Most doctors of the era advised Marie and her husband to place Karen in an institution and forget they ever had a daughter with that name. The book was not a new publication when I first read it. That’s what my brothers and I did with Tricia! They even had a dog who assigned himself the duty of Karen’s guardian. Karen’s siblings helped teach her to walk and eat and play like other children. While she had a delightful personality, Karen was no angel, and she paid the consequences just as her brother and sisters did. Karen’s parents treated her like all of their other children. Except the hardships were laced with such joyful episodes of the Killilea family loving and supporting each other, how could I feel sorry for them for long? I identified with them. A true story, Marie Killilea wrote about the hardships of raising a daughter (Karen) with CP. So when I was twelve and Tricia was two, my mom handed me a book. One of her challenges was cerebral palsy (CP). For her first two years, she was in and out of hospitals as doctors became detectives in discovering what was wrong and what, if anything, medicine could do to help. A victim of the German Measles epidemic in the mid-1960’s, Tricia entered this world with several congenital defects. One of those difficult seasons arrived early in life when my sister was born. In my own seasons of calamity I have learned to be content, and I hope I will honestly be able to say at the end of my earthly life when all seasons come to a close, “I know both how to be abased and how to abound.”
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