"Why God Sent Me to the North Pole"

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I next started to drive around the country not knowing where I would live.  I drove across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and all the way to Illinois to visit my parents, then drove to Kentucky still looking for a place I could call home.  I stopped at a restroom in Kentucky and the writing on the walls, instead of being filthy like what I found it to be like in California, said, "God Loves and Jesus Saves."  This is where I called home. 

Using the lessons that I learned from several of the No Down Payment courses that I took, I bought a house on Kentucky Lake with no money down, no credit, no job and with just a contract on deed.  These no down payment courses really work if you do exactly what the instructor tells you to do!  I moved into the house letting the sellers and my real estate agent know the entire situation making sure that there was nothing for me to hide. 

After moving into this house, this is the point where I had to file bankruptcy for the money that I borrowed over the previous years.  I lived in this house for two years and because of my bad health, I had to sell this house too.  But, if I had the back pay from the nine months when I was initially put on retirement to the time of my first check I could have purchased this house and still lived in it today.  But to this day, I never received a single cent of back pay from the government retirement insurance in which I paid so much money. Unfortunately this house un Kentucky sold too quickly.  My real estate agent told me that I was asking so much for it that no buyers would be interested, so I figured that I would have maybe up to six months before I had to move.  The house was sold in just two weeks after placing an ad in a Chicago paper and I was given thirty days to move.  I really wasn't ready and didn't have any place where I planned to move.  That's how I ended up back in Bushnell living with my parents.  I moved to my parents house and stayed in a temporary quarters attached to the back of the garage and I've ended up living there for the last fifteen years. 

I have always enjoyed some good hard work but after my falling off the cliff experience, because of some deep nervous stress,  I just couldn't stop working.  Another pressure on me was that the Civil Service Retirement System would send notices stating that if I didn't fill out their yearly earnings statement that I would be taken off of retirement and that I would have a very difficult time getting back onto retirement.  This doesn't seem like too much of a threat but when I was in a daily struggle with pain combined with severe eating disorders, any threat to my meager income caused me great stress.

My life was filled with continuous ups and downs. One minute I'm feeling great and all that I would have to do is to slip on the ice, and not fall down, walk to fast or even walk while wearing dress shoes which would cause jarring, without the soft soles found in tennis shoes, and I'm in pain again.  Slipping without falling puts a lot of stress on the abdominal muscles and tears the tissues causing bleeding and weakness.  Walking to fast, and by fast I mean in a normal gait, does much the same thing but adds the jarring action which causes the bleeding.  Walking with dress shoes caused a higher "G" force to be applied in the jarring action which would cause the bleeding problems too.  This list can go on and on because just about anything would cause injury to my esophagus and I would find new ways to hurt myself very often without even trying. 

I started going to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago to have some professionals look at my stomach to see if there is anything that they could do.  They gave me an Upper GI, an Endoscopy, and an esophageal dilation which helped a little for a while.  The doctor kept me coming, it seemed like, every two weeks.  Then after about eight or ten times of these dilations, I was eating better but I still had very much difficulty getting the food to pass into my stomach.

After having this eating problem reduced I started going to the psychiatrist, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital to help reduce the stress and severe depression.  He gave me Prozac which worked great for the depression but didn't really reduce any stress.  Even though the stress was coming from many areas, the pain that persisted in my stomach was causing the lions share of the problems and I knew that, the stomach was the area I had to concentrate on if I ever was going to become healthy again..

I still had a severe problem with lethargy and also chronic fatigue in general.  I have always considered myself a chair seeking missile because when I see a chair, that's where I was going to sit, so I would jump from chair to chair.  The glands in my neck were severely swollen, I had a continuous sore throat, my tongue was heavily coated and I would always have the chills but no fever.  After seeing my local doctor with the proverbial fifteen second exams again and no results,  I again went to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital and this time I visited a tropical disease specialist. He took a stool and urine sample, a blood sample and my temperature, then told me to come back the next week.   So, I returned to Chicago for my second visit and the doctor told me that he couldn't find anything wrong.  But why didn't he ever look down my throat or feel the glands in my neck, it's because he gave me one of those fifteen second exams too!  He never sat me down and asked me about any other symptoms that I may be having in any attempt to diagnose the problem.  If he couldn't find the problem in the samples he took, should he just throw his hands in the air and say that he couldn't find anything and just let it hang there? No way!  The proper next step would be to ask me more questions, look at my throat, or just investigate for other things that may be causing the chronic problems.  He's the person that was supposedly trained to do this kind of work.

After this period of unsuccessful exams,  I spent a lot of time laying down or doing exactly what I'm doing now, my feet on the desk and the keyboard in my lap with the chair in its full back position.   This position was the least physical stress on my stomach and this is the way that I had to sit, mostly, over the last twenty five years. 

After a long period of rest with my feet up, about one year, I started feeling much better and I decided to take a course at WIU, Western Illinois University.  I took a single class of AutoCAD for one semester.  The regular schedule, the teachers and the other students were all a refreshing part of my life.  It was great, so the next semester I started going to school full time in the Industrial Technology Department. This turned out to be too much for me.  By the end of the semester I was too sick to come to class.  My AutoCAD instructor allowed me to do my work at home, on an older version of the program, and send it to him in the mail.  The other instructors let me take an incomplete and allowed me to complete the work and turn it in to them during the next semesters classes.

Read this story about Jeff Dyrek from the Western Courier, Western Illinois University Newspaper.

I was having a lot of problem carrying my class books.  I started hurting so bad that anything more than just a spiral notebook was too much for me to carry.  I rented an apartment several blocks from the school and had to walk very slowly to my classes.  To reduce the pain, I had to walk slumped over while moving my upper body very little.  Day by day the walks and the classes became more and more difficult.  I was in a tremendous amount of daily pain.  My body hurt so long that many times I would just sit in my apartment and cry with no ability to stop.   On an average, I would have to get up five times a night to use the restroom, and because of the stomach pain, I would have to get up about three times a night to take antacids.  The head of my bed had to be raised up six inches, I couldn't eat any spicy foods, I had to take antacids all day and then again all night and just life in general, consisted of spotty sleep, improperly spaced meals, and long periods of intense pain.  The doctor gave me drugs like Tagamet, and Prilosec, but neither made any effect.  He also had me on pain pills and muscle relaxers which did help but left me feeling drunk and dizzy, yet had no real effect on the stomach problem. 

My pain was, finally, just too much and I had to quit going to school.   The painful effects of going to school still persisted for more than six months and there were a couple of times where I was sure that when I went to sleep that I would never wake up again, this was a welcome idea.  It just didn't matter if died in the night because the pain was so intense for so long and I didn't see any better future. 

As it did many times before, eventually I started feeling better.  I was still having a lot of pain and my sleep patterns, with all the getting up for previously mentioned reasons, never changed.  I'm a very motivated type of person and my mind never slows down, so I had to do something.  Since I've worked with Aviation, Electronics and Computers all of my life I decided that I still had to keep myself in those fields of work in some way, while still working around the fact that I had to keep my feet up and my body as horizontal as possible.  After much thought I decided to learn how to make a web site.  I had all kinds of photos from my Navy days, so I started scanning photos and building a web site on my home computer.  I bought a number of computer magazines.  After a long period of intense study I purchased a web site and called it YellowAirplane.com.  My friends complained that since I still had access to the computers at WIU that I should have used their computer space and saved myself some money.  Inasmuch as I wanted to save the money, I have always had this, sort of, external drive that always pulled me in the right direction and kept me on course regardless what others wanted me to do.  So this is how YellowAirplane.com got started.

I laid down in my basement apartment and worked for days and months on end. I didn't do anything else but work on the web site and sleep. I had to listen to comments like, "You're the kind of person that works super hard and never gets anything done," or "You're just dreaming lofty thoughts that will never go anywhere."  But, this are the negative comments that every entrepreneur must endure before they become a success and I knew it. So, without an end, I endured the criticism and bit my lip every time I wanted to lash back and say something in return.

Time has gone on and my personal health had gotten better but I still had severe limitations.  When I rode the lawnmower to cut my mom's grass, I would have to lay down for about a week afterwards, due to the jarring, before I was feeling better and it was time to cut the grass again.  When I sat up to pay my bills, or build a database, or even write Christmas cards, I would be again placed in the wrong physical position and end up in a lot of pain that persisted for long periods after the work was done.

Life was a wreck.  I lived in a shack, I couldn't do very much, if I went out with my friends, I would appear normal for several hours then I would become the party pooper and had to leave because of the pain.  I was always severely depressed. 

Read this story Rally at the North Pole from BalloonLife.com

One day in 1999 a man wrote me a letter wanting to advertise his North Pole expeditions on my web site.  I thought to myself, I would love to go to the North Pole myself.  I asked him if I could have the rights for resale of his expeditions for my web site and he agreed to my deal.  I would receive a commission for every person that I would send.   I worked real hard building web pages and learning about North Pole expeditions.  It was fantastic to be able to be part of a real expedition.  In 2001 I sent my first man, Mr. Ken Bronstein, to the North Pole. 

After the expedition returned, I learned about everything that happened through the stories that I heard.  I also found out that a man in a wheel chair went to the North Pole with this expedition too.  I looked at expedition videos over and over and noticed, where ever they went, the expedition members were either laying on a floor of a cargo plane of stretched out in a reclining commercial airline seat. 

It was like a force beyond my control.  I looked at North Pole pictures so long and after being depressed for so long, there was like no choice, I had to go.  I didn't have any money and the trip was very expensive, but the force was with me and it was driving me.  I worked harder than ever trying to find the money.  I looked for sponsors and did get a few.  I begged the vice president of GE Adventures to give a discount, so he let me go at his cost.  I put my motorcycle up for sale, in the middle of winter, and it instantly sold for a thousand dollars.  I still had to borrow a considerable amount of money and after all that, I was still three hundred dollars short.  I told the companies vice president and since I knew so much about the trip, he hired me as a guide for three hundred dollars.  Now I had enough to go on the trip.  But I had no spending money.  Suddenly, because of the news release letters that I sent, I had three people sign up for the trip and now it was one hundred percent sure that I was going.

I left from Chicago's O'Hare Airport.  I was hurting real bad in my stomach and was in terrible shape in general from not being able to do any exercise for so many years.  On top of that I caught the flu just days before our departure.  But, none of that mattered.  As I said, the force was with me and I had no control over going on this trip. 

I met the expedition group in Moscow and we were taken to the Hotel Russiya directly across from Red Square.  I've never seen such beautiful architecture.  When we ate breakfast, we could see St. Basils Cathedral and the Kremlin Wall right outside the window. 

We left Moscow and flew to Norilsk then Khatanga where we were stranded in some pretty nasty winter storms and tremendously cold temperatures.  It was great.  On the second night in Khatanga we had a fantastic party on the third floor of the Khatanga hotel.  One thing that the Russian's are good for is pouring a lot of Vodka down our throats.  The doctors told me not to drink, but from the first moment we stepped in Moscow someone was giving us drinks with our dinners. 

There was one thing that really scared me about going to the banquets and dinners on this trip and that was that I would get food stuck and I wouldn't be able to find a private place to dislodge the particles in the painful manner that it required.  But, to my astonishment, I was having less and less problems getting the food to go down.  I thought that it may be due to the stress relieving environment of traveling and having a guide take care of all our needs.

Getting back to the big party in the third floor of the Khatanga Hotel.  We laughed for about seven hours straight before everyone finally went to bed.  The next morning I was moving real slow.  It took me four hours to get my first boot on and another hour to get the second boot on.  I then went outside and decided to walk around the town and look around.  I started walking in a normal speed, too fast for me, and it happened again, I started bleeding real badly inside.  I could barely make it back to the hotel.  I then laid down and went to sleep for two days.  The expedition guide called the doctor in Florida and talked for a long time.  They went to the local pharmacy and gave me some drugs to reduce acid production.  I really needed everyone to leave me alone so I could sleep.  I've been through this many times before.  Because of this problem I told the expedition leader that I wasn't able to go to the pole and I would just lay there in the hotel.  If it wasn't for the bad storms moving through the area, delaying our departure, I would never have made it to the pole. 

Here to read about the 2002 North Pole Expedition.

In two days I could feel the bad bleeding stop, but I still had jet black stools for another four days.  Finally even those stopped and I was feeling better.  The weather cleared and we were off to an island called Srednij deep in the Arctic Ocean.  We unloaded our equipment onto a truck and took to the cabin on the island.  I helped in the assembly line that moved boxes from the truck into the cabin.  After loading for about ten boxes, I again started having a lot of pain and began to bleed internally. 

The next morning we left Srednij and headed for Camp Borneo, the base that our group makes just sixty miles from the pole.  As it was with a couple of other people, I didn't feel well at all.  We next boarded the Russian Mi-8 helicopter and headed for the exact Geographic North Pole.  We drank Champaign and took our pictures, dropped our skydivers then headed back home.

Two days later we were back in Khatanga and stuck in another storm.  I stayed there for another week and met a lot of the local people including a beautiful Russian girl who was my best friend and still is to this very day. The storm let up and we boarded a Russian, four engine, turboprop, passenger aircraft and headed for Moscow.  It turns out that I sat in the only row of seats in the whole airplane that wouldn't lean back and on top of that, the seats were in the exact worst position that caused me the most pain. 

There were about two hundred people on the plane and the plane was severely overloaded.  When you factored all of the equipment and dogs, we were packed in there like sardines.  When I looked around I realized that no one was in a good mood and everyone was uncomfortable.  Many of the men there were on the polar ice cap for more than two months.  Their faces were covered with frost bite and their feet were worked so hard that they were covered with deep blue bruises.  In lieu of this, I just couldn't go up to someone and ask them to move so I could be more comfortable. 

I ended up just having to sit in the position that hurt me the worst.  I tried stuffing coats behind me to change the angle but it didn't work very well.  There was nothing I could do.  Then, suddenly, after about ten hours in the air the severe pain just started going away.  It turns out that I had an adhesion that broke loose and now I was able to join the human race and be normal enough to sit up.  As for the swallowing problem, it turns out that I had an infection in my esophagus and all the whiskey that the Russians drowned me with, killed, or at least tremendously reduced the infection to a point that I can, almost, eat normally. 

This is why I believe that God sent me to the North Pole.  He was the driving force that was giving me the uncontrollable urges to join the expedition.  This is the truth.  After twenty five years, seventeen or eighteen operations and a hundred thousand dollars spent on doctors, not counting what my insurance paid, the doctors could do nothing but take my money.  But, God sent me to the North Pole and now, I'm mostly, healed.

I still have a minor pain in my abdomen that feels like it might be the staples rubbing against my diaphragm, the tear in my diaphragm will never be healed, and my knee and broken back will never be healed again.  But, other than that, I never felt better in twenty five years.  At the time of this writing, February, 6th 2003, I have been ill with a flu type symptom for four weeks and it has never gone away.  I get this every year and it's like a low level virus or something.  But at least, I can eat, and I can walk, and I can sit up and pay my bills without tremendous amounts of pain. 

But the previous text was only, really, discussing the problems with my stomach, there were many more things going on than this.  My back was also damaged very badly.  As previously stated, I had a lump in my back, as the result of a broken L1 vertebra.  It's impossible to conceive that I had a compression fracture of the L1 and didn't have any problems with any other part of my back.  My height before the accident was five foot ten inches, after the fall, I was only five foot eight inches, a loss of two inches.  The compression of the vertebra was not significant enough to cause this height difference.  I had bad back pains for many years resulting from this accident.  When I was on the USS Kitty Hawk, just months after the accident, I visited the ships doctor and he prescribed a chair with a high back instead of the stools that were common in the work shops.  This helped a bit but didn't fix the problem.  After I got out of the Navy I talked to several doctors about my back pain.  They all recommended surgery and fusion of the affected areas.  There were three places that my back hurt.  In the middle of the upper spine, in the L1, which had the compression fracture, and lower down somewhere between the L1 and my tail bone.  I absolutely didn't want to have my back fused, so I just lived with the pain and took pain pills and muscle relaxers to reduce the continuous agony. 

While I was working at Patterson Aircraft, I started night school on a half time basis in an attempt to complete my college education.  One of my lab partners was Dirk Mullikin who now lives in the Salt Lake City area.  I was always complaining about a pain in my back and neck, and my friend Dirk kept telling me to go and see a Chiropractor.  I didn't believe in Chiropractic medicine, mainly due to the fact that most MD's consider this type of treatment quackery. 

Dirk's persistence caused me to seek out his Chiropractor, Dr. Wendal Johnson, mostly to just shut Dirk up and to keep him from bugging me about it.  Dr. Johnson took a full torso X-Ray of my back, then allowed me to view a number of training films about Chiropractic Medicine.  After a few days I made my second visit to Dr. Johnson.  He showed me the large X-Rays and I noticed that he had every part of my back charted out with lines that showed the exact angle that its different parts were out of alignment.  This was very impressive because the three points of vertebral misalignment were the exact three points where I was experiencing the pain.  My back was twisted like a pretzel just like a person would imagine it would be after an accident of the type that I had.

It took a couple of years of regular treatment, with Dr. Johnson, before my back was straight again and the pain was gone.  However, the L1 compression fracture can never be fixed.  There are still two reasons that cause pain in this point.  These are, One: when I don't get enough exercise, and Two: when I lift too much, such as when I loaded a stack of concrete blocks, about fifteen, forty pound, blocks in total.  When my back hurts, now, from lack of exercise, it is an intense burning sensation right in my spinal column.  Lifting the blocks, and other heaver work of this order, causes a little more dramatic pain that is of the intensity level that prevents me from doing anything but laying on my stomach or directly back for a couple of weeks at a time as I reported to Dr. Kerr in Macomb, Illinois. 

All of this time, while I was having all of my abdominal problems, I was also having severe back pain that increased my overall problems even more. 

About my Crushed heels.  During the fall I landed on my feet, initially.  This is what jammed my spine in the first place.  The Navy doctor said the problem with my heels was that the connective tissue between the bone and the soft tissue was damaged.  The result of this was that I had to walk tip toe from June of 1977, almost to the end of the cruise in April of 1978. 

Another problem was damage to my right elbow: I also had a lot of pain in my right elbow, right where the funny bone is located.  This pain went away rather quickly but there was also another problem.  When I would sleep with my right hand next to my head, my elbow would stiffen up very much.  It would stiffen to a point that I was unable to straighten my arm up properly until I worked it for a few minutes .  I remember sleeping on the Kitty Hawk when, suddenly, the General Quarters alarm went off.  I was in the third bunk and I was sound asleep with my hand next to my cheek.  I tried to get out of bed but I couldn't straighten my arm enough to grab a hold on the rail to lower myself down from the upper bunk.  The alarm kept announcing General Quarters and that condition YOKE would be set in six minutes.  My time was running out, I worked and worked on my arm trying to get to function enough for me to get out of bed.  Finally it became limber enough for me to get down and make it to my shop just in time.   If it wasn't for the fact that the berthing area was just around the corner from my shop, I wouldn't have made it before all the doors were locked and the six minute time limit was up.

But, this problem persisted for quite a few years afterwards and even to this day, when I rub the funny bone trigger point on my right elbow, it hurts.  However when I rub on my left elbow, I can feel the pressure on the nerve but it doesn't cause pain.

Now I have secondary injuries.

One of the problems that I now have is a perforated esophagus, as one doctor told me.  This was caused by having the doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, perform multiple and repeated dilations of my esophagus.  This procedure literally tears the esophagus to increase the size.  When this procedure is repeated, many times, the scar tissue builds up and creates a point where the flexibility and strength of this portion of the esophagus becomes greatly reduced.  Now I have a permanent injury that is torn by a large amount of sneezing during the allergy season in the spring or fall, or coughing when I catch a cold, or even excessive laughing.  Other things that cause this problem are jarring, falling down, walking too fast, or anything that causes a lot of torque to be put on the abdominal area like when I lift something that isn't directly in front of me.

As I mentioned before, in 1986, Dr. Opsal and Dr. Black performed abdominal surgery on me to fix my hernia, in the process, they used staples to hold parts of it together.  But I believe this is a problem too.  Now, when I sit up as a desk, lean back against a chair, and again sit up repeating this action many times, I have stabbing pains in two parts of my abdomen that are not in the esophagus or stomach.

There were serious secondary injuries because of my fall.  I would now have times when I am feeling a lot better and I would attempt to get my body back in shape, after long periods of laying down.  One day, I went to the park and there was a running course where you would run for a couple of hundred feet and then perform an exercise that was predetermined by the course.  One of the exercises was a horizontal ladder that you would hang from and walk, hand over hand, until you would get to the other side.  In my mind, I was in good condition and I never knew that this was going to be a problem for me.  It tore my shoulder muscles which caused great pain that lasted for several years thereafter.  This also happened because of different types exercises several times, since then, I have damaged each of my shoulders.  Now my shoulders will never be the same.

Stress was another problem.  Missing so much time from work and having the possibility of being fired continuously held over my head for so many years was no joke.  This causes a lot of stress, especially when the doctors never spent enough time to try to find out what the problem really is.  I even had a doctor call me a hypochondriac, yet he never spent over fifteen seconds on the actual exam.  Was I going crazy and just imagining all of these problems?  This was a question that continuously ran through my mind.  This is stress!  Having the boss yell at me because I am making him look bad due to my sick leave usage, is stress.   Not having a vacation in countless years, is stress.  Not being able to go on a date because I was too sick to get out of bed, is stress.  Not having a normal social life due to all that time that I had to stay in bed, is stress.  Having tremendous doctors bills, while not receiving my pay checks because I had to take leave without pay when my sick leave and annual leave have been used up, is stress. Losing my GI Bill because it ran out of time, because I was too sick to go to school and complete my classes, was stress.  Having the doctor give me super short exams then, administering drugs for problems that didn't exist, making me extremely ill, is stress.  Losing my house, my car and everything I ever worked for, because of the Government disability program that I cost me so much money and the fact that this program wouldn't give me a pay check for nine months, was stress.  Having bill collectors call me day and night, playing grinding noises on the phone and making threats,  was stress.  I can go on, but when a person is disabled, they have a lot of problems that add up to a tremendous stress conditions.

To sum up, after my fall, the VA told me since I was on leave and not on a duty status at the time of my accident, that my disability wasn't the VA's responsibility. I have to agree with them on this point, but when the Navy doctor put me back to work after just two days following my fall off of this 200 foot cliff, without performing a thorough exam, at this time, it did become the VA's responsibility.  I am ten percent disabled through the VA and ninety percent disabled through the Civil Service when, actually, it was the VA's responsibility completely.  Also, I have received tremendous financial and post traumatic stress damage from all this and due to the fact that the Civil Service Retirement System refused to pay me a cent for nine months after the Sacramento Army Depot put me on retirement, I have had an enormous increase in stress as well as a greatly increased debt.  In addition, it turned out that the Sacramento Army Depot did not have the authority to grant my disability in the first place. 

In my mind, to make everything straight, my retirement should be completely converted to the VA, and secondly, the Sacramento Army Depot should pay me nine months of back pay at my full pay rate of GS-11 plus interest, because they didn't have the right to authorize my retirement,  and thirdly, I should have my full GI Bill restored with pay for the time I spent attending Western Illinois University.  These things would be the least that my government could do for me to get back into a more normal kind of lifestyle.

Jeffrey C. Dyrek. Webmaster, Disabled Vet.

Watch this 43 second video taken in April of 2007, What it's like to be a Disabled Veteran.

Click Here's a little more reading, A time of despair.