The Transmutation of Epstein’s Magic 1-5-10

Anderson, South Carolina

Fred Epstein is one of those guys who believes in magic, but he is a realist in that he also knows magicians have to practice and do their homework to get their tricks to work right. Even as a master magician of his craft, I am not sure he knows just how much his magic has been transmuted into so many different forms in far flung places. I do know he gets an intelligence folder put on his desk each day, suggesting that he does hear of some of it, but I know of some he doesn’t know of.

Epstein is not a teen-age kid living next door trying to figure out how to make cards disappear or rabbits come out of black top hats. His magic tricks have much higher stakes results. He has learned how to make time come out of nowhere, how to give years of precious life to his audiences of one – you see Epstein is a pediatric neurosurgeon who has figured out how to make things disappear, dreaded things like astrocytomas, gliomas, hemangiomas, things that steal time and life itself if left to their own devices. He especially knows how to make these disappear from the brainstem and the spinal cord. Having studied medicine myself and having spent three decades in those tall towers of academic university medicine, I know these words well. I also know enough neuroanatomy to know that you never ever ever want to have one of these monsters show up in the brain stem or spinal cord and you never want to have to use these words with anyone; especially parents who love their kids really hard. There is no way to sugar coat them and make them go down easier.

I am in the magic business myself in a way. I don’t use Cavitrons or retractors or electrocautery units to make neurological monsters disappear, but I have for years used paint, masking tape, old plywood, and, disintegrating two by fours to create make-believe worlds in a community playhouse. I never would have heard of Fred Epstein’s magic if it were not for the fact that I am still plying my own magic trade in the playhouse.

Every year we have a volunteer appreciation party in which we acknowledge the directors, producers, actors, paint meisters, ticket takers and even grunts like me who do magic tricks with old plywood building sets. Last month we had our annual event and it was on the front row of stage left that I first heard about Epstein’s ability to make things disappear – things you really never want to see again. The last thing Epstein ever wants to do is give a repeat performance to the same audience.

The party, the presentations, the food all faded away as I sat mesmerized listening to how this New York magician, who likes to sail his small boat at sunset, had made a monster disappear from my new friend’s brain stem. During the month that has ensued there has not been a day where we haven’t talked for hours on the phone, swapped e-mails, or made assorted expeditions. I learned that Epstein pulled at least nine years out of the hat for Joanne and as far as she knows she can expect another thirty. It would seem Epstein learned his tricks very well.

Joanne’s two boys have grown up with their mother after all. She is able to order pizza for her boys and their friends every Friday night. Yet, brainstem monsters don’t let go easily and they often exact a price. Joanne is in a wheelchair most of the time because she has no proprioception – a nice neurological medical word for describing the normal ability to have an idea how one’s body is oriented to the planet underneath it. But even in her chair Joanne stands taller than just about anyone I have ever known.

She has managed to take Epstein’s surgical wizardry and transmute it into another kind of magic that also transforms lives. Like most states, public education is really suffering from funding cutbacks, teacher burnout, violence, and countless other impediments to learning. As an unpaid volunteer on permanent disability, Joanne shows up at the Centerville Elementary School every day for four or five hours and works in what she describes as “My Magic Room”. She spends the day coordinating the volunteer tutor-mentoring program that gives some of the 729 students in the school a chance of making a way in their young lives. She described to me the case of a 4th grader who did a math test and got every single problem wrong. He was sent to the Magic Room for help. With her own magic Joanne was able to encourage this young math phobic that he didn’t have to be one. She was able to help him in a way that can only be described as magical. He was able to retest in math and get every problem correct - and no she did not give him clues as to the correct answers. Wanna guess what Joanne does every afternoon? She has four different students come to her house for individual tutoring at her kitchen table.

Epstein is able to do his magic in Operating Room 11 on the sixth floor of New York University Hospital, because a teacher believed in him early on. Children are the most prodigious learning machines in the universe, if properly nurtured and encouraged. Because Epstein got encouraged in his early struggles in school, he got the confidence to believe in himself and ended up a brilliant surgeon with a good set of hands, and he was able to allow Joanne the gift of time to do her own magic in the Centerville Elementary School and in her kitchen every day.

I have unwittingly become a beneficiary of Epstein’s magic myself. I don’t have any monster growing in my head that I know of so I don’t need surgical magic, but my life journey has presented me with monsters of the type that can’t be taken out with Cavitrons and a good set of hands. How often I have wished that my monsters could be just taken out with a scalpel and some high tech gadgets in a pair of good hands.

Joanne describes herself to me as “your messenger”. The magic of her message is one that was written down before the foundations of time. “Just believe and all things are possible.” Epstein believed it and has given the gift of time and life to thousands. His wife, Kathy, believes it, and allows him to climb to the top of the mountain. Joanne believed it and took a big risk and now is able to show thousands of insecure school kids in uncertain times that all things are possible. She is showing me that even now, where Cavitrons can’t go, monsters can be made to disappear.