I moved to California 27 years ago. I moved from a neighborhood in New York City. Yes, I’m from New York. I know it’s tough to tell. I moved from a neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen, to Santa Barbara.

It was like moving to Mayberry.

When I moved here, everybody said, “Bobby, it’s California. You’ve got to be nice. Gotta be nice.” But nobody, absolutely nobody in Santa Barbara had any compunction about walking up to me and saying, “Oh, you’re from New York City and you’re Italian … you must be in the Mafia.”

People think it’s some sort of badge of courage for us, but most people who came to America at the time my parents did ‒ my parents are from the other side ‒ most of them were coming to get away from all of that, to get away from the corruption of the, you know, the 240 governments that Italy has had.

Though occasionally there would be some contact. Someone knows a guy, or hey, if you want a stereo you should talk to this guy, who doesn’t have a store but does have a garage.

Anyway, I went to this very prestigious all-boys high school in New York City, where a lot of made guys – members of organized crime ‒ would send their kids to straighten them out. It didn’t work most of the time.

In my senior year, I was a fairly good student, and I didn’t have to take any of my exams, except that I had three unexcused absences, so I did have to take my exams. So, I’m sitting in my history exam, waiting for it to start, and a fella comes in, Tony Romano, about six-foot-three, 350 pounds if he’s an ounce. A huge human being.

“Bobby, I don’t know nothin’ on this class,” he said. “Bobby, I know nothin’, you gotta help me, you gotta help me.”

I’m like, “Tony, what’s the problem?”

“Bobby, I don’t know nothin’ on this class.”

“Calm down Bobby. Let’s see what we can do.”

Mr. Mack gives us our exam and luckily, it’s a list of 10 essay questions, and we have to answer five of them perfectly. I answer five questions, I pass them back to Tony, and he starts to copy them in his own handwriting.

It wouldn’t matter. His handwriting looks like Sanskrit.

So, I answer the other five questions, and I walk out. We pass. Forward to graduation night. Before the graduation, Mr. Mack walks up to me and says, “Bobby, that was a really nice thing you did for Tony Romano.”

“What did I do?”

Yeah, right, like he doesn’t know.

Tony Romano comes over to me. Gives me a big hug and a kiss.

“Bobby! Thank you so much! Oh, you saved my live. You saved my life!”

And I was like, “Tony. Shhhh.”

He says, “Is your father here?”

“Yes, of course. He’s right here.”

Now, my father is five-foot-six and 270 pounds and nobody ever called him fat. He was like a filing cabinet with feet, this huge human being. I wear a size 48 sport coat, he wore a 56. His shoulders were out to here. When he passed we couldn’t fit him in the coffin. Had to put him in sideways. [In response the audiences’ laughter] Yeah, it’s funny now.

Anyway, Tony says, “My father would like to talk to him. Does your father speak Italian? Yes, good.”

My father goes over, and there they are, these two old Italian men. They look like two sardine fisherman on the wharf in San Francisco. They are talking, and they’re shaking hands and my father keeps looking at me over the shoulder of Mr. Romano with a look that is not good.

Anyway, they finish talking. They kiss each other on the cheek. They’re talking in a Sicilian dialect they both speak. He comes back over.

“Daddy, what did Tony’s father want?”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

So away we go. Graduation. It’s 10 o’clock at night, we’re back at my house, my father calls me into the back yard and says, “What did you do for Tony Romano?”

“I didn’t do nothin’ Daddy.”

“What did you do for Tony Romano?”

“I took his history test for him. Daddy, the guy’s got a head like a roast beef. He’s going to get a job with his father, and that’s going to be it.”

Now, Mr. Romano owned a short bus line, like a 500-mile-radius bus line like Greyhound. It was called Dominican Bus Tours.

So I said, “What did Mr. Romano want?” My father said, “He wants to give you a job over the summer.” I said, “Great. What, changing the oil? Washing the buses?” My father said, “He wants you to be the union delegate for the drivers.”

And now my father tells me about the decision I have to make. The same decision he made 50 years before that. My father was working for a company called Marolla Brothers Plumbing and Demolition. Mr. Marolla got a little behind with a guy in the neighborhood, a loan shark, and the guy sent two guys to get the money from Mr. Marolla. And they started slapping Mr. Marolla around, and the filing cabinet with feet goes over, and he says, “What’s wrong Mr. Marolla?” He smacks one of the guys, knocks him to the ground, then hits the other one, and knocks him out completely.

Anyway, making this story short, he had to make that decision, because this guy came back and said, “You just took out my two best men.” My father’s decision was either to go to work for that guy, or not. And I had to make the decision whether to go to work for Mr. Romano or not.

We went down, we talked to Mr. Romano, we shook hands, we straightened it all out.

Fast forward 10 years, and I’m an assistant director in the film industry at this point. I’m standing in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, and we’re doing a movie. And I hear, “Hey Bob-by!”

And there’s Tony Romano, turning a bus onto Fifth Avenue, wearing a $10,000 watch, leaning out the window to say, “Hey! You should’ve taken the job!”

The post A Actually Robust Choice appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

By Jen Mistrot and Elizabeth Cook

BRENTWOOD (CBS SF) — Sisters can be the best of friends, and Afshan and Uzma Rehman are no exception. So when both found themselves living in a new country, they leaned on each other for support.

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But like most all sisters, Afshan and Uzma have also experienced their fair share of sibling rivalry.

“We fight a lot,” said Afshan with a smile. “We argue a lot. Like, we literally had an argument this morning.”

But the two admit they have never stayed mad for long.

“We were always there to give each other that positivity,” explained Uzma. “To tell each other ‘Okay, you can do this!’.”

Encouragement of each other has seen Afshan and Uzma through some very tough times. The 29-year-old identical twins were born in the United States. They traveled between California and their parents’ native Pakistan before moving to the Middle East in grade school.

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But by the time Afshan and Uzma were teenagers, their father’s violent behavior made home unsafe for the twins and their siblings. So their mom made the difficult decision to bring her family back to the US, where she would raise her children as a single parent.

“For her it was a very tough decision,” recalled Uzma. “It was a very tough decision because it was the four of us being very young.”

“Not having a dad there your whole life,” said Afshan. “Even though he was there in the picture but he never gave us that support.”

Missing their father hurt, but the move was their first hurdle. School came next.

“The way you grow up in Pakistan is very different than here,” explained Afshan. “When you come here as a teenager in your teenage years, you don’t know that teenage life. You don’t know how they are going to treat you.”

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“You get looked down upon,” said Uzma.

“You’re not able to do anything. Oh there was racism. There was like, ‘Go back to your country.’”

But the twins’ country is the United States and California is their home. Both excellent during high school in Brentwood, then graduated from college before launching careers in high tech.

And there have been other great accomplishments and life changes for both women.

During the pandemic, Afshan had a baby and tackled a master’s degree.

“Hectic but I made it out,” said Afshan of the experience.

Uzma kept busy with volunteer tutoring while raising her four year old son.

“I teach him where we come from,” said Uzma of her son. “I teach him where I grew up, how I grew up.”

Both stayed close to each other, offering love, support and friendship.

“We were always there,” said Uzma. “To give each other that positivity.”

The twin sisters want their children to be good friends too. So the pair also stay close to their mom, even when they don’t see eye to eye.

“If me and [Uzma] are fighting my mom does not intervene,” said Afshan with a laugh.

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“She is like, it’s like going to work it out.”

The post Twin Sisters Assist Every Different By Robust Occasions – CBS San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

In March 2019, my mother Holly got a second chance in life. Your bilateral lung transplant was a gift in a class of its own. It saved and extended her life when nothing else would. It gave her body back the strength to enjoy life. It restored their health and independence.

A short year later, she was just out of the University of California at San Francisco to check in for her year-long post-transplant appointments when her doctor called her to go home and stay there.

In an instant, the COVID-19 pandemic took so much of the freedom and independence it regained when it got new lungs. The cost of a lung transplant was that she would spend her days with a weakened immune system. Even before COVID-19, this was a major cost factor. She has promised her doctors and her donor that she will protect her gift and accept the challenge of an immunocompromised life.

In this new world, the virus has taken away or changed a lot of what made life comfortable – for all of us, but especially for people like my mother. But we all know this story. We have all gone through our own losses and suffered our own ailments for the past year and a half. I am not going to try to list them for the sake of making a point.

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Despite all of the inconvenience of a pandemic raging in my mother’s vulnerable life, she has found ways to divert her attention from the grief. Something that has helped both her mental and physical health was exercise.

Walking has always been an accessible and important part of her recovery. Even before the acute exacerbation she was hospitalized, my mother was undergoing pulmonary rehabilitation. When she was in intensive care for three months, daily walks were critical to her survival. Her distance increased from six steps to six laps up and down the hall until she had a fight for new lungs.

In the months after she was released from the hospital, we walked San Francisco and Golden Gate Park together. When she was finally allowed to return to the mountains, she and my father went the old routes in their neighborhood. The mile-long walk around the local pond was insurmountable when my mother’s IPF went bad. Thanks to her new lungs, she can easily complete the loop again.

To keep things interesting, my parents decided to change their exercise routine. Last summer, their communal pool offered lap swimming by appointment. This was a perfect, gentle change as my father developed a painful autoimmune disease called polymyalgia rheumatica. They swam all summer, but the outdoor swimming season is short at high altitude.

In winter they were usually on the slopes or with snowshoes to keep fit. Standing in elevator lines and stuffing themselves in gondolas with strangers didn’t seem like the safest way to spend the day during a pandemic, so they crouched down at home.

When the world thawed this spring, my parents decided to buy e-bikes. They were irritated by winter and got bored of walking the same old routes over and over again. And when vaccines reduced the number of cases, the pool went back to its previous schedule – all children, all day. Even before the pandemic, places like this were on my mom’s no-go list. Please no cooties.

The price of the bikes was high, but the investment was worth it. Their new bikes allow them to conquer steep hills with relatively little effort. This keeps the force on sore joints, old injuries and battle-weary heart systems low. The electrical assistance only works when the pedals are moving. Even if the engine gives them a boost, they have to keep their legs moving.

Both of my parents loved sitting on two wheels again. My mom said it feels like being a kid again when you can take off your bike and leave the house in the dust. Cycling around town for hours feels new and exciting after years of not being able to ride. Knowing that the bike will help her get home up the mountain at the end of the ride takes away the fear that she might be stuck somewhere due to fatigue or joint pain.

E-bikes are an adaptation that enables my parents to do something they enjoy again. Adapting to change is what people do best I think. When things get tough, be it in your body or around the world, we adjust because we have to!

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Note: Pulmonary Fibrosis News is solely a news and information website about the disease. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This content is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always contact your doctor or other qualified health care provider with questions about any medical condition. Never disregard or hesitate to seek professional medical advice because you have read something on this website. The opinions expressed in this column are not those of Pulmonary Fibrosis News or its parent company BioNews and are intended to stimulate discussion on issues related to pulmonary fibrosis.

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