Bart spent the night in the barn. I knew he and Dude had a lot of catching up to do. As I looked out of the bedroom window, the moon cast a warm glow over the farm. I smiled, knowing my husband and I now had a wonderful story to tell our future children and grandchildren.
"Thank you, Lord," I whispered. Then the truth hit me. I'd searched longer for Dude than I'd ever lived in one place. God had used the process of finding my husband's beloved horse to renew my trust in the friend who sticks closer than a brother.
"Thank you, Lord," I whispered again as I fell asleep. "Thank you for never losing track of Dudeor me."
Lori Bledsoe
As told to Rhonda Reese
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Tina's Ten Points
She was seventeen years old and always wore a bright smile. This may not seem that unusual except that Tina suffered from cerebral palsy, a condition that left her muscles stiff and, for the most part, unmanageable. Because she had trouble speaking, it was this bright smile that reflected her true personalitya great kid. She used a walker most of the time to navigate through the crowded school hallways. A lot of times people didn't speak to her. Why? Who knows? Maybe it was because she looked different and the rest of the students didn't know how to approach her. Tina usually broke the ice with people she met in the halls (especially boys) with a big ''Hi."
The assignment was to memorize three stanzas of the poem "Don't Quit." I only made the assignment worth ten points since I figured most of my students wouldn't do it anyway. When I was in school and a teacher assigned a ten-point homework assignment, I would probably have blown it off myself. So I wasn't expecting much from today's teenagers either. Tina was in the class, and I noticed a look on her face that was different from the normal bright smile. The look was one of worry. Don't worry, Tina, I thought to myself, it's only ten points.
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The day the assignment came due arrived and as I went through my roster my expectations were met, as one by one each student failed to recite the poem. "Sorry, Mr. Krause," was the standard reply. "It's only worth ten points anyway . . . right?" Finally, in frustration and half kidding, I proclaimed that the next person who didn't recite the poem perfectly had to drop on the floor and give me ten push-ups. This was a leftover discipline technique from my days as a physical education teacher. To my surprise, Tina was next. Tina used her walker to move to the front of the class and, straining to form the words, began to try to recite the poem. She made it to the end of the first stanza when she made a mistake. Before I could say a word, she threw her walker to the side, fell to the floor and started doing push-ups. I was horrified and wanted to say, "Tina, I was just kidding!" But she crawled back up in her walker, stood in front of the class and continued the poem. She finished all three stanzas perfectly, one of only a handful of students who did, as it turned out.
When she finished, a fellow student spoke up and asked, "Tina, why did you do that? It's only worth ten points!"
Tina took her time forming the words and said, "Because I want to be like you guysnormal."
Silence fell on the whole room when another student exclaimed, "Tina, we're not normalwe're teenagers! We get in trouble all the time."
"I know," Tina said as a big smile spread across her face.
Tina got her ten points that day. She also got the love and respect of her classmates. To her, that was worth a whole lot more than ten points.
Tom Krause
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Don't Quit
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low, and the debts are high,
and you want to smile, but you have to sigh.
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don't you quit.
Life is queer with its twist and turns
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don't give up though the pace seems slow,
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out,
the silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
and you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far;
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst,
that you must not quit.
Clinton Howell
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Beat the Drum
Troubles are like babies. They only grow bigger by nursing.
Old Postcard
Capuchin monkeys are being trained to help quadriplegics with household chores, fetching and carrying. As I watch the television special about their spritely service, I have a flash memorya little monkey helped with my polio rehabilitation, too, more than forty years ago.
Age four and home from the hospital a few weeks, my days were pretty dull. The hospital bed my parents had rented had railing sides so I wouldn't fall out. It felt like an oversized crib. Morning and afternoon, Mom carried me to the tub for a hot soak and then back to the bed for tedious exercises as prescribed by the Kenny Method in favor with the local pediatrician. Still, there were long hours when Mom had to be cooking or cleaning, doing laundry or sewing. My big brother was in school, Dad at work and I was alone.
Cranks at the bottom of the bed allowed my parents to raise the head of the bed, or my knees or feet. The
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visiting nurse had instructed my folks not to leave me propped in a sitting position. The doctors feared my spine would settle in a curved position while my back and side muscles were too weak to support me upright. Nor was I allowed to lie on my tummy propped on my elbows. It would arch my back too much.
To strengthen my grip, they had given me a rubber ball to squeeze, but it was large for my hand. Squeezing it as hard as I could didn't seem to accomplish much, and I'd lay it aside in favor of a stuffed animal or a picture book. As often as not, my squirming would dislodge it from the bed covers. It would slip between the rails of the bed and go bouncing across the room to lie out of range until the next time Mom retrieved it.
During our formal exercise sessions, Mom would lay two of her fingers across my palm and tell me to squeeze as hard as I could, ten times. She was hoping to feel a little more pressure each day, but often she could feel only the first few attempts. She had no way of knowing if I was really trying or whether I had given up from boredom or frustration. I learned to show my effort on my face, scrunching my lips and brows to prove I was trying, as if one set of muscles could apologize for the others. But every day as she left to do other chores, it was still "Keep practicing with the ball, Honey."
One day Dad came home from work with a small paper bag from Woolworth's. From it he presented a mechanical monkey about four inches high. The monkey was smartly uniformed in a red felt suit with gold trim, and he carried a little snare drum on straps around his shoulders. The paws at the end of his furry arms held drumsticks, poised to strike. Coming out of the monkey's back was a rubber tube about the size of a drinking straw. At the end of the tube was a walnut-sized rubber bulb.
Dad showed me how it worked. If you squeezed the
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bulb, the monkey's arms would . . . whump, whump . . . beat the drum. Whump, whump . . . tap, tap.
"Now you try it, Carol." He put the bulb in my outstretched hand.
I squeezed. Nothing. I tried again focusing all my attention in the muscles in the palm of my hand. One of the monkey's arms moved slowly downward, but there was no sound.
Mom sounded delighted, though. "That's good, Carol. Try to do it faster." She wrapped her hand around mine. "Like this." She squeezed. Whump, whump.
"Again, Mommy," my eyes lit up. Squeeze. Tap, tap.
"Now you try again. You know how it feels." Ssqueeezze. Whump.
"I did it, Mommy!" Squeeze. Whump. Squeeze. Tap, tap. "I can do
it!"
I think it was the first exercise I chose to do on my own. I wonder if the family didn't eventually get sick of the continual whump, whump . . . tap, tap, but I don't recall anyone ever asking me to stop. Whump, whump . . . tap, tap. Maybe it was music to their ears.
Some time later, Mom persuaded me to shift to using my left hand. Things were quieter for a while. It took me a long time to get it. Some days I'd give up and switch back to my right. But by then doing it with my right hand was too easy. I'd get bored.
So doing it with my left had become a challenge, and I learned to give myself credit for getting the arm to move at all. I'd squeeze the bulb with my right hand, watching every muscle I could see, feeling how my wrist tightened, how my fingers curled, how my thumb rolled toward the fist.
Then I'd try to get the left hand to feel like that. Tighten, curl, roll. A furry arm would descend halfway to the drum and then bounce back. "Come on, Monkey, hit it," I'd say,
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as if the little guy was resisting me on purpose.
Tighten, curl, roll. The other arm would move to the drum head, but not fast enough. "Aw, you almost had it."
Tighten, curl, roll. Whump! Tighten, curl, roll. Whump, whump. "I'm doing it, Mommy!" It was working! Whump, whump. "Come see!" Squeeze. Tap, tap.
"I can hear it, Honey. Is that your left hand?" She came to the side of the bed.
"Yeah! Look!" Whump, whump . . . tap, tap.
"That's wonderful! Do it again!" Whump, whump . . . tap, tap. "Oh, Carol, that's great!"
Of such small victories is recovery built. Sound the trumpet. Beat the drum.
Carol Barre
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The Letter
To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.
Phyllis Theroux
I sat at my dining-room table, signing my name to the most difficult letter I'd ever penned. The letter was to my son Luke's birth mom. This was not the first time I had reached out to the woman whose name I didn't know. I'd sent several letters over the years with photos of Luke, which the adoption agency had agreed to forward, but had never received a single reply. I didn't know if Luke's birth mom had even read my letters.
Please read this letter, I prayed as I folded the paper and slipped it into its envelope. Luke's life may depend on it.
With four teenagers of our own, my husband Mark and I still felt we had more love to give. And so we adopted Luke, now six, and two years later Matthew.
When Luke was one year old the pediatrician ran a routine blood test: "Your son has sickle-cell disease," the doctor grimly informed us.
"People die from that!" I gasped.
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A gene inherited from both of his birth parents had caused Luke to be born with defective red blood cells.
"As he grows older Luke will probably suffer anemia and extremely painful swelling in his joints," the doctor said. "But we can give Luke monthly transfusions of healthy blood to help keep up his strength."
I thanked God for every healthy day Luke enjoyed. But when Luke was three, he caught a cold and was having trouble breathing. We admitted Luke to the hospital immediately for IV antibiotics.
Luke had acute chest syndrome. Large clumps of sickle-shaped red blood cells were clogging the vessels in his lungs. The blockage was preventing Luke's blood from getting enough oxygen. This caused further sickling, which led to even more blockage in a vicious cycle that was spiraling dangerously out of control.
I held Luke's tiny hand while a heart-lung bypass machine struggled to raise his blood-oxygen levels.
Finally, Luke began to rally.
"Luke has been through quite an ordeal but he is feeling much better now," I wrote to my son's birth mom, who, I had learned from the adoption agency, was a single mother of three with little money, struggling to finish her education.
After his crisis Luke's doctor increased his transfusions from monthly to every third week, but this only forestalled the inevitable. Soon Luke was back in the hospital fighting once again for his life.
Luke recovered from the second crisis, but I knew it was only a matter of time before my son succumbed to his illness. "Isn't there anything more we can do?" I begged the doctors.
Then, Luke's hematologist related some exciting news. "There's a chance Luke's sickle-cell disease could be cured with a bone-marrow transplant," he told us. "The new
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marrow would produce healthy blood cells that wouldn't carry the sickle-cell disease."
My heart soared, but it landed with a thud when the doctor inquired, "Do you know if Luke has any siblings?" To perform a transplant, they would have to locate a matching donor. "A blood brother or sister would offer the best hope for a successful antigen match," the doctor explained.
I anguished over what to do. "Do I even have the right to ask Luke's birth mother for help?" I asked an adoption agency counselor.
"Luke is your child. You have a right to do whatever it takes to save his life," the counselor replied without hesitation.
And so I penned a letter describing the situation to Luke's birth mom. "Would you consider having your other children tested as possible marrow donors?" I wrote. I dropped the letter into the mailbox and then waited and prayed.
Two weeks later the hematologist called. "Luke's birth mom had her children tested, and I just got the results from her doctor," he said, excited. "One of them is a 100 percent match, and he can't wait to become his brother's marrow donor."
"She brought him into this world, and now he'll have a second chance to live a long and happy life," I told Mark.
The cutting-edge transplant was performed at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. Luke received eight days of strong chemotherapy to kill off his diseased bone marrow. Meanwhile, many hundreds of miles away, one of Luke's older brothers visited a local hospital where doctors extracted a few ounces of his healthy bone marrow. The precious cargo was rushed to Michigan, where the doctor used a simple IV line to infuse the life-giving marrow cells into Luke's bloodstream.
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Within weeks, tests revealed that Luke's new bone marrow was taking hold and already producing healthy red blood cells. Two weeks later Luke was ready to go home, his sickle-cell disease gone forever.
In a letter I shared the happy news with Luke's birth mom, who this time wrote back:
I've written many letters but never had the courage to mail them. Many times I've felt like I did the wrong thing, but now I know it was right. I never could have given Luke the medical attention he needed. Now I know he's right where God needed him to be. Luke has two families who love him. He's a very lucky little boy.
I think I'm the lucky one. I get to watch Luke grow up healthy and strong.
Julane DeBoer
As told to Bill Holton
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Just Do What You Can
It was a chilly fall day when the farmer spied the little sparrow lying on its back in the middle of his field. The farmer stopped his plowing, looked down at the frail, feathered creature and inquired, ''Why are you lying upside down like that?"
"I heard the sky is going to fall today," replied the bird.
The old farmer chuckled. "And I suppose your spindly little legs can hold up the sky?"
"One does what one can," replied the plucky sparrow.
D'ette Corona
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Chicken Soup Unsinkable Soul Page 7
