Disabled man in Washington state becomes the voice of other people with disabilities

From The Wanatchee World:

EAST WENATCHEE, Wash. — He calls himself “the voice.”

It’s fitting because Joseph Risenhoover (pictured) has a lot to say.

“I am the voice of people who don’t understand the system,” he says. “I am the voice of people who are afraid to scream at Congress, people who are afraid to complain because they are afraid of retribution, people who don’t have computers, people who don’t understand what the doctors are telling them.

“I’m just not afraid to be that voice.”

At first blush, that may sound a bit grandiose. But sit with him a bit and his words start to ring true.

Risenhoover, 45, is wheelchair-bound, spending most of his days in a cramped office in a small East Wenatchee home. He is rarely off his cell phone or computer — the tools he uses to communicate with people suffering from multiple sclerosis and hepatitis C. He offers advice to help them live with their conditions.

But if those people are having other problems, Risenhoover is ready to help there, too. Recently, he said, he helped a woman in Florida with hepatitis C who just happened to mention that her water heater wasn’t working properly. From thousands of miles away, he worked the phones and the computer and found her the help she needed to get it fixed.

“He was extremely helpful,” said Dolores Conlin, the Orlando, Fla., woman whose hot water heater got fixed by a group that Risenhoover put her in touch with. She added that she also calls him if she’s feeling “a bit down. You can call him anytime and he will answer the phone.”

Risenhoover said that, “Ninety percent of what I do is to take away excuses of other people. I look at other people sitting on their buns because their back hurts or their knee hurts. Well, guys, look, here’s my list of problems, what’s your excuse.”

Risenhoover’s problems are many. He suffers from multiple sclerosis and hepatitis C — the ailments he focuses his help on — along with Parkinson’s disease, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis and a hypersensitivity condition that, he says, makes every touch seem like a bash from a baseball bat.

Risenhoover, who grew up in Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Indiana, says he learned to help others by watching his father, a pastor who traveled from town to town setting up new churches. He says his dad would always stop to help someone in need.

While Risenhoover says he was always ready to help a friend who needed help building a fence or some other project, he wasn’t always the best person to be around.

“I was an IV drug user,” he says. “I had a heart attack when I was 19 years old from too much dope.”

But, Risenhoover says, he kicked his drug habit over a hellish two-week period shortly after the heart attack and, later, also stopped drinking.

He and his wife, Carolann, have been married since 1989 and have six children and six grandchildren. Before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001, he says, he worked in construction, was a groundskeeper for an 18-hole putting course and worked as a paralegal in a Wenatchee law office.

He started volunteering with the Women’s Resource Center about 15 years ago and still makes it there on Tuesdays to help with the center’s food giveaway program.

But Risenhoover’s big volunteer work comes throughout the day when he communicates on the phone and the computer. He says he is involved with several peer support groups on Facebook that he estimates reach a total of 180,000 people online. The groups are aimed at helping people deal with disabilities, especially multiple sclerosis and hepatitis C.

One of the peer support groups is named after Dr. Richard Tucker, an infectious disease specialist at the Wenatchee Valley Medical Center who was killed in a car accident in 2007. Risenhoover was a member of a hepatitis C support group that Tucker ran and, after it disbanded following Tucker’s death, he wanted to honor Tucker by continuing his work online.

Of all his conditions, hepatitis C tugs at his heart the most, he says, because so many people have it and are living with a stigma.

“It’s kind of like when AIDS first came out,” he says. “People assumed that, if you have AIDS, you must be gay. Well, hepatitis C is the same way. People think, ‘If you’ve got hepatitis C, you must have done drugs’ and that’s pretty much the stereotype.”

Risenhoover said he thinks he contracted hepatitis C from inoculations he received when joining the military in 1983.

Keeping quiet about hepatitis C is a bad thing, he says, because it stifles information on how it can be spread and because people find it hard to get information on it. He also says he is concerned that people, who get the disease through infected blood, often don’t know they have it until their symptoms are too far along to cure or treat well.

Risenhoover can’t work because of his illnesses and is on Social Security disability. He acknowledges that having a lot of time on his hands is what makes him a good advocate for the disabled.

“People comment all the time on how can I continue to do this,” he says. “I don’t know what else I would do.”

So he sits in his chair and talks, a man with the gift of gab.

“I share my battles and hurts and pains with everybody else online, not for pity but so everyone else will understand that they’re not the only ones going through the same thing.”