Monday, Sep. 15, 2008

Suffering from rare disorder, Atwater man has found relief in photography

By CORINNE REILLY
creilly@mercedsun-star.com

It was just after 11 p.m. on a cold night in the winter of 2005 at Yosemite National Park. The moon was full. Mike Matenkosky, a nature photographer from Atwater, had left his two little girls with his in-laws and driven on whim with his wife, Stacy, to his favorite place to shoot.

They parked the car. Matenkosky pulled out his digital Canon 300D and began clicking away.

His best shot from that night, of a stunning, moonlit El Capitan, is now mounted on his family's living room wall. It's one of his favorites.

And, like most of the pictures he's taken in the last few years, he shot it without ever getting out of the car.

That's because Matenkosky can barely walk. He suffers from a rare disorder in which his immune system attacks his joints -- at least that's the best guess of all his Stanford University doctors. The condition, which first appeared in 2004, affected his knees so badly that he opted in March to have them removed.

At 43, Matenkosky will never bend his legs again.

He describes the last four years as the hardest of his life. Instead of playing with his daughters, backpacking through Yosemite and hiking Mount Whitney, he's spent much of those years on the sofa, in a wheelchair or in the hospital. He has endured operations, infections and a stroke.

Besides his family, Matenkosky credits one thing with getting him through it all: photography. "If it wasn't for photography, I don't know what I'd do," he said. "I'd probably go crazy from the boredom alone."

Born in Pittsburgh, Matenkosky has always loved to take pictures. He got his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, as a kid. "I'd take pictures of my camping trips," he recalled. "Or I'd set up my model cars and my model airplanes outside and try to take pictures that made them look real."

He joined the military in 1986. His first duty station was Atwater's Castle Air Force Base. In 1990 he received orders for a one-year assignment in King Salmon, Alaska. That's where he got his first 35 mm SLR camera -- a used Minolta with a few zoom lenses that he bought from a friend for $200.

He began photographing his surroundings in Alaska and fell in love with shooting landscapes. After five years, Matenkosky left the military in 1991, but stayed in Atwater.

He married Stacy that year -- "I knew she was the one for me right away," he says -- and got a job at Sears as a service adviser in the automotive department. He eventually went to work at Fisher Research Lab, a metal detector manufacturer in Los Banos. He stayed there until 2005, when his knee problems forced him to quit.

Matenkosky's doctors tell him there isn't a name yet for his disorder. Name or none, the pain started in his shoulders in 2004 and quickly spread to his knees. "It came on pretty suddenly," he said. "Everything got real stiff, like arthritis. I started having trouble climbing stairs. Then I had to get a cane, then a walker."

Matenkosky's doctors first thought he was suffering from Lyme Disease. It made sense. Lyme Disease is transmitted by ticks, and Matenkosky was an avid hiker. But treatments for the disease failed.

As his knees grew stiffer and stiffer, a rheumatoidologist recommended knee-replacement surgery. He endured an operation on one leg in February 2005.

It only made things worse. He developed several infections, prompting his doctors to finally remove his man-made knee in October 2006.

Two days after that operation, while still in the hospital, Matenkosky suffered a stroke. His speech and cognition have slowed as a result. "I used to be a lot sharper," he acknowledges.