Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children began in 1921 with a mission to help crippled children regardless of their parents’ ability to pay. Since the beginning, they have helped over 200, 000 children; I was one of them. Scottish Rite Hospital is one of the most amazing places on planet Earth – and that is an understatement. How do you begin to tell the story of a place that had such a monumental effect on your life that even 35+ years later, you remember and share the gifts and lessons learned there? Well, in the words of the King in Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, you “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
I was born in 1972 with bilateral club feet. While I've never seen pictures, it probably looked like this
When I was born, the doctors told my parents that I would never walk because the deformation was so severe. Even thirty years later at my grandmother’s funeral, some of the nurses that had been in the delivery room with me still remembered me and even commented that they had never before seen a deformation so severe. To those who see me today, I imagine that it is difficult to reconcile such a grim prognosis for a woman that they see leaping, chasing, and dancing through life. How did I beat this fate? Well, I am a talking, WALKING miracle. A miracle that was performed by God through the love and devotion of the miracle factory that is Scottish Rite hospital.
As any parent can imagine, my parents were quite distraught by the news about their first born child. But like any parent, defeat wasn’t an option. They were not ready to accept that I would be confined to the equivalent of a board on wheels to push myself around on or a wheelchair. There just had to be something else out there to help us. They began with an orthopedic doctor who did as much as he could before admitting that my case was more than he could handle. An admission that I still am thankful that he had the humility and bravery to assert. He told my parents about a hospital in Dallas that took cases like mine – the mission impossibles.
My parents took me to Scottish Rite hospital in the mid-1970s. Most of the fourteen surgeries they performed on me were new and untried. I spent most of my infancy and toddlerhood in casts, operating rooms, and semi-private hospital rooms at Scottish Rite. My parents have enough stories of me kicking off and wearing down casts to fill an entire book.
(Not me but gives you the idea.)
(I wore and slept in these - for a LONG time. I HATED these.)
But with each surgery, each cast, each long hospital stay, my feet began to turn and be corrected, and I could walk. Walk by myself with no casts or crutches. By the age of nine, I had beaten the odds and had my fourteenth and final surgery on my club feet. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t pretty. But they carried me. I could now stroll the halls of my school, perform in dance recitals, walk across the football field at homecoming, run up and down the basketball court, march down the wedding aisle, and dance at my wedding. It was nothing short of a miracle that the men and women of Scottish Rite performed on me.
That alone should be enough. The gift of walking. It was enough; but Scottish Rite gave me more. They gave me a haven, a respite from the outside world where I was always different. And many weren’t about to let me forget it. I was the kid with the weird, scarred up feet and corrective shoes. As you can imagine that didn’t go unnoticed on the elementary playground. But at Scottish Rite, I was just like all the other kids. All of us had something “wrong” with us. We were all in a wheelchair, on crutches, or walking with a limp or some other definite sign to the outside world that not every baby is born “perfect.” But none of that mattered there. We ran that place because at Scottish Rite, it was and still is all about kids.
Staying in the hospital was like going off to summer camp. There were toys, coloring books, activities with famous Dallas residents, newspaper reporters, and a staff that just let us be kids…even when we played “ding-dong-ditch” with the elevators 50 bazillion times a day. And being there in the early 80s, I got to play on the revolutionary and much coveted new home video game system – the Atari! It got to a point that my brothers and sister actually got jealous of how fun being in the hospital was!
But the gifts didn’t stop there. Being at a place where the impossible was made possible, I had the gift of seeing that a whole lot of other kids had it a whole lot worse off than I. And it taught me not to wallow in self pity and above all else, I learned empathy. I saw a girl my age that had been born with arms so deformed that she couldn’t use them. So instead she did everything with her feet. It was amazing, and I never once saw her feel sorry for herself. She was absolutely inspirational in her determination and spirit. But that is the attitude at Scottish Rite – everything is possible.
I “threw” my first board game in the lobby of that hospital. As a kid growing up with three siblings, losing on purpose was never part of the equation. One morning while waiting to be called back for one of my many checkups with the doctor, I was playing Connect Four with a girl close to my age. We played several rounds of which I won all. It was during these victories that I realized that they were all hollow. While physically she was stronger than me, she was mentally deficient and didn’t have the gift of strategy and planning that God had blessed me with. I let her win all the other rounds that we played that morning. Never had I imagined that losing could feel so good because I had discovered that day that it was more blessed to give than to receive. I also understood that I should be grateful for those intellectual gifts because God doesn’t see “fair” the same way humans do.
Now, one of my students has become one of the blessed thousands to be cared for by the staff of Texas Scottish Rite Hospital. When I found out that this child was going to Scottish Rite for his surgery and rehabilitation, I was so very, very happy for him. I know that even though his physical trials are and will be Herculean, he is having fun and getting to be a kid even while faced with adult circumstances. He is at the best possible place being cared for by the best possible people in the best possible environment that any kid could ever dream of. I know. I lived it.
No comments:
Post a Comment