A Cautionary Tale for Father's Day: Today's LA Times

[CaliforniaPeggy]

My dad saved me, and I killed him
After an injury at birth, my father's passion and perseverance guaranteed that I walked and played sports. But my last memory of him is a mixture of love and pain.

By Richard Farrell
June 19, 2009

I killed my dad. I didn't blow him away with a gun. Instead, I let him die. I pulled a kitchen chair up next to him and watched him struggle to breathe on the floor. The skin on his face turned a reddish-purple. His neck took on a bluish tint. Both his hands clutched tightly at his chest. And suddenly, the white in his eyes became spider-web etched, in blood-red lines.

Why did I do it? It's complicated.

I loved the son of a bitch more than anything on the planet. You see, 28 years earlier, I was born a cripple. A breech birth, feet first, my head stuck in the birth canal. By my first birthday, I couldn't crawl, stand or walk. My right arm and hand awkwardly clung to my torso. At first, the doctors told my dad I would never walk or run normally because the muscles in my right leg and arm would continue to atrophy.

When I was 3, Dad brought me to Children's Hospital in Boston for answers. They told him I had cerebral palsy. A loss of oxygen to my brain had destroyed brain signals to the right side of my body. The doctors recommended that I attend private schools. They gave him a long list of places that could better care for cripples like me, and they prescribed a full-length removable leg cast to wear at bedtime.

He refused to listen. No son of his was going to be a cripple. He found a doctor who instructed him in how he could take the place of my injured brain. Every morning before breakfast and every evening before bed, my dad placed me on the bedroom floor to exercise my right leg. The muscles were shrunken and twisted together. His job was to craft them straight, at any cost. Back and forth, up and down, my dad pushed and pulled the muscles into shape. He stretched them until the heel of my right foot evenly matched up to the heel of the left foot.

More, much more at link: you won't be sorry, I promise you.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-farrell19-2009jun19,0,2160571.story