From the Baltimore Sun:

At the request of parents, AMC Columbia theater in Columbia, Maryland, has started a series of monthly movie events for kids with special needs. The “sensory friendly” showings on Saturday mornings feature brighter lights, lower sound and no previews. Children are allowed to dance, talk and exhibit other behaviors not normally permitted during movies.

The screenings began after an 8-year-old with autism was ejected from an early showing of “Hairspray” at another theater. “She got kicked out because she can’t really sit still,” said her mother, Marianne Ross, who then contacted AMC Columbia. The program has been popular with families, and AMC is considering adding it to other markets. Last month’s selection was The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (above).

“The world is so cruel to people who are different,” said Michele Schwarzman. Her son, who has Tourette’s syndrome, has been shushed and ridiculed at conventional theaters. But at the AMC films, she said, “we can sit in the theater and nobody will comment.”

By the Associated Press in the New York Times:

Summer camps just for kids with chronic diseases are booming — places to learn about epilepsy or finally meet someone else with Tourette’s tics or slice open a cow’s heart to see what’s wrong with their own.

Now fledgling research suggests such special camps may offer more than a rite of passage these children otherwise would miss: They just might have a lasting therapeutic value.

… ”How do you live well with a chronic condition? I believe in part, the power of being amongst your peers normalizes the experience,” explains Sandra Cushner-Weinstein, a social worker at Children’s National Medical Center who founded the hospital’s weeklong camps for five illnesses, and is studying the impact on campers.

From the Vancouver Sun:

After her daughter was barred from playing on a youth soccer team because she has Down syndrome, Abbe Gates of Vancouver started a team for children with special needs.

Sadie Gates and her teammates will take the field today at McKechnie elementary in Vancouver and play soccer. There are people in this world who still believe this is out of the ordinary. This is a shame.

Sports teams get kids with disabilities onto the ice

By Michael Winerip in the New York Times:

An unsentimental look at a day in the life of Brian Collins and his son Danny at an American Special Hockey Association game in Hicksville, NY. Danny,13, has Down syndrome and plays for the Long Island Blues. The association now has 50 teams, and many of the players have Down syndrome, autism, ADD, Tourette’s syndrome, Asperger’s and cerebral palsy.

“We look like no other hockey you’ve ever seen,” said Jon Schwartz, who is the national association vice president and coach of the New Jersey Daredevils.

Danny loves playing offensive hockey. He also loves routine, French fries, Coke, pepperoni, “High School Musical” (the CD) and “The Night Before Christmas” (the book).

(more…)

Best-selling author Richard Paul Evans has a new novel featuring a narrator with Tourette’s syndrome.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

When Nathan gets snowed in at the Denver airport at Thanksgiving, he offers half his hotel suite to a stranded needy family: recently divorced single mom Addison (a massage therapist), and her two children, Lizzy and Collin. Collin, who has leukemia, cures Nathan’s Tourette’s with his gift of healing touch. Exercising his secret gift makes Collin sicker, though, and as news of his healing powers eventually leaks out, leading to a demand for his services, his condition worsens. Nathan, meanwhile, feels emboldened by his cure, and moves to address childhood woes when visiting his nursing home–bound mother. The tightly honed narrative, brimming with good intention to find courage in shared suffering, soon brings everyone together.

Excerpt in USA Today.

From the Providence Journal:

Alicia Vanasse attends Rhode Island College full-time. She is an honor student, vice president of the senior class and president of the Communications Club. She has a job as an intern in the college’s public relations office. She has friends. She dates. She owns a car, a midnight blue convertible Sebring that she loves in the way people do when they are young and the car means freedom.

She also has Tourette syndrome. Three years ago, a college life would have been unimaginable for Alicia. Now, thanks to new medication and supportive college staff, she is thriving.

“I’ve always been ‘that girl with Tourette’s,’ ” she said. “But here I’ve been given the chance to just be Alicia. People have been willing to work with me, to help me. I haven’t found that anywhere else.”

By Molly Knoedler, writing in the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press:

Tourette’s Syndrome doesn’t prevent me from doing the things I want to do. I play soccer and basketball. I’m in the school play. TS doesn’t threaten my health. So many people have (or had) TS and you probably don’t realize it. Samuel Johnson, a poet and critic who wrote “A Dictionary of English Language” had tic disorder. Jim Eisenreich, a famous baseball player, also struggled with TS but managed to continue playing baseball. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is believed to have TS, though experts are not sure.

I’ve had Tourette’s Syndrome for about a year now. I don’t know how long I’ll have to take medicine. Maybe there will be a cure found in my lifetime.

But there’s a saying that people with tic disorder have: “I have Tourette’s. Tourette’s doesn’t have me.”