Cliff Radel reports:
He plans to tell her how beautiful she looks. She wants to thank him for the walk.
Jerry Walker will have that conversation Saturday with his daughter, Jennifer, as he walks her down the aisle.
Two years ago, the Mason man never thought he would walk again. He didn’t even think he would be alive, much less be traveling to Findlay, Ohio, for the wedding of his 27-year-old daughter, “the baby of the family.”
A sudden and still unexplained numbness in his feet, known as idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, had made him a walker in name only. Now, after finding the right physician – Dr. Humam Akbik – and the proper medical gizmo (a neuro-stimulator implanted in his back), Walker, 63, is back on his feet and ready for the father-of-the-bride dance.
“I want to do this at the end of the dance,” Walker said, standing quickly from his living room chair, spreading his legs and shooting his right arm skyward a la John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” But, he has been told he will be “thrown off the dance floor.”
He doesn’t need that smooth move. Just dancing to the tune of Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” with her dad is all Jennifer needs. As she said, “I couldn’t ask for a better ‘happily ever after.’”
For a while, Walker’s story had little chance of a happy ending.
