Team Hoyt

Via Anna at A Rose By Any Other Name, here's a story I wasn't quite ready to believe at first glance. But here's the Snopes entry on a remarkable family's refusal to let a son's brain damage keep him - or them - down. (Snopes.com tracks down urban legends, if you don't know.)

Once again, here was a couple told their child had no chance of a meaningful life...

From the text I see being passed around the Internet the most right now (according to Snopes, this comes from a 2005 Sports Illustrated article; so far I haven't been able to find a link for people not registered at SI):

...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!"...

Then there's this article by David Reich for the Winter 2006 Boston College Magazine, which includes, among other things, information about a recent film made about Rick Hoyt:

Rick’s Eyes on the Prize is the second in a series of short-film profiles of disabled individuals directed by Team Michalczyk/Marsh, with four additional films currently being assembled or planned. According to Philip DiMattia, executive producer of Rick’s Eyes on the Prize and director of BC’s Campus School, which serves youngsters with multiple disabilities, the series, called “I’m in Here,” aims to depict “the challenges of going from being spectators in life to being active participants.”

For the record, I think human beings have a right to life and loving care even when they don't 'triumph' over disability. We are, after all, human beings and not human doings, as the saying goes. But, doggone it, I am distressed, not to mention angry, at how much vitality must have been sucked out of people over the years - how many lives have been made small needlessly - just because some know-it-alls have misused medical training to shelve (or discard) people instead of helping them reach their potential.

Update: Here's an AP article by Ron Staton from Oct. 19, 2006: Father and paralyzed son ready for last Ironman race. That doesn't mean they're giving up on triathlons, by the way, just the Ironman variety. The dad, after all, is 66 years old.