``Joni suspects Lyme disease killed her husband, who lived a healthy life up until he was diagnosed with the disease last August.''

Old Colony Memorial
SouthOfBoston.com
8-13-05

`He touched everyone he met'
By Daniel Axelrod
MPG Newspapers

PLYMOUTH (Aug 13) - Former Plymouth conservation agent John Martini faced his first obstacle at six months old when his parents left him on the doorstep of St. Mary's Home in Binghamton, N.Y.

Raised by nuns until he was 18, Martini moved out and worked as a cab driver in Boston, where he paid his way through UMass-Boston and earned a bachelor's degree in political science and American history. After two marriages, two children, a career teaching high school, and running a landscaping business, Martini died July 24 at age 55.

Joni, his wife of 19 years, suspects her husband died of Lyme disease.His death was unexpected and relatively sudden, and the official cause remains unknown pending numerous tests.

Martini left behind his daughter Julie, 30, his son Jeffery, 27, a massive backyard garden of exotic plants and a legacy of being a vibrant, outgoing, sociable, kind, generous, optimistic, and loving man, according to friends and family.

Reaching out to everyone

Joni Martini still has the thank you letters from John's former Falmouth junior/senior high school students tucked away in a folder.

``Students sent letters saying they were sorry to see him go. They liked his sense of humor,'' Martini said.``He used to have some students who stayed in touch for years at a time. Even after they'd move to different states they'd call and ask him for advice.'' Wherever he worked and whatever he did, Martini made a lasting impression.

``He was a family guy, warm, caring and wonderful, and he made you feel very special,'' Michelle Turner, administrative assistant for Plymouth's Conservation Commission, said.Turner worked closely with Martini during his days as a part-time conservation agent for Plymouth. Turner said staffers knew when the bubbly Martini came in the town offices because he filled the room with a cheerful vibe and chitchat.
Turner is Italian, and Martini used to kid her in Italian, discuss Italian food and talk about Italy.

``You felt like you were a part of him when you spoke with him,'' Turner said. ``Everyone misses his personality. I still have a picture of him on my desk. I look at it all the time.''

After graduating among the top 5 percent of his class at UMass in 1972, Martini cultivated his love of cooking by working as a chef for a nursing home in Falmouth.

He married Christine Beaulac, with whom he had his two children. Martini spent the next 13 years working, mostly as a chef, and raising his children Jeffrey and Julie. He won custody of the children in 1980, after a long divorce.

Now a single parent, he was partly led to teaching by his need to make more money. He went back to school at Southeastern University to earn his teaching certificate and began teaching history for the Falmouth school district in 1985. Martini again graduated from Southeastern magna cum laude, among the top 5 percent of his class.

At SMU in the mid `80s, John focused on another lifelong passion - learning about New England's Native American clans. Joni still occupies the couple's Plymouth house, where visitors will see a bookcase, built by John, full of perhaps 400 books on Native Americans - just a sample of what he read.

Back when John was in school, he visited the Falmouth Christmas Tree Shop just to catch a glimpse of Joni, a fellow divorcee ``he had the `hots' for,'' Joni said. Coincidentally, Joni's sister, Barbara Beltran, and Martini earned their teaching degrees at the same time.

Barbara liked Martini - who had no idea she was Joni's sister - so she gave him Joni's phone number. John's random phone call to Joni one day led to a six-hour conversation, a follow-up date to the movies, a six-month courtship and marriage.

``You know how people say they have a soul mate?'' Joni said. ``There was just something that clicked there. We both were interested in the same things and it wasn't awkward to talk.''

Martini got a job at Falmouth schools, where he worked for three years before moving to Cornwall, Vt. in search of a wholesome life and good schools for his beloved children. John taught for a time in Vermont and the family became self-sufficient farmers.

No flatlanders (except John)

``Usually Vermont natives call newcomers flatlanders and it takes a while to fit in, but John fit right in,'' Joni said. Martini fit in so well that Cornwall's 1,000 or so residents voted the newcomer onto the board of selectmen.

When the family arrived, they settled in after buying 25 acres and a three-bedroom contemporary home renovated by John after he studied carpentry on his own. The family grew crops, tended chickens and heated the house with wood John split and burned in wood stoves. Joni raised the kids and, while they were in school, worked at a general store where she got to know community members.

One day, residents at the store suggested Joni tell John to run for the board of selectmen. At first he dismissed her suggestion, but soon John delved into campaigning. He loaded hand-painted signs into his big old white Oldsmobile, drove around town and shook hands and chatted with everyone he met. The newcomer with no political experience won the local election by a landslide against an incumbent town leader. Martini's time as a Cornwall selectman was the beginning of a long life of community service as a teacher and member of various boards and committees in the communities where he lived.

Martini also taught from 1987 to 1989 at Otter Valley Union High School in Brandon, Vt., where he established an alternative education program for disadvantaged and disaffected students, just as he'd done at Falmouth. Martini even helped start a reading program and aided in the development of the state's Educational Reform Act.

All along, though, a love of the earth grew deep within him. No longer content just to foster his student's academic and personal growth, he went to school to become a landscaper. After Martini learned landscaping, the family moved to Plymouth. He had lived here briefly and loved the town, and Joni wanted to be closer to her family in Falmouth.

Making his mark on Plymouth

Besides his Vermont community service, Martini served on Plymouth's master plan committee, the downtown steering committee and two different economic development committees and as a town meeting member. He was a long-time Mason, a part-time conservation agent for Plymouth and even a tutor for those who couldn't read.
Speak with those who knew or loved Martini and you'll find a recurring theme - not only did John do everything he could to get to know people, he couldn't stand pat if he saw something in the community needing fixing.

``He meant a lot to many of us for different reasons,'' friend and planning board member Larry Rosenblum said. ``John was concerned about the community and also a great cook, a great gardener and you got the sense he was a shepherd tending to his flock with everything.''

Rosenblum was shocked when Martini recruited him to run for the planning board. ``Usually the candidate picks the campaign manager, here the campaign manager picked the candidate,'' Rosenblum said. Rosenblum remembers one day when Martini drove past the synagogue on Pleasant Street downtown and noticed the lawn's beat-up appearance. Martini wasn't Jewish.

``But he said to the Rabbi, `It looks like the garden needs tending,' and he volunteered to do that,'' Rosenblum said.

Martini's landscaping business, Alden Court Gardens, is still owned by his wife and operated by 24-year-old Jeff Parsons and his assistant, who serve 40 to 50 clients.

``John was never afraid to learn something new or different, and I think that's what made him so successful,'' Joni said. ``If you spoke Polish he'd go out and try to speak Polish.''

The Martinis' house is decorated with Native American artifacts from John's travels.

Outside, John's second passion is quickly evident in the form of the sprawling garden with red pine needle-covered walkways, through which John would walk potential customers to help them plan their gardens.

``His knowledge of plants was amazing, and he knew all the Latin names. Sometimes I had to say `Speak English, John,' `` Turner said. ``And as conservation agent his rapport with people in the field was special.''

Even Martini's kids are excelling in life. Julie works for the Massachusetts Cultural Council on Arts and Jeffery is doing his graduate work at Georgetown University. After a stint working for the conservative think-tank Rand Corporation, Jeffery is studying Arabic.

The end: fast and frightening

The end for John Martini was fast and frightening. Martini contracted the deer tick-transmitted Lyme disease last August and the tell-tale big bull's-eye rash appeared on the upper inside of his right leg complete with a hard egg-like lump. Two months of antibiotics followed and the disease seemed to go into remission. Subsequent Lyme disease tests showed up negative.

But by February John felt tired all the time. His face was puffy and his eyes were often half-closed. The muscular 5-foot, 6-inch 150-pound landscaper became weak and lost muscle strength. He hired assistants to help with his business and took naps during the day between landscaping jobs.

``The doctors had no clue what was going on, and every part of his body hurt,'' Joni said. ``John seemed to feel it was still the Lyme disease, but the doctors said it wasn't and testing didn't show it.''
By June, John was hospitalized at Jordan Hospital for a week with the mysterious ailment. He seemed to feel better and he came back home, but, by early July, Martini was back in the hospital and sicker than ever.

``On July 3, I took him to the Jordan ER and he could hardly walk, his heart was racing, and we were so very scared,'' Joni said. ``We didn't know if he was having a heart attack.'' The hospital admitted him, ran more inconclusive tests and on July 9 sent him to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

He died about two weeks later after a steady stream of inconclusive tests and antibiotics, but not before he got to know all the doctors and nurses on the floor.
He spent his last days sleeping, reading the novel ``The Da Vinci Code'' and dipping his hands in the soil of a plant a friend brought him. The hospital is still running tests on his body to confirm whether Lyme disease was the culprit.

Joni suspects Lyme disease killed her husband, who lived a healthy life up until he was diagnosed with the disease last August.

``He was always positive and he thought he'd get better when he got sick,'' Joni said. ``I'm still in shock. It's still hard to believe that he's gone. I just miss his voice and his laughter. He had a very good sense of humor, he joked a lot, he was silly and he used to like to tell and play practical jokes.''

Martini hopes the doctors pinpoint what killed John, and most of all she wants the public to somehow learn from John's death. (See sidebar) She thinks John ``would be honored'' if his body is used to help fight Lyme disease.

my mother was given prednisone (corto-steroid) and got well for a little while, then got sicker than ever, than died.

my "fibromyalgia" mimicked my mother's illness, only i got it at a much younger age. both of us had to have our tonsils out as teenagers, and following costome at the time, should have had them out yrs earlier.

but also had ear problems that persisted and quite a lot of other stuff, i now know lyme can cause.

and encephalitis, meningitis, heart block, severe pain, severe insomnia, serious neurological disorders as well as musckulo-skeletal symptoms, are not "depression" or "fibromyalgia". as well as the butterfly rash across my face, and an abnormal ANA. and an EM lesion the UPENN dr laughed at me for even mentioning. and i did not know until too late to sue people who said they are drs , but are knowingly doing harm to so many, how much damage i had and was told i most definately did not have lyme , laughed at my robustly pos LUAT from IgeneX labs, and admitted that i may had had lyme, but unlikely, and most definately did not have it anymore, and it ws doubtful if i in fact really ever had
lyme despite history of rashes.

wierd. i was told by a girl my age in my support group, who told me i rivaled her for the unenviable title of " the one who got sickest in our support group ". that i got severe abuse from drs and had stuff in my records that none of them had. she told me to just keep going to lawyers, even "ambulance chaser" lawyers, that i would never consider. but she told me it was the "ambulance chaser" lawyers who went after the tabacco industry.

and she also told me that the itchy, pink, oval rash, same shape and size, and close resemblence to the '96 lyme rash i got at the same location was not "nothing" like the neurologist i was seeing told me, the one who i now realize was just using me as a research project and not treating me, had told me it was. she told me to photograph it, which i did. the neuro was supposed to be lyme friendly. but had connections...and i trusted the ped. neuro there to my children ( before i knew - oh , and in my youngest child's case after, lied, and said my children "did not have lyme. elisa proved this. pcr was a false pos. he sees them all the time. dr Petruschka (sp?), sends her patients to him all the time for a confermation of lyme" i doubt it very much.

he knew this was a name i would recognize and respect, although, from what i understood, she had been harrassed, and was no longer seeing patients. he lied and said my younger child had an ear infection, not lyme, (despite no ear pain as in the past when an ear infection was present, no fever, and no congestion, and a NJ pediatrition i took him to immeadieatly after, confirmied this. he had so much wax in his ear he showed me with the thing they check ears with, that he had so much wax in his ear, you could not even see his eardrum.

and he did not present, or behave , like a child with an ear infection. my own experience with ear infections ( how lyme often flairs in me, and what he was probably making fun of, is your ear hurts a lot. as an adult, i can hide i'm in pain, but children cannot. and my child's ear did not hurt. but it was very clear from birth that he was weak and very sick from something.)

but the lawyer who did take my case as well as another woman in my support group whose son got very sick, in fact psychotic, very different from me. he had me sign a couple of things, but i was so out of it at the time, had very little idea what i had signed, and did not know to ask for a copy. one, i am pretty sure , was a realease for all of my mediacal signatures,

and now, for the very first time, am upset by this. i trusted this man. he seemed so sympathetic, seeing how sick i was , and how week, but so intellegent, enthusiastic, and how such a little boy, he was taking care of his mama. and he was so sick and untreated himself from birth.

you see, she , like me, probably got infected at least once before the infection that did her in. but, even though she had obvious lyme symptoms, she had first been infected during a camping trip in texas. she got it from chiggers. she still gets a rash that rings around her ankle where the original rash was.

but, unlike me, her dr in north carolina, though not educated in lyme, was an excellent dr, cared about her, and they worked together to figure out what was making her sick. he cared about his patient. believed her. and knew she was intelligent. so unlike the "so called" UPENN drs and other drs i saw.

she asked him at one appt. " instead of looking at the symptoms individually, what disease could possibly cause all of these?". the dr was enlightened by this, and what he came up with was Lyme disease. thought it unlikely as Cathy lived and vacationed in the south.

but he tested her with good tests at good labs, and she tested pos for lyme. she had more i.v. abx treatment than i can ever hope for at this point , but was though definately implproved, still far from well. my guess, is she , still very much in need of i.v. abx for the lyme that she will probably ever get, also had at least one co-ifection that has not been addressed.

i got yet infected again, and would be infected at least 3 more times that i can document since then, when my daughter was just a 9 mos old nursing baby during our trip to nantucket island. her pediatrition, who wrote an article on lyme disease for a parent's magazine failed to notice how sick she had become, and that i had gotten very sick ,and reinfectied just before getting pregnant with her brother.

he was most obviously sick since birth. she assured me otherwise. " i see a lot of babies like your son. he's normal". what she sees is a lot of congenital lyme babies. and if it was her baby, i am confident, she would do somes research. not accept that " it is normal" and she ws quite ...well, knew us well, and would not.....competitiveness is not healthy when it comes to raising young children.

strange how those i thought would defend me and help us get med care, instead delighted in this happening to us. insecure people who felt better of themselves as things got worse for us.

oh, and the small area private school that we sent one of our children to due to undx lyme sypmtoms and the need to be in a small classroom, her classmates mum is a pediatric infectious disease specialtist, reknowned. like the upenn neuor-opt that did the "invisible patient" joke on me laughing at like severe pain and severe insomnia, and , despite wills eye hospital dr finding to the contrary, claimed i had no neuro problems and most definately did not have double vision. put things in my records that kept me from getting care evan after i left upenn's care, and i realize now also, made it impossible to get disabililty or my children getting the S.S. benefits they should be getting.

we've talked before. I am so sorry you are going through all of this.

Would it be possible for me to get your friends doctor's name in North Carolina? The doc here in East Tennessee is no longer seeing patients and Dr. J in Charlotte went on tv about Lyme and now he is totally slammed and no longer seeing patients.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
L