you technology injury? >> i would ask them how big the shark was. and so i don't know, we dealt with it with humor. and when i worked in an army facility, you just made fun of people left and right and they made fun of you as well. and so i think that people hate to be pitied. that's just my opinion. but i am not an amputee. but i wouldn't not acknowledge it. and the shark is always good. [laughter] >> we have time for one more question. [inaudible question] >> you work with a really specific demographic, which generally speaking is probably younger and active. did you find that to be a

blessing or curse in rehab? >> it was both. because they were younger and they didn't want to have physical therapy. they had been up all night playing xbox and they were going to roll in and give me a hard time. but they were often sick in some patients will use that to their advantage. they would in the clinic six hours a day working out and they were incredible. so anyway it was a blessing and now i work with this older patient. and i think i went in and hammered some people. so it was kind of bad. [laughter] that yes, we are lucky because were getting young people who are in excellent shape and they could really do the work. and they invented stuff that we had never seen before like the

makers of sea legs told us that you couldn't go up the stairs with it. at the patients figured it out, throwing their legs up there. and they said you can't run on sea legs, but they were. and there were all sorts of things like one of my professors told me that you will never see a bilateral amputee walking especially if they're not pulling onto something, but we saw all the time at walter reed and that was a goal and it wasn't just a goal to walk the two get them back running. so the patients really push the envelope and we just sort of tried to keep up with them. >> thank you. [applause] >> okay, leave the chairs in place.

adele levine will sit up here and sign copies of her book. thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. forty-eight hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. booktv is television for serious readers. >> this is booktv on c-span2. here is our primetime lineup. tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern, meryl comer talks about her experiences as a caregiver for alzheimer's. and a story after that on texting while driving. our primetime programming continues tonight c-span2's booktv. >> how you acquire a book?

>> there are a million ways to do it. and one which is not often talked about is you really come up with an idea and you try to find the perfect writer or the person whose passion for the idea matches yours. that is one way you can make a book happen. and in other ways you make sure to talk to agents as much as possible and see what kind of experiences they are enthusiastic about. and you raise your hand in the hope that they will send you a good proposal. and sometimes you cultivate and plant ideas with them and you hope that over time that they will come up with a project that they really want to spend five or 10 ye