From the Boston Globe:

Volunteers with disabilities in Burlington, Massachusetts, visit all of the town’s second-grade classrooms each year to let kids know what it’s like to live “differently” with their disabilities.

“We want to help kids not to be afraid of people with disabilities,” said the group’s chairman.

David Murphy, who has diabetes, explained how he lost part of his left leg after it failed to heal from a bad bruise, as the second-graders passed around an extra prosthetic leg he had brought with him.

“Were you sad when you didn’t have your leg?” Nisha Chhayani, from Nelson’s class, asked Murphy.

“Well, I was at first, a little bit,” he said. “Then, I wasn’t anymore.”

In an editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Maureen Downey praises a U.S. District Court decision that prohibits the state of Georgia from overruling doctors in determining the care children receive under Medicaid. The state has consistently created barriers that needlessly stress parents and prohibit kids from getting the care they need. Doctors should stand up for the right of children to receive the services they’re entitled to get, she says.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state matching program that pays for medical assistance for children from low-income families and those with disabilities.

Earlier post here.

From Fox Channel 5 in Atlanta:

For the next two weeks, more than 400 kids with cancer from all over Georgia will enjoy just being kids at Camp Sunshine outside Atlanta.

The camp provides all the typical camp delights — swimming, fishing, boating, archery, crafts and more — as well as giving kids safe place to be together among others who understand their experiences. Some of the campers get their chemotherapy at camp, scheduled during rest periods so they won’t have to miss any of the fun. With video. (Image: screen capture from Fox website.)

Related story: Cancer survivor becomes cancer nurse

From the New York Times:

Kendall Bailey, a 19-year-old breaststroker who has cerebral palsy and autism, qualified to represent the United States in the Beijing Paralympics this fall. But the U.S. Paralympics organization then formally requested that he be declared ineligible to compete because he has intellectual as well as physical disabilities — a request that was withdrawn after Connie Shaw, his mother strongly objected.

Mrs. Shaw has been left with questions similar to those of other parents who fight bureaucracies they think are interfering with their disabled children’s rights and dreams. Was U.S. Paralympics really trying to protect Kendall when it formally requested that he be rendered ineligible for the Beijing Games? Or did team officials file the appeal simply not wanting the distraction of handling a 6-foot-6-inch 19-year-old with an elementary-school mind and a nursery-school temperament?

Mrs. Shaw said she thinks the U.S. Olympic Committee was acting out of ignorance.

(more…)

From the Los Angeles Times:

Doctors are concerned about the broad availability of over-the-counter chelation agents that are being marketed to parents of children with autism. Such products are risky and have not been proven effective, they say.

“This whole chelation therapy craze is one of my pet peeves,” says Hilary Godwin, chair of environmental health sciences at UCLA. “It’s not something you should be doing on your own.”

Columnist Tom Utley in the UK Daily Mail says he’s wary of Debbie Purdy’s efforts to challenge Britain’s assisted suicide law. Purdy (left, celebrating court victory with husband Omar Puente) has multiple sclerosis and says she plans to kill herself at Dignitas, a controversial euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. She says she wants to make sure that her husband will not be prosecuted if he aids her in making arrangements for assisted suicide.

Utley thinks Purdy is really trying to legalize assisted suicide in Britain — a prospect he finds alarming.

In the Netherlands, MPs voted in 2000 to legalise euthanasia, assuring the world: ‘This is only for people who are in great pain and have no prospect of recovery.’

Within three years, more than one per cent of all deaths in Holland were being deliberately inflicted by doctors.

We saw the same phenomenon here with abortion. When it was legalised in 1967, we were assured it would be carried out only if continuing the pregnancy would mean risk to the life or mental health of the mother, risk to the physical or mental health of existing children or ’substantial’ risk of the child being born ’seriously handicapped’.

Today, abortion is widely seen simply as an alternative to contraception, and 500 fetuses are killed every day. Do we really want to go down that road with euthanasia?

If so, how long will it be before doctors start bumping off old women like my grandmother, who say they want to die but don’t really mean it?

Related story: Woman wins right to review of law on assisted suicide

From the Chillicothe [Ohio] Gazette:

A trio of valedictorians from high schools in Ross County, Ohio, demonstrates diversity.

Molly Clairemont (left) is legally blind. Marcus Edwards was the first African American valedictorian from his high school in 70 years. Another valedictorian, Heather Nichols, has metatrophic dysplasia, a rare form of dwarfism. Nichols received a full scholarship to Ohio University-Chillicothe, and hopes to be a middle school teacher at a school for deaf children.

Clairemont will attend Otterbein College and plans to major in physics. “I really want to understand the world around me better and do something challenging. Then pass it on to other people,” she said. “It’s a mission to become as good as anybody else without a disability would be, so nobody looks at me differently.”