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Show She stands like a giant cornstalk in a wide green field. The sun glows about her body in a silhouette of edges. She is laughing and slinging herself about from the waist in large swirling circles. Then she is swinging, pumping so recklessly that I am afraid she will whip over the top of the swing. She picks up a bit of broken glass, peirces her skin with it and tears a fine pencil line of blood along the palm of her hand. Suddenly, she roars, and with one great tearing of her teeth, tears a chunk of skin and muscle from the back of her hand. I look down into the cut and there is no blood. I fold the skin back and see the bone there. My stomach turns over, and I awaken in a cold sweat. This has been one of the first nightmares about Patty. My first year of teaching, I was assigned two aides and four students. They were children who saw as one would do in lamplight, and heard many splintered sounds or pitches. They were children whose great emotional disturbances, overshadowed their retardation. Patty was the first and only child who, in her total blindness, placed her signs in my hands because there was no other way for her to communicate. She could not finger-spell and it had no meaning for her. The signs she read in my hands might never be found in any one signing school. With these children, communication was more important and if they got that far, formal signs and socialization were considered. Many of them had additional handicaps, those that are never well-defined in special education books or even in their medical counterparts. Such problems as visual-perceptual, integration of both sides of the body, secondary diabetes or continuing glaucoma, and many others, made their maturation much slower than normal children. Nearly all of them were rubella babies, with the threat of the disease re-awakening in their bodies more than once. |