Playing the Hand You're Dealt

troy_williams, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>

Raised in a surfing family, Bethany Hamilton competed professionally as a child. She was going to be the greatest, everyone said. At 13, she lost her arm and almost her life in a vicious shark attack. How could a surfer compete with part of her body missing? But in a little over a month she was back on a surfboard and doing what she had done before. If she needed to learn to do things differently, that's what she did. If she needed to work on a skill that other people took for granted, she would do it.

When I taught at Cooper, I was told at the beginning of the fall semester that one of my students would be coming in later than everyone else because of a car/trailer accident that his family had but to leave room in the Junior English class. Sure enough, Coby came loping in one morning with a big goofy grin on his face. But it was almost a shock because his head was encased in a halo or halo ring which meant 4 titanium pins were placed in his skull in a device that attached to a vest. It was needed to make sure his spine was destabilized, but it was hard to look at him without wishing that he didn't have to go through it. He answered questions from everyone about how much it hurt, brushed it off as "not too bad" and went on down the busy halls like all the rest of the students. People tried to be careful and not bump into him, afraid of what it would do. Sometimes he would do an imitation of Frankenstein to make everyone laugh. At Homecoming he came into class and looked like a piñata: cheerleaders had decorated all the contraption with crepe paper streamers. He wore it for all the time he needed and never asked for anyone to change routines because of him.

At Wilson it was the story of Wilson kid Brent who was so deathly sick at the end of the summer and needed all the medical knowledge available to get a diagnosis and treatment. When school started, he was still in the hospital although out of intensive care. So we came up with the plan as we worked with his parents that I would go to the hospital twice a week, take assignments from teachers, pick up what he had done, and keep him somewhat connected to what was happening. The first night I got there at the scheduled time of 6:30, and he wasn't in his room. I had to wait awhile because it seems he was having a wheelchair race with one of the orderlies. It wasn't so  long, but when Mama Bear Brieger found out about it, she let him know he was never to make me wait again or suffer her wrath. He went through hours of rehab and work, so when we learned he was ready to come back to school on a certain day, we stood at our doors and watched to see if  a wheelchair would roll in. Not for our Brent. He walked into the building with perhaps not the smoothest walk he had ever made but it was a walk, showing that all that rehab would bring him back to the person he had been.

Erastus "Deaf" Smith was considered the finest scout that Sam Houston had in the fight for Texas Independence after the Alamo. No one else seemed to be able to judge the number of men in an enemy's force or where the best place was to cross or how to move an army without letting the enemy know of the movement. Stories about his deafness are confusing because most say he became deaf as a child and others say it might have been later. Whenever it was, he became a great lip reader and could follow conversations in both English and Spanish. If he thought there were too many conversations in a room, he would tip his hat and go outside with his dog. But he never left any situation that he needed to solve. Houston said that there was no better fighter in the Texas Army and that more men would have been lost if Deaf hadn't taken control of the scouts. He never asked for special treatment. He did what needed to be done.

We move along our lives and never expect the unexpected to happen, but if it does, we can let it overpower us or take it in. Whether it be rehabs or dealing with adverse conditions, it is individual choice which makes us who we are and makes us only stronger.