In our office building there's a black guy who's part of the team that cleans the building at the end of the day. Let's call him Jim, I'm pretty sure he said he commutes to Chapel Hill from Garner. Cultural stereotypes make me to say he's an older guy, because he is older than the mental age at which I like to picture myself, which is eternally somewhere in the 20s, adjusted for inflation, so it's drifting me up towards Jack Benny's constant internal age of 39. But he is in fact probably a good deal younger than me.
So Joe told me a story not long ago about how he was coming from work one day along 40 or maybe 54 and he came across a wreck and saw a car that he recognized as his daughter's, banged up pretty badly. He pulled off and discovered that his younger daughter -- who's maybe 16 -- was in the back seat and that she couldn't feel her legs. He said that all he could think of was circulation so he got in the car and started rubbing her right leg vigorously. After a while she regained motion in that leg so he started working on the other one. Same thing. After a little while, she could move that too.
An ambulance came and took them to the hospital. She went into surgery, after which a doctor came to talk to him. She had broken her back. The doctor asked what had inspired him to rub her legs like that, and he said that all he could think of was circulation. The doctor told him that had he not done that, she would have lost use of her legs for life, but that he had saved her. Amazing.
He told me this story shortly before we headed north for George Jr's service. George was a quad-, not a paraplegic. I don't think there would have been an analogous intervention for him. But love and plain old parental instinct can do a lot under the right cirumstances.
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