The couple: Simone Nasry (maiden name Bak), 35, works as a consultant at Accenture Federal Services in Arlington, Virginia. Daniel Nasry, 32, is a theology teacher at Bishop McNamara High School in Forestville, Maryland. They live in Arlington with their dog, a mini Australian shepherd-poodle mix named Basil.

How they met: Shortly after returning from his family’s annual summer trip to Egypt in 2017, Daniel, then a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, was telling his friends in the program “how amazing it would be to meet someone who understood the culture, valued it, could speak Arabic, and felt a draw toward that region of the world,” he recalls. One of his friends thought of someone from college who fit this description: Simone, who, like Daniel, is part Egyptian. Soon after their friend introduced them, they started talking every Sunday over Skype (Simone was living in Washington, D.C., at the time), bonding over their shared background and community-mindedness. She took the train to meet him in person in early 2018, and the rest is history. I don’t know how this is going to play out, Simone remembers thinking, but I’m pretty sure this is my person.

The proposal: On Aug. 17, 2019, during a trip to the Red Sea in Egypt with Daniel’s family, Daniel arranged a private meal for the couple on the beach. Daniel had previously told Simone he was not ready to get married, so she was taken aback by the flower-strewn table and their favorite songs playing in the background. “And then one thing led to another, and Danny got down on one knee,” recalls Simone. “There was a lot of crying on my part.”

The ceremony: After their engagement, Simone and Daniel planned for a May 2020 wedding, but the pandemic forced them to change course. They ended up tying the knot three times. First, in 2020, they wed through the courts over Zoom while wearing their pajamas. Shortly after, they hosted a virtual religious ceremony with family and friends. Finally, on Nov. 12, 2021, they held an in-person ceremony at All Saints Church in Chevy Chase with about 80 guests. “The wedding is just as much about the witness you make in front of your community as it is about the commitment you’re making between you two,” says the bride. The liturgy was done in a mix of English and Arabic, and the couple also included a take on the Christian tradition of a foot-washing ceremony. “It felt important as a sign of what we’re willing to do for each other,” she says.

The reception: “We wanted to have a massive dance party and just a big open space,” says Simone, and the Silver Spring Civic Building offered just that—plus plenty of opportunities for special touches from the newlyweds. Friends put together the simple greenery arrangements on each table, and the guestbook took the form of a Jenga tower, with people writing messages on the wooden blocks. “It’s a way to do something fun while we reminisce,” Daniel says. A photo booth with a glittery backdrop kept guests entertained throughout the evening, and the photo strips in magnetic sleeves served as the party favors. “There wasn’t a sense that it had to be perfect,” the groom says of the big day. “Like, we’ve already been married, and now it’s just time to really live it up together.”

The food: The pair called on D.C.-based Fava Pot to cater the buffet-style spread of Egyptian food, which included chicken kebabs, falafel and koshary, Egypt’s national dish made with pasta, rice and lentils. “It tastes like stuff you’d get in the home,” says Simone. Since the dinner was heavier fare, the couple kept it simple for cocktail hour: tables of their favorite snacks—gummy worms and dark chocolate for Daniel, granola bars and nut mixes for Simone. The cake, a decadent chocolate raspberry truffle from Firehook Bakery in D.C., was paired with other desserts—such as chocolate cupcakes and millionaire’s shortbread—made by their friend who runs GreenIsland Bakery, also in D.C. “A lot of our wedding was a reflection of the two-way relationship of our community,” says Simone.

The outfits: Simone picked out a strapless Marchesa gown from nonprofit-run Cherie Sustainable Bridal in Savage, Maryland. “It was just ornate,” says the bride, who finished off the ensemble with a veil passed down from her mother and a pair of floral-embroidered shoes handmade by an artist in Indonesia. Daniel, meanwhile, “had never actually gotten a suit that fit me,” so he took the opportunity to don a custom-made maroon number.

The music: Several musician friends of the couple arranged and performed the ceremony music—Simone walked down the aisle to “I Choose You”by Sara Bareilles, and the newlyweds left the church to “In My Arms” by Jon Foreman. When it came to the reception, “people were dancing so hard the entire night that they forgot to drink,” recalls the bride. After the couple’s first dance, to John Legend’s cover of the Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows,” guests boogied (and did the limbo) to a mix of Arabic dance songs and international pop tunes. “It was just like, ‘Come as you are, and dance in whatever way makes you feel free,’ ” Daniel says.

The honeymoon: The May after they said “I do,” the pair jetted off to Bonaire in the Caribbean for a 14-day honeymoon. “It’s best known for scuba diving, and we got certified to scuba dive,” says the groom—but partway through the trip, the newlyweds got COVID. “Then we just stayed inside until the time where we were better and watched movies about scuba divers,” Simone says with a laugh.

Vendors: Ceremony, All Saints Church; cake, Firehook Bakery; desserts, GreenIsland Bakery; DJ, DJ Hussam; dress, Cherie Sustainable Bridal; flowers, Danisa Flowers; food, Fava Pot; hair and makeup, Alina Karaman; photo booth, Efotoz; photography, Jessica Nazarova Photography; reception, Silver Spring Civic Building; suit, Ezra Paul Clothing.

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

The post A Chevy Chase wedding and Silver Spring reception with Middle Eastern flair appeared first on MoCo360.

Our area is flush with type A go-getters who set goals and hustle to meet them. So we may be suckers for New Year’s resolutions. But while we’re achieving many of our goals—running marathons, eating healthier, advancing our careers—a sense of contentment can still elude us. What can we strive for in 2024 to make us happy?

You are already there, which is to say, here. The idea that we must arrive somewhere to reach Shangri-la both deludes and derails us—and the type A-ness of this area further fuels the myth. High-pressure jobs and schools may yield achievement and financial success, but they won’t give us or our anxious, burned-out kids lasting satisfaction. Why? Well, there’s always a bigger, better deal—whether it’s a fancier house or car, or the quest to look thinner or younger. We are chasing the wrong things. 

Specifically, we tend to pursue money, power, pleasure and fame, according to Arthur Brooks, who writes about happiness for The Atlantic, teaches the subject at Harvard and was president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative D.C. think tank. In his latest book, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, he and co-author Oprah Winfrey contend that happiness, as we conceive of it—a sustained joyful frolic free of hardship—isn’t attainable or meant to be. What is? Brooks and Winfrey say it’s a mix of enjoyment and purpose acquired through faith, family, friends and meaningful work. By focusing on these so-called pillars and employing tools for more equanimity, they say we can all be happier no matter what circumstance makes happiness feel beyond our reach. 

Another Brooks—D.C.-based New York Times columnist David Brooks—decries what he calls the lies of meritocracy, which value achievement and self-sufficiency and led to his own loneliness. “In the course of a career, just by drifting along and paying too much attention to the lies, you come to desire the wrong things. You desire reputation, and you come to idolize time. You value productivity over people. Instead of settling into deep relationships with people, you always have a clock in your head,” he said in a 2019 speech at Brigham Young University. The columnist, who believes building community begets happiness, shares the same sentiment as Winfrey—that the greatest gift we can give is our attention, to make others feel seen and heard.

And that’s the way to create close relationships—which, according to an 85-year Harvard study, unlock lifelong happiness. In fact, such bonds “protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes,” according to The Harvard Gazette.  

In our world of distractions and traffic, to-do lists and social media, relationships matter most. 

My mother, Barbara Pomerance, who passed away this year, listened so attentively that countless people emerged with stories about her recall of minute details of their lives. She built a wide and deep social network involving annual trips with dear friends. And while she acknowledged the bittersweetness of life, she focused relentlessly on the sweet. She died in peace after a life well lived.

My advice for all of us—whether you’re a MoCo mover and shaker or one of the few relaxed souls among us: Put the damn phone away. Slow down. Invest in your relationships. Consider how you can help others. And connect, in person, with the people you love. Happy New Year.

Have a question about life in Montgomery County? Ask Ms. MoCo by emailing msmoco@moco360.media.

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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It’s not by accident that American neighborhoods are often divided by class, says Richard D. Kahlenberg. Government zoning has created a form of bias against those with less education and income that limits their ability to access good schools and other amenities, says the Rockville author. His book Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See (PublicAffairs, July 2023) tries “to shine a light on a pervasive form of economic discrimination that essentially determines who gets to live where in America,” he says.

Alice McDermott’s ninth novel, Absolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 2023), focuses on two very different American women who lived in 1963 Saigon, Vietnam. Unlike a memoir, fiction allows the characters to purposefully reflect on their experiences, says the Bethesda author. “That’s why the title is Absolution,” she says. “Is there a way to assess who we were at any given point in history or in our own lives, and understand context in a way that allows us to forgive one another for what we didn’t know?” 

ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown has a new host with local roots: Scott Van Pelt. The TV personality grew up in Brookeville and attended Flower Valley Elementary School in Rockville and Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring. Van Pelt has been with ESPN since 2001. He began his new gig at the start of the 2023 NFL season and will continue as host of SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt. The Bethesda resident was slated to be inducted into the Montgomery County Sports Hall of Fame at the end of October.

As a religious studies scholar who grew up in Mississippi, Robert P. Jones of Takoma Park says his new book was partly a personal quest to disentangle the role of white supremacy and Christianity in the development of the country. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (Simon & Schuster, Sept. 2023) looks at church doctrine used centuries ago to justify the conquest of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans, and how it connects to contemporary ways people are reckoning with this history. 

Reading List

Here are the top-selling books at Loyalty Bookstores, 823 Ellsworth Drive, Silver Spring

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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I could barely even glimpse my black-and-yellow cycling shoes beneath my swollen belly that December morning in 2018. “Mind over matter,” I muttered to myself as I clipped into the bike. Stevie Nicks’ raspy voice began to croon, “Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise,” and I settled into the beat. Taking in the sea of familiar faces, my self-judgment began to evaporate. My SoulCycle community—my people. Not only had we sweated, cried and whipped our towels in the air together, we had forged deep connections. Friendships that saw me through my divorce, my remarriage and, now, my soon-to-be firstborn.

I had moved from the West End of Washington, D.C., to Bethesda in the fall of 2015 knowing exactly one person—the boyfriend I would end up marrying. Newly divorced and carless, I had secured a one-bedroom rental that happened to be two blocks from a SoulCycle studio. Little did I know that spinning would bring me back to my field hockey and lacrosse days at boarding school, where my freshman-year teammates became lifelong friends.

One evening after work, I finally strode over to a class. The wide-grinned instructor, Michelle, spoke openly about her family relationships, shared stories about her acting career and told us about a recent date. “You are exactly where you are supposed to be,” she emphasized between songs. “Trust the process, Everyone in this room has gone through something hard.” Instead of fighting back tears, as I had done on and off for months at work, I felt a release as they melded with the sweat dripping down my cheeks.

Over the next several months, SoulCycle became my house of worship, and I came to think of Michelle’s ever-evolving affirmations as thrice-weekly sermons. When I quit my law firm job nearly a year later, I was up to six classes a week and counting. But it wasn’t just Michelle drawing me in. 

As I began to rebuild my life after divorce, the faces of strangers had become those of my closest confidantes. Similar to the locker room banter of my boarding school classmates followed by team dinners and training trips, quick chats in the spin studio turned into yoga, barre and coffee dates. Those soon stretched into lunches and dinners. Eventually we found ourselves consoling one another after miscarriages, celebrating birthdays and even vacationing together on the shores of Nantucket. Just as I still do with a close circle of my school teammates.

On the morning of my wedding to that boyfriend-turned-fiancé, we donned our respective bride and groom tees for a celebratory ride. Dripping with sweat afterward, we clinked our Champagne flutes and cut into a cake made by our friend Polly. “I couldn’t help myself,” she said with a grin as she pointed to the custom topper—a pair of bicycles.

After my daughter was born in 2018, I began to mix in yoga classes as well as stroller walks with fellow parents. Like spinning, heated yoga provided a sanctuary from the pressures of parenting and working, allowing me instead to focus on the simple movements of my body. 

But in March 2020, my routine came to an abrupt halt. Like every fitness studio around the country, SoulCycle and CorePower Yoga closed their doors when the pandemic hit. People feared even masked walks outside. For weeks I lamented the loss of my physical and emotional outlets. Would our friendships go by the wayside, too, I wondered?

A small group of us got our act together for a couple of Zoom happy hours—cocktails encouraged. We shared workout playlists and took the occasional masked walk 6 feet apart on the Capital Crescent Trail. Pregnant this time with my second, I even donned a pair of headphones and tried out a few of the silent disco spin classes in the parking lot of the Marriott in North Bethesda. 

With fleeting ambitions of practicing downward-facing dog and cycling while my newborn and toddler napped, I jumped at the chance to livestream yoga classes and purchase a spin bike. But zero accountability and the inevitable distraction of my husband and kids made it easy to skip those planned workouts. And those occasions when I managed to lay down my mat or clip in? I had a dark room with a mirror. Music turned up to the loudest decibel. I even had a scented candle. But I didn’t have my community. Turns out, that was the key to it all.

Fast forward to January 2023. Here goes nothing, I thought as I clipped into a bike at the Bethesda studio. “Welcome back,” Michelle said with her signature grin. “Close your eyes,” she encouraged me and the many other riders who had recently returned. “Trust that your body knows what to do.” Within minutes, I felt my mind and body relax as I moved intuitively to the beat—pushups, tap-backs and all. I gazed around the dark room during the last song, feeling the contagious energy of my fellow riders cheering and whipping their towels in sync. I truly came home at that moment—not simply to the end of the class, but to my fitness family here in Bethesda.

Since then, I’ve started getting to know the new staff and riders who’ve flocked in since the pandemic eased, reconnected with old fitness acquaintances and invited my longtime workout buddies over for dinner. Our crew spans five decades. We are lawyers, writers, fitness instructors, publicists, stay-at-home parents and entrepreneurs. But we are united by a collective basic human desire: to connect.

And that’s how I remembered that exercise can be about more than simply burning calories, boosting endorphins or dutifully checking a box for the day—though it does all those things, too. It’s about moving your body and connecting with the people around you. Whether you’re passing the ball to a teammate, riding with the pack or flowing on your mat alongside others, group fitness allows you to feel a part of something larger than yourself, drawing you in at times when you might feel out to sea. I’m back in the saddle these days, and I hope you will be, too. 

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Pat Pacious is president and CEO of Rockville-based Choice Hotels International, which counts some 625,000 rooms in 7,400 hotels in 45 countries and territories. As one of 11 children growing up in Montgomery County, Pacious (who declined to provide his age) realized a Navy ROTC scholarship was key to paying for college, which is how he came to learn a hard lesson as a young officer in charge of a ship in the dead of night. Here’s what he learned when he “lost the bubble.”

One of the biggest things that happened to me that has been key to managing my career happened in the Navy. You get qualified in the Navy to stand on the bridge of the ship and maneuver it in a fleet exercise. This was probably my third or fourth time doing that, but I took the watch without being prepared. About 15 or 20 minutes in, I had, what they call in the Navy, “lost the bubble.” Ships were moving everywhere, and I had no idea what we were doing or what we were going to do next. And the embarrassing thing is when you have to call the commanding officer and say, “I need you up here on the bridge.” 

You’re humiliated in front of everybody because you’re supposed to be the guy in charge. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you can’t see things other than lights or blips on a radar screen, so it’s not obvious what’s happening out there. Where’s your ship in the fleet? Where is it supposed to be in the next move? It’s a dangerous game: There are 450 people on that ship who are depending on me to make sure we don’t run into another ship or get in the wrong place. The consequences were major, and it was clear to me early on I better call the commanding officer and tell him I’m in over my head here.

That mistake really taught me. There’s an old adage, “prior proper planning prevents poor performance”—there’s a Navy version that’s a little more salty—but it’s really about being prepared for when you are going to take on something that you haven’t done before. In our business today, if we’re going to do something major, it’s all about that prior planning and thinking a couple of moves ahead.

At the end of the day, the commanding officer said, “You did the right thing. Calling me was the right thing instead of letting it cascade into a bigger problem.”

I’ve never forgotten that experience. I was probably 21 or 22 at the time. It’s a reminder to me that you learn from those mistakes and you say to yourself, Well, the next time I’m going to be better prepared. If there would be one mistake early in my career that really set me on a different trajectory, that would be it. 

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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For a house built and decorated during some of the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hilary Cusack’s 6,500-square-foot colonial in Bethesda’s Bradley Manor feels like a bright and joyful retreat. “I asked to be surrounded by beauty and serenity in a nest that would comfort me,” says Cusack, a homemaker originally from Bermuda who relocated from Concord,
Massachusetts, to be close to two of her four adult children who live in this area.

Location drew her to purchase the site of her new home, which shares a back fence with the home of her eldest daughter, son-in-law and their three young children. But the house that was already there didn’t work for her—the 1960s colonial had cramped rooms and a prominent two-car garage. So, after buying the property in 2019, Cusack opted to tear it down and start fresh, living with her daughter’s family for 18 months while the new house was built. 

“She wanted a place with curb appeal, a good connection to the outdoors, and space for her out-of-town family to stay when they visit,” says Luke Olson of GTM Architects, the Bethesda firm Cusack tapped to dream up a five-bedroom, five-bath, two-story neoclassical house with an impressive front portico. “It’s arched and has decorative glass, which ties into an arched doorway inside,” Olson says. “It creates a sense of purpose.” 

When visitors step inside, they enter a showstopping two-story foyer with a curving stairway that sweeps up the right wall before turning to meet the open second-floor landing. At the back of the entry hall, Olson’s barreled archway leads to a cozy great room. 

“With that arch, which is flanked by paneling and doors, we created a seamless transition from a high-ceilinged room to the lower-ceilinged den,” says Adam Goozh, co-founder of Chesapeake Custom Homes & Development, the Kensington company that executed GTM and Cusack’s vision. “It creates this warm, nice detail as you move from room to room.” Wallpaper in Thibaut’s Easom Trellis print and a vintage settee upholstered in a green and white Gastón y Daniela fabric both ground the entry space.

Three mini wings branch off from the foyer: a primary bedroom suite and library/home office for Cusack to the left, a formal dining room to the right, and, at the back of the house, a great room, screened-in porch and what Olson calls “a pretty substantial kitchen that acts as a day-to-day dining space.” 

At the top of the swooping stairs, GTM kept the open landing bright with a bank of three windows. The space doubles as a reading nook (with a window seat flanked by built-in bookshelves) and as a connection to the four en suite bedrooms and laundry room upstairs. “It all works so well, because the house fills up with my children and grandchildren around the holidays,” Cusack says.

To decorate the interiors, Cusack employed Kelley Proxmire after finding the Bethesda designer’s website. “I’m kind of formal-fancy, I don’t have a run-of-the-mill Ethan Allen style,” Cusack says. “I liked how Kelley elevated my kind of mix.” Cusack, who was born and raised in Bermuda, felt she’d discovered a kindred spirit who loved colors and prints as much as she did.

The pair started working together during COVID lockdowns in 2020, when Cusack would drive to Proxmire’s house and meet with her from a distance.“I didn’t even get out of my car; I’d just roll down the window,” Cusack says. “Kelley and her assistant wore masks and sat at a card table in her front yard to present their ideas.”

Proxmire was inspired by her client’s classical style and island heritage. “On the dining room wall, there’s a landscape painting by Bermuda artist Sheilagh Head in blues and greens,” Proxmire says. “The whole project jumped off from that.” 

That formal dining room, where Cusack now hosts Thanksgiving for her clan (she has three daughters and one son, plus eight grandchildren), was wallpapered in a green grass cloth. Other riffs on Head’s dreamy painting: a pair of generous host chairs upholstered in Schumacher’s Arborvitae fabric, and crisp white drapes trimmed in an ocean blue Samuel & Sons applique tape. “Kelley had to talk me into some of the trims in the house, but I think they add something special,” Cusack says.

Throughout the home, “we worked with a lot of the furniture she already had, reusing things by refinishing or reupholstering them,” Proxmire says. In the dining room, there’s a vintage sideboard repainted in a muted gray, and the home office holds a beloved lounge chair and ottoman that Proxmire refreshed with a springlike green Kravet velvet, finished with blue cording. “I live in this space, and mainly in this chair, with my computer or a book,” Cusack says. 

Wallpaper, a constant in the project, lines the backs of the office’s built-in bookcases. Artwork from the owner’s world travels fills the room—a wooden Brazilian wildcat under the delicate desk, a papyrus print of an ancient Egyptian goddess on the wall. “This is my power room, and that’s Isis,” Cusack jokes.

A small private hallway connects the office to Cusack’s primary suite, one of two in the house. “She wanted a ground floor owner’s suite, but we also did one upstairs for resale value,” Olson says. The suite on the first floor holds a clean-lined, all-white bathroom, outsize walk-in closet, and a large bedroom overlooking the spacious backyard. 

In that boudoir, Proxmire brought in the greens from the rest of the house as well as a serene pink. “Hilary loved these Lee Jofa toiles, which are so in and so retro,” Proxmire says. A new headboard upholstered in Jofa’s Floral Bouquet plays off a vintage bench recovered in emerald velvet, along with the window curtains in Schumacher’s small-scale Duma Diamond print in white and green cotton. 

“It’s a very restful room, and it helps that she had fantastic art from Bermuda to hang in there,” Proxmire says. Small landscapes of buildings and shorelines tie the bedroom to Cusack’s island heritage. “All of those pictures have stories, whether it’s a painting of a cottage my family owned or prints by Bermuda artists,” Cusack says. 

The open floor plan space at the rear of the house features multiple windows overlooking the backyard. Goozh outfitted the generously proportioned all-white kitchen with cabinets from Hagerstown Kitchens and Mara Blanca quartz countertops. “She asked for a white space that didn’t feel cold,” he says.  

Proxmire added outsize drum pendants from Visual Comfort and upholstered stools in a vinylized fabric (better for smaller kids) to pull up to the kitchen island. “There’s room for everyone in the big open kitchen, particularly with such a large multifunctional island. It’s been great with my grandchildren for everything from making rock candy to rolling homemade pretzels,” says Cusack, who says she spends a lot of time in the kitchen. “I love the deep Rohl sink and the induction cooktop—it has clean lines and a quick boil point.” The window over the sink is framed with a valance in Thibaut’s Mitford fabric. A matching wallpaper went up in the adjoining laundry room—yep, the house has two—which does double duty as a mudroom.

The kitchen adjoins the informal dining area and a great room. The great room’s fireplace faces a new Kravet/Lee Jofa sectional sofa in a camel-colored herringbone tweed as well as armchairs Proxmire redid in—what else?—an island green. 

Just a few feet away, a screened-in porch outfitted with sofas and decorated with an oversize plate Cusack purchased in Italy is both a private retreat and the site of occasional family celebrations. “During the pandemic, we had Christmas dinner out here all wrapped up in coats,” she says. 

Best of all, the porch has a terrific view of the arched garden gate between Cusack’s backyard and her daughter’s. It’s a whimsical feature Cusack wanted to re-create after seeing one in The Secret Garden on Broadway. “That’s the emotional heart of the home,” she says, “seeing that every day.”

Jennifer Barger is a local design and travel writer. Follow her on Instagram @dcjnell.

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Guitarist Michael Bard has performed for every kind of Washington, D.C., crowd: Choral Arts Society holiday revelers, flocks of Latin dance enthusiasts, even the odd secretary of state or Supreme Court justice. But at his Carnegie Hall debut this November in New York City, the Bethesda resident is honoring a new and special group: the military veterans he has served as a teacher, performer and medical musician. 

The art of using music to soothe body and soul dates to at least ancient Greece. These days, through groundbreaking efforts that include the Sound Health initiative—a partnership between the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts—scientists across the country are researching the intricate ways music might be used to ease the symptoms of depression, Parkinson’s disease and other conditions. 

Bard, 55, became a part of the growing medical music community in 2018 after reading Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul. Written by guitarist Andrew
Schulman, the book chronicles how hearing Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” through a pair of earbuds rescued its author from a postoperative spiral toward death. Intrigued, Bard began training with the Medical Musician Initiative (MMI), a nonprofit co-founded by Schulman that trains concert-level acoustic musicians how to work with medical teams in intensive care units. 

At Massachusetts’ Berkshire Medical Center, Bard’s MMI instructors taught him about how ICU teams operate, how to serve as a team member, and how to identify which music worked best for specific patients. “I was there to learn how to heal and help with positive patient outcomes,” he says. “You have to find just the right musical prescriptions for each patient’s individual needs.” Bard found, for instance, that slow major-key pieces calm many nonverbal patients. He relies on intuition, based on decades of experience, to tell him whether to play for those patients the second movement from Dvořák’s “New World Symphony,” “Amazing Grace” or another selection.  

With a master’s degree in classical guitar, intensive training in flamenco, and experience playing worldwide as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department, Bard also has honed a versatility that serves his new calling well. Following the lead of string instrument luminaries such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who has recorded bluegrass and tangos, Bard can play and improvise fluently in numerous styles that easily connect with patients of all nationalities and walks of life. 

For years, Bard has held down a heavy performance and teaching schedule featuring ongoing gigs as a member of Trio Caliente, a Bethesda-based band that performs Latin and Brazilian music locally and at music festivals across the country; guest appearances with Choral Arts and other performers; and a student roster that has listed top U.S. government officials along with young wannabe shredders. But after his MMI training, he carved out time to play for the National Institutes of Health’s Pain and Palliative Care service at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda.

Among the service’s patients was retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Ronald Wilgenbusch, who asked Bard to play the “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo. “The cheer that you brought…flooded into me,” Wilgenbusch wrote after being discharged, before dying in 2022. “I could hear you playing long after you left the room—even if it was just in my head.” 

Word of Bard’s healing music spread to Marlow Guitar International, a Rockville nonprofit that runs the Regis Ferruzza Guitars for Veterans program in cooperation with the Steven A. Cohen Military Family Clinic at Easterseals in Silver Spring. Designed to help veterans cope with anxiety, stress and other challenges, the program provides participants with a guitar, 15 one-hour lessons and accoutrements such as books, music stands and footstools.   

As the son of a Ukrainian immigrant who served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War, Bard enthusiastically signed on. When COVID-19 brought his in-person lessons for Marlow to an end, he continued them via Zoom and won praise for his gentle approach. “He’s just a wonderful person,” says Gary Mason, a Vietnam veteran and retired elementary/middle school teacher living in New Mexico who studied remotely with Bard in 2021 and 2022. “I really appreciated his expert tutelage and patience.” 

Talha Aziz, a current student who served in the U.S. Navy from 2003 to 2007, has similar sentiments. “We’re so connected to our devices…when you go to an acoustic guitar, all the noise goes away,” says Aziz, who is a program manager for Oracle. “[Bard] has a perfect temperament…he always puts me at ease.”

Bard has also served as a guest lecturer for Harvard University’s online extension course “Music and the Mind,” where he has helped psychology students and others explore the practicalities and value of music therapy. 

Bard’s debut at Carnegie’s 268-seat Weill Recital Hall on Nov. 4 is slated to be an evening of classical, Spanish and Brazilian music. The Veterans Repertory Theater of New York will receive a portion of the concert proceeds. Among the guest artists joining Bard is Bethesda soprano Aurora Dainer, 16, a junior at Walt Whitman High School. 

Bard plans to continue his healing work in the years to come. He has seen what music can do, he says—and it’s a reward in itself. “Being part of the transformation veterans and patients experience when learning and listening to music has meant everything to me,” Bard says. “It’s one of the most important things I’ve done with my life.” 

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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It was the morning of May 4, 2020, and attorney Lisa Blatt was about to make history. From a podium that she set up in her Chevy Chase dining room, Blatt was moments away from presenting oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the first-ever SCOTUS case conducted by telephone.

“My [19-year-old] daughter was there keeping time,” she says, “and my husband was in charge of keeping the dog away from the house so he didn’t bark.”  

The case was The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com, and Blatt was representing the hotel-booking website. She was arguing that the company should be allowed to trademark its name over the objections of the Patent and Trademark Office, which had denied the company’s application on the grounds that “booking” is a generic word and therefore not eligible for trademark protection. 

Blatt knew the ruling would carry major implications. It would likely affect not just her client, but also hundreds of other companies whose business model revolved around a trademarked web address that consisted of a generic word or two followed by dot com. 

But with the world on lockdown due to COVID-19, and the Supreme Court forced to shift from the model it had used for more than 200 years, Blatt was at a disadvantage: She couldn’t read the justices’ facial cues or body language to gauge whether her arguments were resonating with them or falling flat. 

Standing in her dining room in the black suit and white blouse she wore when arguing before the court, she could only hear the justices’ voices over the speakerphone, which was connected to the landline by a 30-foot extension cord. “The mechanics of this were incredibly elaborate,” she says. “We spent a lot of time with the court personnel preparing for it and kind of going through…what happens if the phone doesn’t work.”

As she stood at the podium, waiting for the familiar call of oyez, oyez, oyez to bring the court to order over her speakerphone, Blatt could only hope it would all go smoothly.  

Except in narrow circumstances, attorneys must be members of the U.S. Supreme Court bar to practice before the high court, and nearly 200,000 attorneys from all over the country are official members, according to bar records. Yet the actual pool of frequent advocates—those who have represented numerous clients at the high court over many years—is closer to 25, insiders say. Many in this elite club, such as Blatt, live in or around Montgomery County, and their recurring appearances before the court’s nine mercurial justices have given them a celebrity status of their own—and plenty of stories about what it’s like to stand before the highest court in the land. 

“It’s an amazing institution. It’s incredible,” Blatt says. “You can’t practice before them without loving them.”

Blatt heads the Supreme Court and Appellate practice at Williams & Connolly in downtown D.C. She has argued 46 cases before the high court—more than any woman in
history—and she has a win rate of nearly 90%, according to her law firm bio. 

She won the USPTO v. Booking.com case 8-1 (only Justice Stephen Breyer dissented). 

Blatt says the case also paved the way for a new protocol that the court has kept in place even after returning to in-person oral arguments in October 2021. Now, after each side finishes oral arguments, “each justice has an uninterrupted [session] to ask the advocate questions,” she says.

Previously, explains Chevy Chase attorney Peter Keisler, 95% of what the advocates were doing was responding to justices’ questions. “It was a free-for-all,” he says, with justices interjecting as they saw fit.

A longtime partner—and now senior counsel—in the D.C. office of Sidley Austin, Keisler argued his first case before the Supreme Court more than two decades ago. He says the pre-COVID protocol of pummeling advocates with questions started in the 1980s, when William Rehnquist was chief justice and Antonin Scalia joined the court. Scalia “was always a very active questioner…and it seemed that every justice who joined the court [after him] was a more active questioner than the justice that preceded him or her,” Keisler says. Back then, there was a strict 30-minute limit per side for oral arguments, he says, and Rehnquist “was a maniac as to time.” 

Indeed, “it was like facing target fire,” recalls Bethesda’s Jeff Wall, who has argued 30 cases before the high court. “On the lectern, there’s a light that comes on when you have a certain amount of time remaining. And then a red light when your time is up…[and under Rehnquist] when your red light came up [you were] expected…to stop midsentence,” he says. 

Now, advocates can get their oral arguments out uninterrupted, but with “nine active questioners,” Blatt says, arguments can sometimes run long. Between both sides’ orals and the justices’ questions, Blatt’s 2022 case of Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith went on for close to two hours, she says—nearly twice the pre-pandemic limit. 

In the end, she won the case 7-2, with all but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan siding with her that the Andy Warhol Foundation had infringed on photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright when it commercialized a series of Warhol silk screens based on Goldsmith’s 1981 photograph of the singer Prince.

“For the advocates,” Blatt says, having more time to speak is always “a lot more fun.”

Those who practice regularly before the high court prefer the term “advocate” over “attorney” to describe their role because “our stock-in-trade really is our advocacy, Wall says. “It’s what we take pride in and how we judge ourselves within the profession.” There’s no higher compliment, he says, than being told you are an excellent advocate.

Guessing what they’ll ask

Bethesda’s Gregory Garre, head of Latham & Watkins’ Supreme Court and Appellate practice, has argued 48 cases before the high court. “The court today is much more focused on historical arguments than it was 10 years ago,” Garre says, meaning that all the justices these days, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, the most recent confirmation to the court, tend to look not only at modern precedents, but the historical events surrounding a constitutional provision.

Garre says he typically holds two moot courts to practice his cases in front of colleagues who are tasked with poking holes in his arguments and asking questions he’s likely to hear from the justices. Yet he has still experienced some “colorful” exchanges with justices that he didn’t anticipate, including one about whether dogs were used to track down 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper, and another back-and-forth about what would happen if Big Bird accidently uttered the “F-bomb” on Sesame Street. 

“The only really zany [questioner] was Justice Breyer…because he would ask super crazy, wild hypotheticals,” Blatt says. “Justice Scalia probably had the most combative jousting style…and Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor….would always ask for a yes or no answer. 

“In terms of individual styles…Justice Jackson’s very animated and fun,” Blatt says.

Before the pandemic, Justice Clarence Thomas was often criticized in the media for not asking enough questions, but that was because he didn’t want to become part of the frenzy, Blatt says. Now “he is known as one of the best questioners,” she says. “There’s usually a pause after the advocate gives his or her opening remarks to see if Justice Thomas has a question, and he usually does.”

Up close and personal

Few people realize how close the attorneys are to the justices when making oral arguments, says Wall, who heads the Supreme Court and Appellate practice for Sullivan & Cromwell. The lectern is only about 6 feet from the chief justice’s face, he says, with the most senior justices flanking the chief justice and the most junior on the wings. You are so close to the chief justice, Wall says, “that you can’t see all nine [justices] in your field of vision…it’s a difficult balancing act to be able to argue to all nine.”  

Wall says he’ll never forget his first case before the Supreme Court 14 years ago. He had recently joined the U.S. solicitor general’s office and was asked to argue on behalf of the federal government in support of New York City. “I was terrified. I couldn’t sleep the night before, so I got up and went to the office in the wee hours of the morning to practice,” he says. 

Wall had been instructed that his first words before the court were supposed to be: Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court, yet he recalls that Scalia bellowed out a pointed question before he had a chance to get settled at the lectern. But once he got in his introductory line, he says, “the nerves fell away.” 

Wall won the case, but what was even more meaningful was that “it turned out…in the courtroom was a clerk in the chief justice’s chambers, and she’s now my wife and we have two beautiful kids,” he says.

Bethesda’s Neal Katyal, who is a New York Times bestselling author, a partner in the D.C. office of Hogan Lovells, and a frequent guest on MSNBC, has argued 43 cases before the Supreme Court—more than any other minority attorney, according to his personal website. Yet he still gets nervous every time he appears, he says.

“I wear the exact same thing to the court every time: my dad’s Sikh kara bracelet, socks my mom gave me, a tie my aunt gave me and a suit I bought a while ago,” the 1991 Dartmouth College graduate told his alumni magazine in 2018.  

Garre says that no matter how many times he argues before the court, “one of the most thrilling things…is exiting…through the great bronze doors and walking down the court steps…having just survived an argument.” 

But that long, magisterial flight of stairs happens to be “one of the brightest spots in D.C. on a sunny day,” he adds, “so you have to proceed with caution to make sure you don’t finish your day by tripping on the steps and tumbling to the bottom.” 

Staying under the radar

Keisler says that the cases that don’t get much media attention are the most exciting to argue because the justices aren’t coming in with preconceived notions. 

“If you’re arguing one of the big headline cases…you are coming in pretty late to the game,” he says. “But if you’re arguing about, you know, what’s the maximum compensation rate for a disabled longshoreman, it may be that when [the justices] open your brief, that’s the very first time they’ve thought about that.”

Keisler’s long resume includes stints at the U.S. Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office, and two nominations that required appearances before Congress. Yet, he says, “there’s nothing like the direct interaction and focus an advocate has in the court.”

Think about it, he says: Lobbyists go to Congress and appear before committees where members are shuffling papers or walking in and out of the room, or they go to the executive branch and likely meet with staffers. 

But at the Supreme Court, “for an hour plus, you’re there with the nine decision-makers…and they really are the decision-makers,” he says. “And they’re not focused on anything else. They’re not talking to anyone else. They’re not coming in and out. They’re not shuffling papers on some other matter. They are completely engaged in the case at hand.” 

As for the longshoreman-compensation case he argued before the court in 2012, Keisler says he was told shortly afterward by a friend that Justice Samuel Alito was making public remarks along the lines of everyone thinks we spend all our time deciding about affirmative action and abortion, and Alito referenced the longshoremen case as an example of how dry and technical most of the cases are that come before the court.

“And I will tell you,” Keisler says, “I was pleased that my case had been singled out.”

Down on SCOTUS

Only 44% of Americans view the Supreme Court favorably, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll. That’s the lowest favorability rating since Pew began polling the public about the court in the late 1980s.

Pundits blame the court’s declining approval numbers on recent controversial decisions involving abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, student loans and affirmative action—as well as a series of news reports involving justices accepting potentially inappropriate gifts and mingling with high-profile partisan donors. 

Critics have called for reforms, including expanding the court. Last spring, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Takoma Park) was among 14 co-sponsors of a bill to boost the number of justices from nine to 13. 

Tom Goldstein, a Bethesda attorney who has made frequent appearances before the nation’s top court, has even spoken out against its ability to render fair and impartial decisions since the addition of three Trump-era appointees: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. 

Goldstein and his wife, Amy Howe, co-founded SCOTUSblog, an independent news source for all things Supreme Court-related. When Goldstein announced his retirement earlier this year from the Bethesda law firm that he founded more than a decade ago, he said it was partly in response to the Supreme Court’s evolving character, according to Reuters. “In the important civil rights and social cases, the court’s conservative super-majority makes it very difficult for the little guy to win,” Goldstein told Reuters at the time. (Goldstein did not respond to Bethesda Magazine’s requests for an interview.)

Other local attorneys Bethesda Magazine interviewed who argue regularly before the court say that while the current makeup of the court is more conservative than in recent years, every case is decided on its merits.

For example, says Bethesda’s Jeff Wall, the court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, found that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. The decision was 6-3, with Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first appointee to the court, writing the majority opinion—joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices. “The court sometimes does reach outcomes that people are predicting, but oftentimes it doesn’t,” Wall says. “It is a court that will reach conservative legal results more often. But that does not mean that…folks presenting different arguments can’t get a fair shake.” 

A self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, attorney Lisa Blatt wrote an article in 2018 for news website Politico that supported Kavanaugh’s  nomination. “I still think he’s an incredible justice,” she says now, even though she is “extremely pro-choice” and Kavanaugh voted with the majority last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I was disappointed, but not surprised [in the ruling],” she says. “[As an advocate] you don’t have to like every decision.”

Journalist Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.

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The midcentury modern ranches and split-level homes lining Woolsey Drive are tidily landscaped, with house prices in the area starting at $1.5 million. 

Yet buried below lie the bones of enslaved people who worked farmland and maintained households for white landowners in the mid-1800s in what’s now the Rollingwood area of Chevy Chase. 

Now, two neighbors who peeked into the area’s bleak legacy are urging the community to acknowledge it. Chevy Chase residents Rachel Peric, 44, and Nadine Chapman, 55, hope to gain support for a statue to mark the site and to introduce local children to its history. 

A couple of years ago, Peric says, she was looking into the Chevy Chase Historical Society archives out of curiosity about the neighborhood where she grew up. She discovered that enslaved Black people were buried only a few blocks from her home.

“That prompted me to start reaching out to the historical society to just try to learn more and see if this was a history that our neighborhood could learn more about and ultimately acknowledge and honor the lives of those buried there,” Peric says.

Renata Lisowski, director of the archive and research center at the historical society, estimates that at least five enslaved people were buried in the area. The most likely location of the burial site is east of Brookville Road at the intersection of Woolsey Drive and Rocton Avenue, according to Brian Crane of the Montgomery County Planning Department, who reached that conclusion earlier this year by studying land deeds from the time. 

Peric shared her research with a neighborhood email list. Chapman added a 2021 MoCo360 story about the county’s long history of racism. The two bonded over wanting to highlight that history in their community.

“It just piqued my appetite to make sure that we’re not asleep, that we know what’s going on where we live, and we know our history—the good, the bad and the ugly, and the in-between—and we’re not afraid of it,” Chapman says. “My concern is that if we don’t know our history, we’ll repeat our history.”

Peric and Chapman held a webinar in May in conjunction with the historical society where they shared research findings and asked for help in learning more about the burial site. More than 100 residents, including author Mau VanDuren, participated in the webinar and decided to take part in the initiative to acknowledge the enslaved people. 

“[Given] my own experience as a partly Jewish person growing up in a very strict Protestant environment in the Netherlands where I was also discriminated against, I just wanted to get involved,” VanDuren says. “If we can…maybe put up a plaque or a sign or something that says, ‘This is here and this is significant,’ I think that would be a worthy project.” VanDuren says his contributions to the initiative have included research into who was living on the farm and their conditions, an effort that proved difficult as there weren’t names, but only numbers of the people who were enslaved. 

Fellow community residents Bonnie and Joe Oppenheimer also decided to join the initiative to uncover more about where they live. “This is a neighborhood thing which requires neighborhood work,” Joe says. “If we’re not going to do it, it won’t get done.” 

According to Lisowski, enslaved people likely maintained the farm by taking care of animals, cleaning the house and tending to crops. Census records indicate that this farm had 32 enslaved people in 1860, she says. 

The fact that the county recognized the site as a burial ground in 2019 is a positive step, Lisowski says, as similar burial grounds usually are faced with disputes over whether they exist. For one thing, she says, African burials—of both enslaved and free people—did not generally have grave markers as we tend to think of them, whether for cost reasons or because the community used other means to mark graves, such as boulders or dirt mounds. Another reason is that many people migrated elsewhere after the Emancipation Proclamation and weren’t around to speak up about where their ancestors were buried, she says. Finally, even known burial grounds can be destroyed for the sake of new construction, but that’s even easier for developers to do without historical societies standing in the way.

Peric and Chapman also recruited at-large county councilmember Will Jawando in their efforts to get recognition for the burial site. He kicked off the webinar and has been “connecting this work to larger efforts in the county focused on racial healing and repair,” Peric says.

“We can’t address the problems of today if we don’t address how we got here and the history of our community,” says Jawando, a Democrat who has worked as a civil rights lawyer.

Chapman and Peric say they are not looking to dig up the remains of the deceased; the most important aspect to them is educating younger members of the community. “In the next year, I would love to see that our local schools and just our community as a whole have access to this history and are using it,” Peric says. “Then our goal also is to identify a site where we can have some sort of space of remembrance and historical marker and information.” The women plan to contact Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and Chevy Chase Elementary School to see if they can hold a seminar or some sort of discussion to teach students about the history of the area. 

Although the acknowledgment may seem small, the two neighbors say there’s no better place to start to make a difference than in their neighborhood. 

“We start here in our community,” Peric says, “and this is the piece we can do.” 

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Everybody hurts.

But pain is highly subjective, complicated by a mix of signals in the nervous system that can vary from person to person. And that diversity of experience lends itself to a lot of inaccurate ideas about physical suffering.

“People get misguided in belief systems that don’t make any sense or are outdated,” says Jan Dommerholt, a physical therapist and founder of Bethesda Physiocare. “If you look at what’s known about pain—and there’s a lot that’s known—that research would eradicate 50% to 90% of the myths and misconceptions that still circulate.”

Here are six of those myths, according to physical therapists:

Myth No. 1:  Pain is a natural sign of aging

We should expect wear and tear on our bodies as we get older. But to “associate pain as a consequence of age is not necessarily a natural progression, nor correlation,” says Jennifer Norton Graham, owner of Graham Therapy and Fitness in Bethesda. 

Just because we experience hormonal, neurological, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and other changes as the years pass doesn’t mean that pain is on the horizon, she adds.

While research shows that older adults are more at risk for pain, often because of the increase in falls and chronic diseases, the two aren’t automatically linked, echoes Dommerholt, who is also co-founder of Myopain Seminars, a postgraduate continuing education company for physical therapists and other health care providers.

“There are many elderly people who do not have pain, and there are elderly people with pain—but that’s true in every single age group,” he says.

Myth No. 2:  No pain, no gain

Here’s a common scenario: People who haven’t exercised in decades decide they need to lose 10 pounds immediately and approach an exercise regimen too aggressively, increasing their susceptibility to pain.

No matter the source, pain is not a measure of progress. “Just like in baseball—there’s a preseason for a reason,” says Binila Abraham, a physical therapist at Integrative Therapy in Kensington. “You want to slowly work your way up to discomfort, and maybe just a little bit more. Pushing through something for a long period of time isn’t a good idea.”

It is important to determine what is contributing to the pain, address the area of dysfunction or mechanical limitations, or look deeper into—and tackle—the root cause, says Norton Graham.

“Most people wouldn’t ignore the gas light in a car or an oil light that is on,” Norton Graham says, “so it is important to honor the body’s natural response and work with a health care provider to address any pain complaints and still be successful at achieving the gains.”

Myth No. 3:  Rest is the only way to treat pain

Rest often is required when someone has a new or severe injury, such as a broken bone or sprained ankle, because it aids in the healing process and manages inflammation and other acute issues, says Norton Graham.

But rest is by no means a panacea.

“This is an old-school mentality,” says Abraham, who recently entered a program to become a certified therapeutic pain specialist. “Research has shown that even just a basic level of exercise allows for blood flow to the ‘injured joint’ or whatever it is that ails you.”

Abraham points to a saying in the physical therapy world: “Motion is lotion.”

“It helps to sort of massage and get blood flow to the area so it can heal faster,” she says. “Otherwise you have stasis—that’s when things don’t move. You don’t want that.”

Myth No. 4:  Pain is all in your head

While this one is somewhat accurate because the brain receives signals of pain, “pain is very complex,” Norton Graham says.

Abraham explains that if pain lasts six weeks, one of two scenarios is at play: Either tissue damage has healed but the body’s central nervous system remains on high alert, or there’s something else going on that needs attention.

With the first, “the reality is that the [pain] isn’t there anymore, but our brain has gotten stuck in the position of protect, protect, protect,” Abraham says. With the second, “that’s when you hope you’re being seen and treated by a good physical therapist.”

Abraham suggests desensitizing the central nervous system with some good self-talk. “You can’t dismiss what you feel,” she says, “but you can tell your body, ‘I’m doing everything I can to support you. Thank you for giving me the heads up, but you don’t need to dump the adrenaline anymore. We can settle and take a deep breath and move forward.’ ”

Myth No. 5:  Where you feel pain must be where the problem is located

It seems like a reasonable assumption that if you have heel pain, the source of the pain is in your heel. But that’s not always the case.

“If only the human body were that simple,” Norton Graham says.

For example, pain felt in the heel could be related to the Achilles tendon, plantar fasciitis, bursitis, the pelvis or low back, or a number of other troubles, she points out.

Myth No. 6:  Pain is pain

Just as people are different, so are their experiences of pain. For the same type of injury, one person may have a much higher sensitivity to pain than another, and to think otherwise “could discount what the individual is experiencing,” Norton Graham says.

Care providers often use a visual analog scale—a validated, subjective measure for acute and chronic pain—to determine pain intensity. 

The scale’s questions may include: Is the pain constant, or does it come and go? Is it different throughout the day? What activities make the pain better or worse? Does the pain stay in one place or travel down a limb?

Two people with nearly identical injuries may have wildly different responses to the exact same questions, says Norton Graham.

To get the best help, she says to be sure you’re evaluated by a skilled and licensed health care provider who will “truly listen and dive into what is being experienced and conveyed—and more importantly, why pain is being experienced in the first place.”

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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