Free Chicken Soup for the Soul: Children with Special Needs by Jack Canfield Page A

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?”
    The message translates beyond any words that I had tried to offer.
    Hope enters the room as the disbelieving father is brought in. Now the offer to connect them with the ACA is heard. There is a round of stories, handshakes, and thanks, now accompanied by smiles and laughter. I leave the family with the medical resident.
    Later, as the story is replayed with our clinic’s psychologist, my eyes fill with tears. Though my life is full and blessed, it is not every day that I can see my prostheses as gifts.
    Perhaps there are times when it is appropriate to offer our