4323 43rd Ave NE

We rented a big old house in Laurelhurst, 4323 43rd Ave NE the same neighborhood as Eric and June, Tim moved in and we located an office there. It worked for a little while. We learned how to bill and Tim and I tried to find a way to work together. In the end, it didn’t work out so well and we decided to go our separate ways. Tim was from West Virginia and he went back there. Melissa and I moved into the Laurelhurst house. I changed the name from Orthopedic Physical Therapy Associates to Chasan Physical Therapy and launched my career.

One of my very first patients was a home care patient that I had treated through his initial care on the Burn Unit . His name was Frank and he had suffered a terrible injury when he had fallen off a roof he was working on and pulled a large bucket of hot tar on top of himself. He had 80% second and third degree burns, and he lost his right leg in a high above knee amputation. It was working with people like him that had me really appreciative for my fitness, vitality and well being.

At this point, Melissa and I were already struggling with our relationship. Melissa wanted to set a date to get married and I was really reluctant to do that till we worked out the many issues between us. We found another therapist, this woman, Dawn Gruen, literally saved our relationship. She was incredible and we loved her. Sadly she died after losing a fight to cancer at a young age. She really had us look at what we were dealing with in ourselves and with each other over the years.

With Dawn’s help, we finally hit a good rhythm, seemed to be on the same page and set a date to get married. We made the decision to go on a “Dive Honeymoon”. So we registered for SCUBA classes at Underwater Sports,  and started learning about diving. We initially got certified as PADI divers by completing the required skills and we embarked on a series of shore dives. Next we committed to the Advanced Certification course. It was interesting. We had to learn some advanced skills and pass skill tests including search and rescue, underwater navigation, a deep water dive, a current dive and a night dive.

Of the skills, the deep water dive and the current dive were the most interesting…the night dive was just, well, spooky. For the deep water dive, we had to dive to 90 feet. The dive boat we were on  took us to where the depth was 90 feet and in we went. Up until then the deepest we had dived was 40 feet. There is really not much life in the Puget Sound deeper than that since the light doesn’t penetrate that far. But the dive was a 90 foot dive so we started to descend. What happened to me was that as I got deeper, and my BC (Buoyancy Control vest) compressed, I started to sink faster and faster. I was adding air to my BC as fast as I could but I just kept sinking….I hit the bottom with a thud and always wondered what would have happened if there was not a bottom at 90 feet. It took a minute for my BC to fill enough to lift me off the bottom.

The current dive was interesting too…in this case the boat dropped us on one side of a channel between two islands where the current was moving. We dropped down to about 40 feet and the and current swept us along the wall. It was kinda like being on a conveyor belt.

The night dive was so crazy. We put glow lights on our snorkels, and we swam out to the end of the oil dock at Edmonds Underwater Park. About half way out, Melissa freaked out and “dropped” her weight belt….so she could not descend. She went back to the shore and the next day we came out and I did a search and rescue to find her weight belt.  For the night dive you realize as you descend that you are in the darkest dark you can imagine. It is PITCH black. Then you turn on your flashlight and BOOM color everywhere. There is a fish in the Puget Sound called a Rat Fish. They use the oil from it for gun oil. It has a poisonous spine on its back and it is a nocturnal fish. I had never seen one but when you turn on your light underwater, it turns and comes straight at you….it’s spooky

Well the instructor felt bad for Melissa, who definitely had the skills to get her Advanced Certification, so he awarded her the certification in any event.   We were ready for our honeymoon.

By the time our wedding arrived, on August 4th, 1985, we had been together for 3 years. Our wedding was planed for SeaFair Sunday. We got married on the grass, outside of my cousins place in Broadmoor on the golf course. We were serenaded by the Blue Angles flying over our wedding.

We went from the wedding to a downtown hotel for the night and then on to the airport in the morning. Next stop Kauai. 

We had a blast in Hawaii. We LOVED Kauai. We did two dives a day for two weeks with every 3rd day off so we could degas. It was amazing.

There were two situations that stand out in my memory from those dives. The first, we were diving a dive spot called Kitchen Sink. It was in about 90 feet of crystal clear water where several items from dismantled old ships had been dropped to create a graveyard of shorts that formed a false reef years before. It was well populated by fish, moray eels, shells etc. Imagine a 40 ft reef, sort of circular in shape, in 90 feet of water in the open ocean.

Melissa had opted not to dive that day. She suffered from motion sickness and the ocean was a little choppy. So she stayed ashore. I dived with the Dive Master as my dive buddy. We were down exploring the reef when I looked up to see the Dive Master with his hand on his forehead, indicating a shark. I turned around and behind me about 30 feet away was a shark that looked to be about 15 feet long and about 2 ft wide.. He was big…he was coming toward me lazily. My blood pressure skyrocketed. The shark came closer. I crouched in among the reef making myself as small as I could. The shark swam around the reef a couple of times before flicking its tail once and disappearing. I mean it was gone. I have never felt so out of my element as I did at that moment.

The other experience occurred while I was diving with Melissa as my dive buddy.  We were in about 60 feet of water. We spied these amazing shells – a really nice cone shell that looked like this:

I picked it up and it was alive…there as clearly a snail in the shell, so I put it down. Melissa was not satisfied with that so she picked it up and handed it to me to put in my goodie bag. I shook my head no and set it down.

I swam off. She followed. What I did not know was that she picked up the shell again and slipped it into my BC pocket.

What Melissa had forgotten ( I think, and maybe she knew LOL) was that the snail is poisonous and has a deadly spine it uses to kill things…like divers who are stupid…and who put them in their pocket…

Well we got on the dive boat and Melissa said “Hey, why did you keep putting that shell down, I was trying to give it to you?” I said “Well it is alive so we can’t take it”.  She cocked her head and said “Oh, I put it in your BC pocket”…I was like Startled…and looked in the pocket and this is what I saw…

The snail had extruded it’s poisonous spine and lucky for me it had gotten caught in the webbing of my BC pocket and was pointing parallel to my trunk and had missed me by millimeters! I was very, very lucky.

I have it that my new wife tried to assassinate me on our honeymoon! In any event, we loved the experience. We took helicopter rides, we went to a Luau, we dived the beach called Tunnels where we saw Black Tipped Reef Shark.

We had a great time. We were young, we were in love, we were on an adventure and we sat in a restaurant on the last day having lunch before we head to the airport to come home and we seriously debated staying. We almost did.

I had just started my practice, I had signed a lease to move my office into a medical building on Pill Hill, and Melissa had a great job on the Burn Unit. She was super close to her sister and her other sibs and her mom, so she wanted to come back. So we reluctantly came home.

We set about buying a house and we ended up making an offer on a house on Superbowl Sunday of 1986. Melissa met Tom and Heidi and we really got along with them. They accepted our offer and we had our first home.