Miracles and Religion

Well, I didn't get many questions from the last post, except for Glam (thanks, sweetie), so I'm going to let that sit for a bit longer.

The Miracle of Kathy Miller

I know a lot of you are younger than me (wah!!) and might not remember a made-for-television movie from 1981 (after all, I was only nine), but The Miracle of Kathy Miller stuck with me. Confession: I couldn't remember the name when I first started thinking of using it in a post. I only remembered that her name was Kathy. A big thanks to Megora at CC for getting me the name.

Here is a review for the movie:

Helen Hunt is outstanding as the real-life Kathy Miller, a 13-year-old Arizona athlete and honor student whose world came to a screeching halt in 1977. Struck by a car on a lonely highway, Kathy spends the next ten weeks in a coma. Upon awakening, she is unable to walk, talk, read or write: she has sustained massive brain damage and her leg has been mutilated. The experts say "No hope", but neither Kathy nor her parents (Sharon Gless, Frank Converse) will settle for that diagnosis. After eight torturous months of physical and mental therapy, Kathy Miller is entered in a 6-mile race -- the first of many stepping stones to her ultimate status as a world champion.

Now why did I love it so much? It was such an inspiration to me. Here was this girl, just a little older than me, who had suffered something so much worse than only having one arm, and she didn't just survive. She didn't just live. She TRIUMPHED!

Her attitude made me realize exactly how possible it is for people (no matter their difficulties) to accomplish anything.

Saved!

I was watching movies late at night a few years ago and came across this one. Since I really can't stand Macaulay Culkin as an actor, I almost changed the channel.

Instead, I ended up changing my mind about his acting ability.

He is amazing in this movie, playing wheelchair bound Roland. Now, I didn't see the entire thing, so I don't know why he was unable to walk, but it really doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that he's a secondary character. Or that I hated the whole plot of the movie.

I would watch it again just to see him play Roland.

It was the same way when I watched Sean Penn in I Am Sam. I learned to absolutely adore him. He played the part of a mentally retarded man so well.

Here Sam is being read a goodnight story by his young daughter.

Excuses

I can't believe I haven't done a post here in 25 days! That's awful.

There are reasons.

1) Yuna was here. We has a blast! (Granted she's been gone for 12 days, but who's counting?)

2) It's difficult to write really personal stuff like what's posted here. That's part of why I dropped the memoir book some of the original posts came from.

3) I've been trying to ready that interview, only to realize something about myself - I'm a crappy interviewer. I can't think of questions to ask. So I'm going to ask this person if s/he will just do a post instead.

So that's it. Tomorrow (when I have more than 2 hours sleep) I will do a real post. In the meantime, what sort of questions do you have about what being handicaped is like?

Pain and Deadly Weapons

Sorry, folks, but the interview is going to be postponed for a few days. Time differences (and busy lives) have made it difficult to schedule.

Hurting Yourself

Yep, hurting yourself. When you wear a prosthesis (an artificial body part), it happens. The worst one ever for me happened when I was 5 years old.

I'd asked my teacher repeatedly to let me go to the bathroom. She finally said yes, and I ran out of the room and down the hallway. I was running fast enough that I didn't see the sign:

Put running and wet, slippery tiles together, and you almost always get disaster. Add in a metal hook, and a trip to the ER is inevitable.

I slipped, skidding face first down the hall. Like most people, when I fall, I put my hands (or hand and hook as the case is for me) out to catch myself. Didn't work so well :)

Instead my face landed on the end of my hook with enough force to push it all the way into my jaw bone. No matter how hard I pulled, I couldn't get it out.

I sat there screaming (which is hard to do with a prosthesis stuck in your jaw!), hoping someone would come help me. It felt like hours before one of the teachers showed up. She tried pulling the hook out too, but it was seriously lodged into the bone.

A call to my mom and a fun ride in an ambulance, then I was sitting in the ER. The doctor was great! He thought the whole thing hysterical, the first time he'd ever seen something like that. He had me laughing despite how much it hurt.

It took a lot of novacaine and a lot more pain before my hook was extracted, but he got it out. Then 11 stitches to close it up.

I still have that scar on my chin reminding me to never run on wet floors.

Hurting Others

When a prosthesis becomes so much a part of you that you really think of it as your missing body part, you can do a ton of damage without even realizing it.

Like in second grade. I was standing on a stepstool at the blackboard doing some math problems. And when I work on something like that, I get totally engrossed. The world around me just fades into nothing.

So when my friend Joey called my named, I jumped and spun around on the stool.

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I spin around really fast, my arms swing out to the sides and spin with me. Really bad thing to happen.

Joey was standing right behind me, so when my prosthesis arm spun out and around, it clocked him right on the side of the head. Knocking him unconscious.

I was horrified! Here was my best friend, out cold on the floor because of me. Another ambulance arriving at school.

He woke up just as the ambulance got there (thank God!), but it taught me well. Very well. That is the very reason why I stopped wearing my prosthesis the day I found out I was pregnant.

Useful Tool Or Deadly Weapon?

I played soccer in high school (though not very well at all), and we were at Ethel Walker school for a game in my junior year. I was running behind and changed as quickly as I could into my uniform.

As I ran out to take my place on the field, the ref blew his whistle. We all stopped and stared at him. He wasn't supposed to do that until the game actually started.

The coaches and the ref huddled together for a few moments. The ref gestured wildly just like you see on tv sometimes.

I stood there bored and snickering at the sight of the weird ref doing whatever. Then my coach called me over.

"You have to leave the field," the ref told me.

Huh?

I guess it showed on my face because he continued, "You can not play soccer while carrying a deadly weapon."

Double huh?

He pointed to my prosthesis which I had forgotten to take off. Mortification doesn't even begin to describe it.

I quickly took it off (takes talent to do that without removing your shirt :)) and threw it at his feet, then stomped back to my position. Never again did I forget to take it off before a game.

It's All In The Attitude

Attitudes are contagious. Are yours worth catching? ~Dennis and Wendy Mannering

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left. ~Hubert Humphrey

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. ~Winston Churchill

If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it. ~Mary Engelbreit



I don't usually start a post with quotes, but these seemed rather appropriate to the post I want to write. The title really says it all - It's all in the attitude.

Even commercials say it ("Never let them see you sweat" ring a bell?) and play on it, implying their product will infuse you with confidence. That's not exactly what I mean though.

And I'm not talking about a disabled person's attitude. But those of all the "normal" people around them. Those can make all the difference.

I'm a contrary person (if you haven't figured that out yet, go read the previous posts). All it takes to make me determined to do something is for someone to tell me I'm not capable of it. A lot of others don't have that, and that is where attitude comes in.


Everyone Can Make A Difference

It's true. Even I feel it. When somebody acts like my disability couldn't possibly put any limitations on me, it makes it easier for me to do the same.

Think about it. Which would you rather hear throughout the day?

(Said by an extremely old woman in the checkout line at the grocery store) "You poor dear. If I'd known you were crippled, I would have let you go first."

Or . . .

"I figured if you needed help you'd ask."

Personally, I'll take the second any minute of any day. It shows that they respect me - my abilties, my honesty, my courage.

I'm a big country music fan, and this song shows what I mean about attitude very well.




It's by Rascall Flatts, called Skin. It still makes me cry and smile every time I hear it.

So I applaud all of you who have the attitude necessary to keep people like me going!! Keep it up!

My next post will be an interview with a friend of mine who has a degenerative disease.

Butterflies and M*A*S*H

I swam the butterfly in high school. It's not an easy stroke to do under normal circumstances, and on the first day of practice, my coach told me not to bother trying to learn it because it would be too hard with only one hand.

That infuriates me. People making assumptions based solely on differnces. So I did what I always did whenever someone assumed things about me - I set out to prove him wrong.

Our first swim meet was 2 weeks away. I looked him right in the eye and told him that if I could learn the stroke well enough by then, he had to let me race it. Idiot that he was, he agreed. That's how sure he was that I couldn't learn it.

So I went to Nancy, a friend and our lead butterflier, for help. We worked together for one week, whenever both of us were free. And I haunted the pool. Early morning before school. Late at night after everyone was asleep (it was a boarding school). Completely ignored all homework and tests.

One week to the day after my coach and I had made the agreement, I told him to meet me at the pool. I didn't even speak to him, just dove in and started swimming. The look on his face as I finished the hundred meter butterfly made it all worthwhile.

He was floored as he stuttered, "Well, I guess we now have a second butterflier."

Nothing else was said, but he entered me in every swim meet as our second for the butterfly. When I graduated, he came to me and told me that he'd never met anyone as stubborn as me in all his years of teaching.

Being the rude, sarcastic girl I was, I replied, "And you never will again."

Diseases Can Be Overcome As Well

Shelly Mann, 1956 gold medal winner at the Olympics for the 100 meter butterfly, overcame the terrible paralysis of polio to become a world class swimmer. She contracted polio as a child and was left with weakness and semi-paralysis of all her limbs. At 10, her doctor recommended swimming as therapy.

Not only did it work, but she excelled at it, winning medal after medal and breaking records. At age 17, after only swimming for 7 years, she went to Melbourne and won the gold medal for butterfly - the most difficult stroke to swim.

In 1984, she was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame for her accomplishments.

She should be an inspiration to all of us.

Just Because You Can't See It, Doesn't Mean It's Not There

How many of you grew up watching M*A*S*H? I absolutely loved that show. Cried when it went off the air.

One day in math class in 7th grade, some kids had been picking on me really bad. My teacher told us that he had known Gary Burghoff (Radar O'Reilly) when he was in school.

What would Radar have to do with me getting picked on? Well, he too has differences in his left hand. I could never get my teacher to tell us exactly what those differences are, and all I can find online is that his left hand is "deformed" (I hate that word!), so I really don't know.

What I do know is that he and the shows producers and directors went to a great deal of trouble to hide it on the show. They did very well at it too. I've watched every episode numerous times and never seen it.

I have to say it makes me kind of sad. Gary Burghoff was a wonderful actor and that should have been the criteria by which he was judged. He shouldn't have had to work to appear "normal".

Yes, those were different times. I realize that. People with disabilities were avoided or people would just ignore the disability itself. Some were even placed in institutions back then. Considering all that, I'm amazed he got the part of Radar at all. But it still makes me furious when people are forced to hide their disability because it might make someone else uncomfortable.

Hats off to you, Gary, for making it during a time when it wasn't easy!

Fanatics

I was 12 the first time it happened. Just sitting on the beach, minding my own business, reading Gone With the Wind. I only had a few chapters left to read, and I remember being so excited because I was going to win the bet with my Grammie. She hadn't thought I could read the entire book in one day. Yet, here it was only 6 hours after I'd started and I was almost done.

A shadow fell over me, blocking out the light.

"What the hell do you want?" I asked, looking up.

A man in a ratty blue suit (looked like it was a left over from the 70s) stood over me holding a bible in his hand. "Do you know why you only have one hand, young lady?"

"What?"

"It's because you are a sinner. You hold evil inside you and that is your punishment from God."

I frantically looked up and down the beach, hoping that someone from my family would show up and get rid of this guy because he scared the living daylights out of me. But there was no one in sight, not even my 6 year old sister.

"Don't you know that if you love God deeply enough and believe in Him strongly enough and pray hard enough that God will let your other hand grow?" He dropped to his knees on the blanket next to me.

I scooted as far away from him as I could while still remaining on the blanket where I had promised my parents I'd stay.

"Obviously you don’t believe. And don’t pray. Let’s kneel and pray together and ask God to give you your other hand. My faith and love are strong and pure. He will listen to me, forgive you all your evil and let your hand grow."

Screaming at him to stay away from me, I ran down the beach until I found my mom and sister collecting shells. I stayed with them for the rest of the day, and did not return to the beach for the remainder of our vacation.

That incident has always stayed with me for a few reasons. I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life. It made me leery of organized religion. And it made me question why I had only one hand.

But I was willing to believe that this man was an anomaly, that he didn't represent the thinking of an entire religious group. I put it to the back of my mind. Until it happened again.

My ex-husband took me to visit his extended family the Easter weekend before we got married. I was so excited. My family had never been close and his was, so I wanted desperately to be accepted. Everything was going fine until we got to his cousin Maria's house.

Her husband, Bill, bible in hand, cornered me in the kitchen and repeated almost word for word what the man at the beach had said to me.

Luckily, I wasn't a scared kid anymore. "I agree that God made my arm like this purposely. But it’s not a punishment. It’s a way to teach people that it’s okay to be different. A tool to educate the scared and ignorant like you." I smirked at him. "You do realize that people hate most in others what they hate in themselves? So what are you lacking?"

Then I turned and walked out. I never went back to their house, and didn't speak to them at the wedding.

Kudos Earned

Today's post is dedicated to two completely amazing organizations - The Possible Dream Foundation and the Wounded Warrior Project (both links are on the side bar).

The Possible Dream Foundation

Run by Camille Geraldi, a pediatric nurse, and her husband Mike, a pediatrician, this isn't an institution by any stretch of the imagination. They have made a home for children that no one else could or would take care of.

Years ago when I worked for them, it was called The Up With Down Syndrome Foundation because when they started, all of the children they took had Down Syndrome. As they grew and expanded, taking in more and more children, the name no longer fit. So it changed as they had.

Working there was the most influential time period of my adult life. For the first time, I spent significant portions of each day with people who had much more severe problems than I did. Working with them, helping to teach them the most basic things in life, made me realize for the first time in my life, exactly how lucky I was that my disability was such a minor one. More than anyone else, those children taught what courage in the face of adversity really means.

Camille is who I want to be when I grow up :) She has the biggest, most giving heart of anyone I've ever met. Love for these children that society terms as "lesser" because of their extensive problems (many of which even make them look abnormal to outsiders) pours out of her.

I don't know how she does it. From the day I first set foot in their homes (Just about a month after Hurricane Andrew), she has been an inspiration to me. She taught me to keep a leash on my terrible temper when faced with verbal and physical prejudice. After all, as "Mom" to that many special needs kids, she knew first hand how it felt.

Check out their website if you have a chance.


The Wounded Warrior Project

I have to confess that I don't know a ton about this group, but what I do know is amazing.

I first heard about them from Celebrity Apprentice when Piers Morgan chose them as his charity that he earned money for. It is a group that:

To raise awareness and enlist the public’s aid for the needs of severely injured
service men and women,
To help severely injured service members aid and assist each other, and
To provide unique, direct programs and services to meet the needs of severely injured service members.

Considering how long our country has been involved in one violent conflict or another, and how often our service men and women are injured, it is a wonderful and needed group.

When working at The O'Callaghan Hotel in Annapolis, MD, I was lucky enough to be the night supervisor when a bunch of them came to town and stayed at our hotel. We stayed up late (well, they did, but my job was to stay up all night) talking about our disabilities. Most of them were missing a leg. They said that was much more common than a missing arm in the service sincemost loss-of-limb injuries were caused by mines.

I was amazed at how well-adjusted these men (because all the ones I met were men) were. None of the terror and lost feeling that used to show in this guy I knew in high school. He lost his arm in a drunk driving accident and ended up killing himself because he couldn't adjust.


Anyway, two admirable groups that should get more notice and acclaim than they do. (Sorry but no pics this time.)