Chicken Soup for the Soul: Children with Special Needs (10 page)

All She Has

W
e don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.

Anaïs Nin

“Hey, honey!” I said, hugging my seven-year-old, Jean Prince, as she got off the bus. “How was school?”

“Well, not so real good,” she replied, looking glum. “Everyone has their pictures on the Reading Bulletin Board but me. I never get my picture up, not for math or reading or anything.” Her shoulders slumped, and her chin began a definite quiver.

I’d like to believe that, with enough educational therapists, visits to the doctor, experimenting with different medications for ADHD, and drill, practice, and patience at home, I can turn my Jean into a valedictorian, a teacher’s “dream child,” the whiz kid who gets everything right and never colors outside the lines.

But I can’t. And every failure is yet another blow to me, as well as to Jean. Taking a deep breath, I turned on the “building self-esteem” mode. “Well, hon, I’m sorry. But I’ll bet something good happened in school today, didn’t it? What was the best thing that you did today?” Jean took her own sweet time, thinking things through. She wasn’t, however, on the verge of tears anymore.

Finally, she brightened a bit and said, “I gave my bunny from the prize box to Jeffrey when he fell down and cried ’cause his knee bled. Mrs. Lawrence said she was proud of me, and she put my name on the ‘Character Counts’ tree.”

“Sweetie, that’s great!” I blessed Mrs. Lawrence in my mind yet again.

The next day, we were reading the weather report in the paper, ever mindful of the science curriculum, which this month was focusing on weather. As I was trying to help Jean sound out “partly cloudy,” she grabbed the paper and shrieked, “Mommy! Mommy! Why is that lady crying, Mommy? She’s holding those two little kitties, and she’s crying! Why?” I sighed. We were distracted from the task at hand yet again—something that happens with Jean on a minute-by-minute basis.

“Well, let’s read the story,” I replied, hoping to turn the task into yet another school lesson. “It says here that the lady is Mrs. Hamilton, and she lost her home yesterday when lightning struck it.” I read on, and the story was indeed a heartbreaking one. The poor woman from the small town of Monroe had lost everything—even her pet dog—and had no insurance.

“Hmm, Jean,” I concluded. “It says here that Pastor Barry (our minister) is taking donations for Mrs. Hamilton. We’ll make sure to give him a check tomorrow at church to help her out, okay?” Then I went off to locate Jean’s elusive three-year-old brother, James Moses, and begin dinner.

The next day, as I was trying to herd the crew out the door for Sunday school, Jean suddenly wheeled around. “Wait, I’ve got to get my stuff!” She came back with her special heart-shaped box and a homemade card. I strapped James Moses in the car seat and took off down the drive. When we got to church, Jean didn’t head straight to her Sunday school classroom. “I’ve got to find Pastor Barry!” she exclaimed. “Where is he?” It wasn’t until then that I bothered to check out Jean’s special box and card.

The card read, “Mrs Hamitlon, I am saveng mony for yuo. I pray for yuo. I love yuo. Jean.” Inside the box was $8.54—every penny the child had saved from her allowance for the past month. The fifty cents she saved by not getting ice cream one day at school. The dollar she got for picking up all her toys and putting them away. The dollar her Meme sent her in the mail. The change from her last big purchase, a Barbie doll. The dollar and some change she’d been allowed to keep when she helped me clean out the car.

The pure magnitude of the gesture literally took my breath away. This was truly the widow’s mite—every coin the child had in the world, wrapped up in her most special keepsake box, and accompanied with a card decorated with rainbows, a happy sun face, two smiling kitties, and every happy image the child could draw, along with as many words of encouragement as she could get down on paper. This was so much more important than reading or math. Her future? The sky’s the limit.

Connie Ellison

Connie Ellison
has taught English in Virginia’s public schools for twenty-eight years. She is the author of the memoir,
Any Road: The Story of a Virginia Tobacco Farm.
Connie lives in Elon, Virginia, with her husband, Andrew, and two children, Jean Prince and James Moses. Jean is now a third-grader and an active member of Elon Presbyterian Church. This past year, Jean raised over $300 for her school’s Jump Rope for Heart for the American Heart Association, in memory of her best friend, Ian Mapes, who died of heart complications last August.

One Brief Hour

T
here is no better way to thank God for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark.

Helen Keller

For one brief hour on a sunny June afternoon, my life intersected with a nineteen-year-old young man. He walked away from that hour with his life changed forever. I walked away with an empty leash and a full heart. Two years before, my family and I had just returned from living overseas in Hong Kong. We had lived in a forty-four-story high-rise for four years, and were now back to our American lifestyle, backyard included. All that was missing was a dog for my eight-year-old son.

My husband, not a dog lover, thought he had found a way to table this discussion indefinitely. “Find a purpose to having a dog, son, and then we’ll talk.” That very week, Tad brought home a permission slip for a field trip to travel to Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB) in San Rafael, California. Being a dog lover, I volunteered to chaperone.
Voilà!
We had found a purpose. Tad and I attended the weekly puppy meetings, filled out paperwork, studied the manual we were given by GDB, and within a month or so, we were on our way to pick up a little eight-week-old yellow Lab male puppy named Arbor.

About that same time, in Olathe, Kansas, nineteen-year-old Jonathan Hill began to fill out his paperwork to apply for a guide dog. Nearly blind from a rare syndrome called Bardet-Biedl, a genetic disease that results in progressive blindness, Jonathan didn’t let his poor vision limit his life. Not by a long shot. An Eagle Scout, avid hiker and camper, and a college student, Jonathan had big plans for life with his future guide. After completing the lengthy application, Jonathan had to wait for Guide Dogs for the Blind to contact him, meet him, and see if he met their qualifications. He was selected, so now his job was to wait until a spot opened up for him in class.

Meanwhile, back in California, our first objective was to help Arbor discover the joys of using the great outdoors for his potty. The next objective was to start basic training: sitting, laying down, waiting, and not chewing up everything that got close to his tiny, razor-sharp teeth. And, of course, we gave him lots of love. Every Tuesday night, we packed Arbor into the car and zoomed off to our weekly puppy-training classes.

In his official little green jacket, he was proudly welcomed at supermarkets, church, and restaurants. More often than not, outings to socialize Arbor were very successful. Once or twice, our cheeks burning, we cleaned up after an unfortunate miscalculation of his need to relieve himself. And Arbor grew, and grew, and grew.

By the age of one year, he was well over eighty pounds. And just a few months later, we received word that Arbor had been recalled to Guide Dogs for formal training. When we dropped off our gentle giant at the facility, I thought I heard someone mutter, “Sheesh . . . the Schmaltz family is here.” It was true. We were bawling. Even my stoic husband shed a few tears. So now our job was to wait.

Every few weeks, we received a new report of how Arbor was progressing during the ten-phase, four-to-six-month training program. As he neared phase eight, I let myself start thinking that he might really do it. He might just graduate! Jonathan was now allowed to pack and arrive at Guide Dogs for his one-month training program. Throughout the month, from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Jonathan and Arbor, who had been matched together based on personality type and need, worked on becoming an unstoppable team.

Twenty-eight days after Jonathan arrived at Guide Dogs, he and I met for the first time, right before the graduation ceremony. Immediately, I sensed why they had been paired. Jonathan, too, was a gentle giant. We had the honor of formally presenting Arbor to Jonathan at the ceremony. Afterward, we said good-bye. The car ride home was a solemn one. We knew that, very likely, we wouldn’t see Arbor again.

The very next evening, I received an e-mail from Jonathan’s mother, letting me know that the flight went well and they were back in Kansas. “Jonathan took Arbor on a walk to see his friend, and I realized something,” she wrote. “He hadn’t felt the confidence to walk to his friend’s house in years.”

In just twenty-four hours, Arbor had already started changing Jonathan’s life. And since then, those two have done more than most sighted people ever do. They’ve hiked the Oregon Trail all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They’ve gone deep-sea fishing off the Florida Keys. And they always send me e-mails and postcards. Last year, I received the family’s Christmas card with Arbor’s name included in the imprint. Since that first e-mail from Jonathan’s mother, I haven’t felt any tinge of loss. Only gain. And, by the way, we’re now raising our fifth guide-dog puppy.

Suzanne Woods Fisher

Suzanne Woods Fisher
is an author, a wife and mother, and a puppy raiser for Guide Dogs for the Blind. The best thing about being a writer, she feels, is that everything in life ends up being material. It’s all grit for the oyster. Check out her website at
www.suzannewoodsfisher.com
.

Reprinted by permission of Off the Mark and Mark Parisi. © 2006 Mark Parisi.

The Gift

I
am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

Edward Everett Hale

Battered crutches leaning in the corner, Fatuma sits, head down, eyes averted. Sixteen years old, she lost her leg above the knee to a land mine a year ago in Somalia, and is now in the refugee clinic. In her culture, because of her amputation, she has become family baggage, and her father stays in the waiting room, ashamed, as her twelve-year-old sister happily translates.

The medical student hadn’t asked why she did not wear a prosthesis, so as the teaching physician in the clinic, I accompany him back to the room to fill in the holes in her story.

Eyes remain downturned; hope has gone from the room. Her prosthesis was lost in their flight from Somalia and never fit well.

There is a national organization for amputees, the Amputee Coalition of America (ACA). Perhaps she would benefit from speaking with them, I suggest.

The prosthesis was painful, she replies, words barely murmured. She has yet to walk again, yet to make eye contact in the room, and clearly feels herself a burden. She is ashamed.

How much of our own story is appropriate to share with our patients? In Western medicine, the line seems very clear, separating patient and physician. We teach and are taught that as physicians we are there for the patient, and our stories can get in the way of theirs.

But for the first time with a patient, I consciously step across the line between physician and patient. Raising the leg of my pants reveals the titanium of my prosthetic ankles, for both of my legs have been amputated below the knees due to an accident six years prior.

There is a burst of words in excited Somali between the sisters.

“But you are the doctor. How can you have artificial legs?”