Do read this true story about making a difference. Very very inspiring.
Given you are reading this, I want to let you know that you are important to me.
Who you are does makes a difference, I want you to know that.
Please accept this a blue ribbon and pass it on to as many people you can.
Thank you Charul for passing this story.
Be ready! You will cry watching what a father’s love can do for both father and son, a father’s love which the world needs very much. They are really an inspiration for both the able-bodied and disabled. You must read this article and watch the youtube video at the end of it. It brought tears to my eyes and I don’t cry easily. The video touches me in ways I never knew. The story is about human courage. The story is about father and son. I’m now a father to two. I realized there is so much more I can do for my children.
This is the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen. I am absolutely in AWE of this man. Please watch the video, too — I am sitting here at my computer at a loss for words. There are no words for this, only tears filled with emotion.
A MUST Watch Video
This Father does it all just for the purpose of seeing the smile on his son’s face. If you want to see the most profound reflection of the Father’s love for us that you’ve ever seen … watch. Time taken to watch this is the best time you’ve ever spent on email.
Read this and then watch the video at the end. You won’t be disappointed.
[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]
Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars — all in the same day.
Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?
And what has Rick done for his father? Not much — except save his life.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.
“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life,” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an institution.”
But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”
“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.
Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”
Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”
That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”
And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”
How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.
Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?
Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 — only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.
“No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”
And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”
So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.
Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.
That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.
“The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad would sit in the chair and I would push him once.”
Smallest and cutest women on planet
Thank you Ravi Bhavsar for forwarding these images to me.
I just love these pics. and what I’m also present to is God’s beauty and cuteness.
A picture began circulating in November. It should be ‘The Picture of =he Year,’ or perhaps, ‘Picture of the Decade.’ It won’t be. In fact,unless you =btained a copy of the US paper which published it, you probably would ever have seen it.
The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by surgeon named Joseph Bruner.
The baby was diagnosed w ith spina bifida and would not survive if r emoved from his mother’s womb. Little Samuel’s mother, Julie Armas, is on obstetrics nurse in Atlanta She knew of Dr. Bruner’s remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville , he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.
During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr. Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon’s finger. Dr.Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile.
The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the =icture, ‘Hand of Hope.’ The text explaining the picture begins, ‘The tiny hand of =1-week- old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother’s uterus to =rasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.’
Little Samuel’s mother said they ‘wept for days’ when they saw the picture. She said, ‘The photo reminds us pregnancy isn’t about disability or an illness, it’s about a little person.
Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful.
Now see the actual picture, and it is awesome…incredible….and hey, pass it on. The world needs to see this one!
- Thanks to Raymond for sharing this information with all of us –
Here is the true story of Patrick Henry Hughes and his father, Patrick is blind and cannot walk since childhood. Its very inspiring to see what he has accomplished in his life. He is a true inspiration. Don’t miss this video!
Don’t miss this true spirit of dancing. Thanks to Anupamaa for sending this video to me. Guy in the Dance has only one leg but you’ll surpirsed the way he has danced and the way he is celebrating true spirit of dancing.
