Four years ago on a late night, Colette Smith, 53, sat alone in her living room watching TV. The rest of her family had gone to bed earlier. Suddenly, she noticed her heart-rate speeding up. It slowed, but then happened again a few minutes later; this time the rapid pulse continued for ten minutes. “I thought it was strange, and it had never happened before—it made me sit up and pay attention.” She woke up her husband, and together they guessed that she was having heart troubles. Smith wasn’t. But she was experiencing the symptoms of a deadly disease.

Her husband drove her to the ER where a doctor suggested they do a CAT scan to check for blood clots in her lungs. “I knew when the doctor came to give me the results of the CAT scan that he looked concerned. He said they found a nodule in my left lung and several in my right. He told me to follow up with my primary care doctor. I didn’t think anything of it, though.” The presence of nodules don’t always mean a cancer diagnosis—here are 13 things to know about lung nodules.

When her regular doctor thought the CAT scan results were inconclusive, and Smith put the event out of her mind. “A year later, my primary doctor called me back and said he wanted to repeat the CAT scan to see if anything had changed.” She went in, and the next day she got a call from the doctor—even though he was away on vacation. “I knew that wasn’t good. The nodules were still there, and he wanted to do a PET scan.”

Though Smith’s PET scan results were also inconclusive, her doctor wasn’t satisfied. “I asked what he would do if he were in my shoes—he said he would take it one step further.” Smith found a highly recommended cardiothoracic surgeon. “He looked at my scans and said he could tell right away it was 1A lung cancer. I wasn’t so sure, so I asked for a biopsy.” When the biopsy was inconclusive, Smith’s surgeon recommended she get surgery to find exactly what they were dealing with. “I had the surgery and he was right. It was stage 1A lung cancer. The surgeon removed the upper lobe of my left lung, along with lymph nodes that may have been affected.”

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death among men and women; about 142,670 people will die from the disease this year alone. Though smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer, many people—like Smith—develop it with no history of smoking. Often, patients will have no obvious symptoms until the cancer has spread. If symptoms are present, they’re likely to be a chronic or worsening cough (here’s when to worry about a cough that won’t go away), coughing up blood, chest pain that worsens with deep breaths or laughter, hoarseness, loss of appetite, weight loss, shortness of breath, fatigue, chronic lung infections, and sudden onset wheezing. Shoulder pain may also be a symptom—though that’s just one of possible reasons you have pain in your shoulder.

Though her recovery was difficult, Smith is feeling much better. She credits her walking routine and regular therapy with a mental health provider. “It’s amazing how much movement helps with pain management. Finding a therapist was also helpful because I needed someone I could trust and connect with outside of my family, who could help me understand it all.”

Because her doctors caught the cancer early, Smith did not require radiation, chemotherapy, or other targeted cancer therapies. After surgery, Smith was declared cancer-free. “I was one of the lucky ones,” she says. She goes every six months for scans to check for recurrence. Smith’s words of advice to others facing a frightening diagnosis? “This is probably one of the worst things you’ll ever face, so be sure to get care that you’re comfortable with—don’t settle for less.”

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When Army surgeon Rhonda Cornum regained consciousness after her helicopter crashed, she looked up to see five Iraqi soldiers pointing rifles at her. It was 1991, and her Black Hawk had been shot down over the Iraqi desert. Dazed from blood loss, with a busted knee, two broken arms, and a bullet in her shoulder, the then-36-year-old medic was subjected to a mock execution by her captors, sexually assaulted, and held prisoner for a week.

Her crisis included textbook causes for post-traumatic stress: a near-death experience, sexual assault, utter helplessness. And yet, after her release and medical rehabilitation, she surprised psychiatrists by focusing on ways she’d improved. “I became a better doctor, a better parent, a better commander, probably a better person,” she says.

Cornum’s experience is far from unique. The term post-traumatic growth, coined by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, describes the surprising benefits many survivors discover in the process of healing from a traumatic event. After counseling cancer survivors, the bereaved, the severely injured, veterans, and prisoners, the researchers found growth in five main areas: personal strength, relationships with others, perspective on life, appreciation of life, and spirituality.

Tedeschi doesn’t believe trauma is a good thing. But, he says, “in the wake of trauma, people become more aware of the fragility in life, and that unsettles some while it focuses others. This is the paradox: People become more vulnerable yet stronger.”

Cornum is convinced that resilience is like a muscle; it strengthens when exercised and atrophies when neglected. In 2009, she became the director of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, a training regimen that now falls under the umbrella of the Army’s Ready and Resilient (R2) initiative.

Today, every U.S. Army soldier takes part in resilience training, which has been shown to significantly decrease substance abuse and increase good coping skills, adaptability, and character strength. The training is so successful that psychologists believe it can help people from all walks of life.

The program is something of a dichotomy. The military thrives on teamwork, yet during resilience training, soldiers concentrate on self-awareness. They learn how to focus on the present moment.

Practicing a rhythmic breathing exercise, participants inhale deeply and exhale fully in a slow cadence. Focusing on their breathing helps them unlock muscle tension. Harvard University neurobiologist Sara Lazar has shown that “meditation can literally change your brain.” It can actually shrink the amygdala, the “fear center” in the brain that might be enlarged after a trauma and trigger flashbacks of anxiety and panic.

Because being thankful may help lower anxiety levels, the Army instructs soldiers to “hunt the good stuff” by keeping gratitude journals. Studies at the University of California, Davis, show that grateful people not only report being more content with their lives but also have fewer medical symptoms and more energy. Just as important to the Army, cultivating gratitude tends to make people more social and willing to help and work with others. So every day, soldiers jot down three things they were grateful for in the previous day.

To help them learn from their good fortune, they write about each event using the following prompts: Why has this good thing happened? What does this good thing mean to me? What can I do tomorrow to enable more of this good thing? How did I or others contribute to this good thing?

If pen and paper aren’t handy, GIs are encouraged to blot out feelings of self-blame with a tactic known as detecting “icebergs”—beliefs and values that fuel out-of-proportion reactions.

For instance, if an action causes a soldier to feel shame, he or she is instructed to work through it by asking these questions: What is the most upsetting part of the situation to me? What thoughts are triggering the emotions and reaction that I’m having? Identifying our own precepts as icebergs allows us to recognize whether they’re true obstacles to helping ourselves or relating to others, and learn how to steer around them.

One of the most important findings about resiliency is also one of the most basic. Resilient people have one trait in common: a sense of optimism, says Cornum, who retired from the service as a brigadier general in 2012. As she told medium.com, “They believe a problem is in a time frame and not forever, and that there is something you can do about it.”

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In 2012, Kim Stemple, a special-education teacher, found herself tethered to an IV in a Boston hospital being treated for one of several diseases she had been diagnosed with, including lupus and lymphoma. The normally ebullient Stemple was naturally getting very depressed. And then a friend gave her a medal. Make sure you’re aware of the silent lupus signs you shouldn’t ignore.

Before she got too sick to exercise, Stemple had been a marathon runner. The medal came from a racing partner who had just finished a half marathon 
in Las Vegas and hoped the keepsake would act as a kind of vicarious pick-
me-up. It worked like a charm—and then some.

After Stemple hung the medal from her hospital IV pole, other patients said they wanted medals too. That got Stemple thinking. “A medal is a simple way 
to give a positive message,” she told 
pilotonline.com. And so was born 
her charity, We Finish Together, which collects medals from ­strangers—
runners, dancers, swimmers, singers, and even spelling bee winners—and donates them to all sorts of people in need. Talk about meaningful acts of kindness that don’t cost a cent.

Recipients have included hospital patients, residents of homeless shelters, and veterans. Part of the process involves the donor writing a personalized note on the ribbon. “This gives them a connection to someone,” says Stemple. “If they receive a medal, they know someone cares.”

Can a simple medal really make a difference? Yes, says Joan Musarra, who suffers from ­pulmonary fibrosis. “I opened my package containing my new medal and the notes of positive, warm thoughts. I was overwhelmed,” she wrote to Stemple. “At that moment, I was sitting on my couch breathing through an oxygen cannula because my lungs have deteriorated so badly. It means so much to me to feel that I am not alone.” Read on for more moving stories about the kindness of strangers.

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Phyllis and Darren Sudman brought their second child, Simon, home from the hospital in the fall of 2004. Everything was going along as smoothly as is possible with a newborn and a two-year-old—their daughter Sally. Like all new parents, the Philadelphia couple was busy trying to get Simon on a regular sleep schedule and encouraging Sally to bond with her new brother. Everything was going well—until the unimaginable happened.

“It was an exciting time,” Phyllis recalls. Simon was a healthy baby boy who scored high on the APGAR scale. (APGAR stands for “Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration” and is used to assess newborn health. The higher the APGAR score, the better the baby is doing.) “There were really no issues.”

And then, at four months, Simon died in his sleep. Doctors believed the cause to be SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), but the couple’s pediatrician told them to get their hearts checked. That’s when Phyllis learned she had long QT syndrome, a genetic heart condition marked by fast, chaotic heartbeats; it has been linked to up to 15 percent of all sudden infant deaths. Phyllis had no idea she had the condition because she had never experienced any symptoms. Research suggests that having your baby sleep like this can reduce the risk of SIDS.

“Once I was diagnosed, we knew we needed to do something more to make sure no other family had to go through what we did,” she says. The Sudman’s did something incredible: They founded Simon’s Heart, an organization that has since saved countless lives by raising awareness of sudden cardiac death, funding close to 19,000 free heart screenings (and counting) and providing 100 automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) in places where kids learn and play. AEDs can save someone in cardiac arrest by resetting the chaotic electrical activity in the heart—that’s why it’s crucial to know where the AED is at your gym. Basketball gyms may have the greatest need for these devices: A recent study found that the majority of sudden deaths in youth sports were heart-related and occurred most often in middle-school basketball players.

The group has been behind the passage of legislation known as Sudden Cardiac Arrest Prevention Act in 14 states—it encourages education on sudden cardiac arrest for students, athletes, parents, and coaches. Simon’s Heart also created Heartbytes, the first-ever youth heart digital registry of kids—their heart screenings, medical screenings, family history, and more—which researchers can tap for study data. So far, this data has been the basis of four studies presented at major medical conferences, and it’s helping change the standard of care. The Sudmans also created a crowd-funding platform to help youth facilities get AED devices.

The Sudmans and Simon’s Heart have even bigger goals: They’re hoping to change the standard of care for diagnosing newborns and young adults with conditions that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death. In the United States, children get a pulse oximetry exam at birth to check their blood oxygen level. This can reveal a congenital heart defect. After that, the doctor will listen to a newborn’s heart with a stethoscope, but research shows that a fuller heart screening—family history, physical exam, and a non-invasive measure of the heart’s electrical activity (ECG)—is much more effective at detecting heart conditions and preventing sudden cardiac arrest than just listening to the heart.

Steven A. Shapiro, DO, the Chair of Pediatrics at Abington Hospital-Jefferson Health in Abington, PA. has been involved with Simon’s Heart since the Sudman’s launched it. “If a baby dies of SIDS then mom, dad, and siblings should all get their hearts checked,” he says. There aren’t always warning signs, he says. The two most common risk factors are fainting during or after exercise and the sudden death of family member under the age of 50.

“The Sudmans could have crawled under a rock after Simon died and nobody would have blamed them, but instead they wanted Simon’s legacy to be that no other family goes through what they went through,” he says. “The legacy of Simon is to lessen the likelihood of a sudden cardiac event in childhood or young adulthood.” Just in case there isn’t an AED available, make sure you know how to perform CPR to help keep someone alive.

The post My Healthy Baby Had Cardiac Arrest—Here’s How It Could Have Been Prevented appeared first on Reader's Digest.

The day it all began

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Tom Frey reported to duty as a detective for the New York City Police Department. Like many on that fateful morning, he never imagined it would be the day his life changed forever. After the Twin Towers collapsed, Frey was assigned to Ground Zero where he set up DNA testing sites for families to bring personal items of loved ones to be tested and worked alongside a bucket brigade for rescue and recovery. When the debris was transferred to a landfill on Staten Island, Frey spent eight months painstakingly sifting through the dust and rubble, looking for human remains. “We worked for weeks with no days off, searching for body parts and pieces of the planes. In the very beginning, we only had paper masks at Ground Zero, but once we moved to the landfill we were given hazardous material suits. When the Red Cross brought us lunch each day we had to take the masks and hoods off to eat, and the white dust, asbestos, and whatever else from the rubble blew onto us and our food. It was really rough.” Even after the rubble had been cleared, Frey says he worked for years assisting in the identification of remains from the attacks and notifying families of victims.

“It caused a fire in my lungs”

In February 2016, Frey says everything “hit the fan.” After routine check-up and blood work with his doctor, Frey got a call from the nurse the following day. His white blood cells were elevated, and after more testing, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer common among first responders of 9/11 due to the toxic debris ingested when the towers collapsed. “I went through nine rounds of chemo and started having a little shortness of breath. I saw a pulmonologist who diagnosed me with pulmonary fibrosis—he said it was a combination of the debris dust and chemotherapy that caused it.” One of the chemotherapies Frey received contained bleomycin, and pulmonary fibrosis is a side effect. “I asked him what we do to treat it, and he said, ‘nothing.’ He said that the chemicals I breathed had created a sort of fire in my lungs, and it scarred them.”

Frey went home and researched the condition, and what he found shocked him. “It said I had three to five years to live. I thought I had written it down wrong. I went to my oncologist and told him what I read. I asked, ‘What do I do? This can’t be true.’ He said he was going to pray for me.” Pulmonary fibrosis is a progressive and fatal lung disease characterized by scarring in the lungs that reduces function. Symptoms include shortness of breath, dry cough, gradual weight loss, fatigue, aching joints, and clubbing of the tips of fingers and toes. About 200,000 Americans are affected by the disease, and 50,000 are diagnosed annually. There are many forms of the disease, and it can be caused by environmental exposure to toxins and certain medications, as in Frey’s case. Treatment options include medications to slow the progression of the disease, supplemental oxygen, steroids, and clinical trials. Shortness of breath is a symptom that should never be ignored—here are 58 others.

A new normal

After completing his chemotherapy treatment plan (minus the bleomycin), Frey began scouring the internet to learn more about pulmonary fibrosis. His searching led him to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, a site he says has made all the difference in his journey with the disease. “I saw that people on the website referred each other to the Mayo Clinic. I met with a doctor at the Jacksonville, Florida center and started a treatment plan. I started pulmonary rehabilitation and began using oxygen.” Frey’s cancer is now in remission and he will be eligible for a lung transplant once he has been cancer-free for five years. “I just keep moving. If you keep moving, you keep living.”

Many of Frey’s colleagues that responded to the World Trade Center attacks also have pulmonary fibrosis, as well as cancer due to the toxic chemicals they ingested during recovery efforts. “I know many from the police department have been diagnosed, and I’m sure the fire department is the same. A study recently came out showing that diagnoses’ are rising for the first responders of September 11th.” Frey’s lung function is currently at 50 percent, and he says it’s stable- a good sign. Here are 12 signs your lungs may be in trouble.

Today, the retired detective is an ambassador for the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation, traveling the country to encourage others with the disease. “It becomes an elephant in the room, you think maybe it will just go away, but it doesn’t. With every breath you know it’s there. If you have this, you have to go to the foundation’s website and get the resources. Go to the support group meetings. Doctors only have 15 minutes to offer you, but these people are going through the same thing. Some have lived with this for years. They give me hope.” Read on for 12 more secrets the government doesn’t want you to know about what happened on September 11.

The post I Was a First Responder at 9/11—Why I’m Telling My Story 18 Years Later appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Jeramie Miller is the last guy you’d expect George Vorel to hire. After all, Vorel’s company, Envirosafe, is an industrial steel processor outside Pittsburgh where employees operate heavy equipment as they sandblast and paint steel used in bridges and buildings around the country. And Miller is a former drug user and dealer. What’s more, he introduced Vorel’s own daughter to heroin soon after she graduated from high school, in 1998.

It took Vorel’s daughter until 2005 to get clean. Once she was, she became a drug and alcohol counselor. Among her goals was to get her friend Jeramie clean too. He’d ended up in jail for selling and possessing drugs and aggravated assault, and she thought a job would help him get his life on track. “I remember her saying, ‘I’ll mention something to my dad,’” says Miller, now 40. “And I was like, ‘Huh? Are you sure? Your dad dad?’” Yes, George Vorel—the man who’d once chased this dangerous guy out of the house.

Vorel had always resisted hiring anyone with a record at Envirosafe. “This business is tough enough without bringing in addicts and criminals,” he would say. But Vorel, now 70, developed a newfound faith in his later years. Through his church, he became a teacher in a prison ministry. Empathy and forgiveness are important to him. “God equipped us to have a heart,” he says.

So Vorel offered Miller a job as a laborer and even invited his new employee to carpool. Miller was a nervous wreck the first time he settled into the passenger seat for the 70-minute trip. But “within five minutes, I relaxed,” he says. “I thought, OK, he’s human.”

Storytellers both, the men talked and talked. During their trips, Vorel would learn that Miller had once been a baseball phenom. Miller learned that he and Vorel both shared a birthday with Abe Lincoln: February 12. Soon, a genuine friendship flourished, as did Miller’s performance at work, where he was promoted to a supervisory role.

In part because of Miller’s success, Vorel hired more men with checkered pasts, including one who served time for homicide and another who was living under a bridge. Vorel, who runs the business with his son, ­estimates that of his 30 employees, 80 to 90 percent have backgrounds that would make it tough for them to get work. Men such as Gregory Fowler, Kavin Mann, Zachary Allen, and Patrick Thunberg all landed jobs they otherwise might not have. Thunberg was hired as a laborer in 2014 and has since been promoted to shop foreman. “We are saving lives, and that’s huge to me,” Vorel says.

In hiring former addicts, Vorel isn’t naive. He knows that many of them won’t work out. In fact, that’s what happened with Miller. After three and a half years on the job, he relapsed following the death of his grand­father. The company gave Miller several chances but let him go after a few positive drug tests. “It broke our hearts, but we had to send him on his way,” Vorel says. He is undeterred by Miller’s setback, and he still refers former inmates from the prison ministry to work at Envirosafe.

Miller now has a job painting trucks and is clean again. But he and Vorel realized that something was missing in their lives: their conversations. Now they meet for lunch a couple times a year and catch up just the way they did on their car rides, greeting each other with big hugs.

“I say, ‘I love you, man,’ and he says, ‘Hey, I love you, too,’” Vorel says. “That’s what I live for.”

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I had very good parents. My mother came to this country from Scotland by herself when she was 11, and she didn’t have much of an education. My dad was kind of a street kid, and he eventually went into the insurance business, selling nickel policies door-to-door. It was the 1930s, a time when America was a lot more racist and segregated than it is now.

One day, my dad asked his boss, “What’s the toughest market to sell?” and the insurance guy replied, “Well, black people. They don’t buy insurance.” My dad thought, But they have kids; they have families. Why wouldn’t they buy insurance? So he said, “Give me Harlem.” He took the Harlem territory and sold nickel policies; every Friday, he would go around and collect the nickel and give his customers a receipt on the policy. Check out these 31 funny, heartwarming stories about dads.

When my dad died in 1994, I talked about him on The Tonight Show. I told the story of how he worked in Harlem and how he always taught us to be open-minded and not to say or think racist things. Then one day, I got a letter from a woman who was about 75 years old.

She wrote that when she was a 
little girl, a man used to come to her house to collect on policies, and he would always bring her a lollipop. She said this man was the only white person who had ever come to dinner at their house and the only white 
person she had ever had dinner with period until she got to be almost an adult. The man was very kind to her, she said, and his name was Angelo—was this my father?

The letter made me cry. I called her up and said yes, that was in fact my dad, and she told me how kind he had been to her family. Her whole attitude toward white people was based 
on that one nice man she met in her childhood, who always treated her with kindness and respect and always gave her a piece of candy and asked her what she wanted 
to be when she grew up. From this experience, I learned a valuable life lesson: to never judge people 
and to be open-minded and kind to others. Next, read a heartwarming story about a woman who wrote a letter to her late father and got an incredible response.

For more great life lessons, buy your own copy of The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons From Extraordinary Lives By Katie Couric.

The post Jay Leno Always Knew His Dad Had a Big Heart—Then an Unexpected Letter from a Viewer Proved That He Changed Lives appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When he first began to struggle to breathe three years ago, John Sousa blamed the trouble on spring allergies. But the wheezing continued into summer, so he began using an asthma inhaler. That didn’t help either because Sousa’s real problem was that his heart was failing—and he was just 41 years old.

Since Sousa couldn’t seem to catch his breath no matter what he tried, he went to see his doctor, who blamed the shortness of breath on an infection in his lungs. Sousa got prescriptions for antibiotics and steroids. “The medications the doctor gave me helped for a little bit, and then I just got worse. I knew something wasn’t right, he tells Reader’s Digest.

Next, his doctor ordered an EKG: “That was the first time we realized that my heart was involved,” he says. Once he saw a cardiologist, the news got worse. “They did an echocardiogram and blood work. They gave me a diagnosis of chronic heart failure. I was completely overwhelmed and in denial. I took the medications and reduced my sodium intake, but I kept thinking maybe it was a virus. I thought I would get better and go back to my normal life.” There are some real health benefits to cutting back on salt—check out the 15 ways your body changes for the better.

Though Sousa followed his doctors’ orders to exercise and eat better, his heart function continued to decline. “They made me wear a defibrillator vest that would shock my heart if it had an episode. I was losing weight. My cardiologist said they weren’t seeing the improvement they wanted, and they would be implanting a defibrillator. That’s when reality really hit home.” Once the permanent defibrillator was implanted, Sousa says the severity of his condition could no longer be denied. “I finally wrapped my head around it: This was something I was going to have to live with and manage.”

Shortness of breath, fluid retention, fatigue, and irregular heartbeat are often over-looked symptoms of heart failure. Here are some other silent signs of heart failure to watch for.

Heart failure specialist Andrew T. Darlington, DO with the Piedmont Heart Institute tells Reader’s Digest that Sousa’s initial reaction to the diagnosis is not unusual. “We think that the older population is most affected, but that’s not the case. It can affect anyone, and it does come as a shock to those who receive the diagnosis at a younger age.”

Dr. Darlington says the most common risk factors for developing the condition are high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and coronary heart disease. “There are some cases that we call idiopathic, where no traditional risk factors are identified, but in the vast majority of cases the patient has at least one.”

As for Sousa, his health history included struggles with his weight and high blood pressure. Once he was placed on Entresto, a medication that has been proven to keep heart failure patients out of the hospital and living longer, things began to turn around. “I noticed I could be more active than before. I would walk in our mall and I was able to increase my walking time to 30 minutes.” Sousa’s healthy lifestyle changes—exercise, healthy diet, monitoring his blood pressure—also began to help. Here are some heart-healthy findings that might just save your life.

Dr. Darlington says that heart failure is a chronic and progressive condition that weakens the heart and slows blood circulation. “Hospitalization of patients is the biggest prognostic indicator for us as medical professionals. Hospitalizations are a red flag because we know that up to 10 percent of patients who have been hospitalized with heart failure will die within 30 days after they’re discharged. There are about 900,000 hospitalizations for heart failure a year, and that works out to two a minute. We work really hard to mitigate a patient’s risk within that first 30 days out of the hospital.” For Sousa, changing the way he eats was key; check out the best and worst diets for heart health.

Today, Sousa says the diagnosis has changed his life for the better. “Once I realized that heart failure is manageable, and accepted that this is what I have, it made me appreciate my life more. I take my medications and do what the doctors tell me to do. I went from thinking I was going to die to realizing that I’m alive now, so I’m going to enjoy it.”

The post My “Asthma” Turned Out to Be Chronic Heart Failure appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Bill McDonnell was going bonkers. Deer season had begun, but it was colder than usual, so here he was, sitting among the mounted bucks inside his rancher in Winchester, Virginia, watching winter through the windows.

Up until his late 80s, Bill hadn’t minded hunting in subzero temperatures, but he had slowed in the past few years. The snow-dusted mountains of the Shenandoah Valley were no place for a 92-year-old. He knew it. But man, did he want to get outside.

Then, on December 15, the forecast brightened, and before he announced his intentions, his wife, Joanna McDonnell, knew what he was up to. The couple went through an old song and dance whenever this happened.

“You’re not going,” Joanna would say.

“I’m going,” Bill would shoot back.

Joanna would try to bargain. “You’re not taking your gun. Stay on a trail.”

“I’m hunting,” he’d say.

“Take a friend,” she’d reply.

“They’re all dead.”

“Take Bill Jr.” (Not possible that day. Bill McDonnell Jr. would be at a football game.)

Joanna: “You’re a dang old fool!”

Bill: “Agreed.”

But this particular day, Joanna didn’t even try to talk sense into her husband. Bill had fought in World War II and Korea. He’d been a sailor, and after that a soldier. A “country boy through and through,” he might respect his wife’s wishes on most topics, but not when it came to the call of the wild. There was a place he hadn’t hunted in a long time, and he wanted to get out there once more before he was too old.

The next morning, Bill woke up at four, grabbed his muzzleloader, and steered his Jeep toward Shenandoah Mountain. At the end of the old Laurel Run logging road, he hit the trail on foot.

It was about 7:30 a.m. and 25 degrees when the sun peeked through the trees. Bill had strict instructions from Joanna to be out of the woods by 2 p.m. and home by 3 p.m.—plenty of time before sunset, in case he missed the deadline. Which he often did.

Not long into the hike, he came upon a path he didn’t remember. Maybe this was a secret route to the king of all bucks. He took it.

As the temperature climbed through the 30s, Bill veered off and back onto the trail, looking for tracks and rubbings on trees, signs that a buck might be over the next ridge. He wouldn’t kill it—he just liked to get a trophy in the sight of his scope, enough of a kick to feel the blood surging in his old veins.

Then, around 11 a.m., he emerged into a clearing along a ridgeline. He’d walked farther than he’d suspected. “What the … ?” he muttered.

It seemed that his path up the mountain had meandered quite a bit. There might be a quicker route back to the Jeep—as the crow flies, anyway.

When thoughts of shortcuts come to mind, Bill looks at his left hand and remembers a little mishap he had in Hawaii. He and Joanna had taken a once-in-a-lifetime vacation for her 80th birthday. They needed an extra bag, so he took a sidewalk to a nearby store, then realized he could get back to the hotel quicker if he jumped a barrier and scrambled down an embankment. But he tripped and broke his wrist and hand. With the pins now bolting the hand together, he was lucky he could still use the thing at all.

But on this day, eyeing the line the crow would fly, Bill couldn’t help himself. I’ll just be extra careful, he reasoned, and began cutting his own path.

Before his descent, Bill had picked up a call from Joanna. “Who might this be?” he’d answered.

“Sounds like you’re still alive,” she’d said.

Bill figured he could drop into the valley, hunt a bit, tackle the next ridgeline, then maybe hunt a bit more. But the farther he snaked down through the forest, the thinner and deeper the ridges became. Before long, the canyon narrowed to a rock chute. Next thing he knew, he was looking straight down from the top of a waterfall, 
100, or maybe 200, feet high.

He looked to his right and saw a 20-foot-high wall of nearly vertical rock. Behind him, the ravine he’d followed down the mountain looked steeper and longer than he’d thought it was. To his left, the wall was slightly less vertical, slightly more creviced, slightly more covered in thick laurel roots.

He knew what he should do: go back up the ravine. But if he scaled that rock to the left, he could continue across and down the ridgeline. He would make it to the Jeep in time.
Bill began the climb, carefully plotting each step, grabbing the fattest root, tugging it to test its sturdiness, then heaving himself up to reach the next solid perch, and the next one, and so on. He tried not to look down.

He kept pushing upward until, finally, he hurled himself onto the shelf atop the rock wall. Everything burned. He needed a rest.

By the time Bill got going again, it was nearing 2:45 p.m. Descending into the valley, he came to a trail marked by white blazes. He remembered that one of his granddaughters had mentioned seeing a waterfall while she was climbing in the area, so he called her for advice. He described the ravine, the rock walls, and the white-blazed trail that he thought might take him back to the Jeep. “It looks pretty easy,” he said.

She didn’t remember the trail. “Grandpa,” she begged him, “go back to the ridgeline.”

But he wanted to take the trail. “I’ve got it figured out,” he said, then realized he was talking to air. His phone had died.

He dug into his pants for the GPS device he always brought in case of emergency and pushed the “on” button. Nothing. He had forgotten to charge it.

The trail looked to be angling downward in the right direction. Soon, though, it turned and began to climb away from the road where the Jeep was parked. So Bill decided to take another shortcut. He began bushwhacking, stopping occasionally to adjust course. He reached the valley. No road.

No, I’m not lost, he told himself. His eye caught a stand of tall trees. He remembered admiring the line of majestic oaks and pines earlier. Reach them and the car wouldn’t be that far off. He’d have to cover some ground, but part of it looked like an area loggers had clear-cut. How bad could it be?

As it turned out, the loggers had left behind a gnarly thicket of limbs and branches; laurel, prickly greenbrier, and other vines had sprouted up into a web of a billion needles in the pockets between the debris. Crawling through barbed wire in Korea, Bill thought, would be better than this.

He was moving slower and slower, Joanna’s 3 p.m. deadline having long since vanished. Eventually, the sun slipped below the mountain ridge behind him and the forest turned pitch-black. He hadn’t brought a flashlight. His quivering legs felt as if they’d stomped at least 15 miles.

There was only one thing to say: “McDonnell, you’ve really done it this time. You are one dumb son of a b——.”

Bill McDonnell Jr. was entering the football stadium at James Madison University when he got a text from his niece. She said she’d lost contact with her grandfather around 
2 p.m. and no one had heard from him in hours. “I’m sure he ignored you and took the shortcut,” Bill Jr. told her.

An avid hiker himself, Bill Jr. knew his father could cover ten miles with all his winter gear on. But he had become more forgetful in his 90s. They agreed to call 911.
Bill Jr. headed to Winchester, where he found his mother in a panic, rifling through paperwork. She said she wanted to make sure she had the necessary documents in case her husband was dead.

Capt. Wesley Dellinger of the Shen­andoah County Sheriff’s Office sprang into action when he got the call about a missing elderly man: not quite six feet tall, 200 pounds, lost in the forest. Having made a few wrong turns in these woods himself, he felt for the guy. “You think you’ve got it figured out,” he told one of his deputies, “then all of a sudden you don’t.”

He ordered a command post to be set up near the Laurel Run trailhead, and by 6:30 p.m., he’d assembled personnel from within an hour’s radius in every direction. But Bill’s last location was in an area far too rugged and remote to attempt a full ground search, especially under a moonless sky.

So the sheriff sent his deputies out to cruise the highways and back roads, hoping Bill might have found his way to a thoroughfare. Around 9 p.m., a helicopter from the Fairfax County Police Department arrived.

It was about 9:45 p.m. when Bill heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of a helicopter and looked up from his makeshift bed. He had never minded bedding down in dirt—make a little sleeping mat from branches (a trick he learned in the Army) and you’d be sawing logs all night.

Now, as the light from the chopper danced closer, Bill struggled to rouse his achy joints and get to his feet. He managed to lift his orange hunter’s hat to the sky and wave. “I’m here!” he yelled.

The chopper hovered directly above him. But the mix of tall trees and low laurel canopies were too dense for its searchlight to penetrate. The light dimmed, and the whir of the heli­copter blades softened. Bill guessed they wouldn’t be back until morning.

He tried to go to sleep but couldn’t quiet his head. He hated that search crews were wasting resources and losing sleep because he’d taken one too many shortcuts. Joanna was probably terrified. He wanted to get up and power through the darkness, but he knew he’d only end up in more trouble.

Shortly after midnight, Captain Dellinger’s phone rang. It was the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, offering its search-and-rescue drone. At $94,000 (for the device, training, and maintenance), the quad­copter, as it is officially called, is the hot new gear all search-and-rescue chiefs want but few can afford.

The following morning, as the silhouette of the mountains emerged, teams of rescuers with bloodhounds started on the trail Bill had hiked. At the same time, Loudoun County master deputy Matthew Devaney and his copilot, Jamie Holben, set up a launch area for the drone, then waited for the signal to send it out.

This was the first time they would fly the drone in a real rescue ­situation. Any failure would be red meat for ­detractors, who called it a taxpayer-funded toy. The device has a three-mile line of sight and a high-def camera so powerful, Devaney says, “you can see the nose on a guy’s face on the ground from 400 feet up.”

At 9 a.m., it was time. As Devaney worked the joysticks, Holben called out adjustments. Threading the drone between tall trees, they sent it flying toward the search area.
At the same time, one of the tracking teams came upon a spot where some branches had been tamped down into a sort of mattress. They had heard the lost hunter was an old woodsman. Such a comfortable nest had to be the work of a master’s hand.

That morning, Bill had woken before dawn, replaying his wrong turns and imagining his wife’s despair. He never worried once that he wouldn’t find his way back, only about what would be waiting for him when he got there.

Just after 7 a.m., the sky lightened and the thicket around him began to reappear. He ate a few snacks and got ready to battle with the laurel.

The light was still bad, and each step took some thought to avoid thorns or a twisted ankle. After about 15 minutes, Bill came to a spot where he could see the landscape around him more clearly. There, only a few hundred yards away, was the line of trees he had been hoping to reach the night before.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he yelled to the woods.

Within 15 more minutes, Bill emerged from the thicket and began a slow ascent to the ridgeline. He knew the trackers couldn’t be too far away. He began pushing himself harder. He’d better make it to the Jeep before they made it to him.

Now that the deputies had the drone up, they could see the forest as clear as a crow. But they saw little except white rock and scattered trees, and after about 20 minutes in the air, the battery slipped below 25 percent. They’d have to land the device and switch batteries if they didn’t get a bead on the lost man pretty soon.

The drone flew up and over a ridgeline capped by tall oak and pine trees, only about a half mile away. A neon-orange dot moved below. Zooming the camera in, the image became clear: The orange dot was a hunter’s cap.

“I think we have him!” Devaney shouted.

Down below, Bill began walking more briskly—the terrain was finally familiar, and he was sure he was less than a mile from the Jeep. He saw a large black animal bounding toward him out of the corner of his eye—a bear, maybe? He had seen some scat. But before he could reach for his gun, he realized it was a dog.

“Bill!” a voice called. “William! Bill McDonnell!”

“I’m up here,” he yelled back.

Damn trackers had beaten him after all.

It’s not that he wasn’t thankful for the “neat little contraption” that had helped rescue him, or for the young people who’d traipsed through the cold forest in search of an old-timer. It was more that he was embarrassed, and frustrated with all the fuss. Even the local news channels had shown up.

“Half hour more daylight and I would have been fine,” he told the rescuers.

The next day, Bill Jr. was tasked with sitting his dad down and having “the talk.” “I said, ‘The whole family was extremely scared, especially Mom,’” Bill Jr. recalls. “‘You can’t go out alone anymore.’”

Bill agreed to swear he wouldn’t go out hunting or hiking alone again.

But a week later, during a short hike—with company—he waffled a bit. “I need to keep that promise,” he said. “But the idea of it drives me crazy. I love walking around in these woods alone.”

Read on to learn how this man survived a rattlesnake bite with no way of calling 911 or getting to the hospital.

The post A 92-Year-Old Avid Hunter Set Out Into the Woods—Until He Realized He Didn’t Know How to Get Back appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Whenever Jane Lockshin went out to lunch with her elderly aunt Sylvia, she made a point to pick up the tab. After all, Sylvia Bloom was a modest secretary, a widow of more than a decade who lived in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment and took the subway everywhere, including to her job at a Manhattan law firm. She worked there—
­full-time—­until she was 96. Simply put, Lockshin didn’t want Aunt Sylvia to blow her budget on lunch.

So when Bloom died in 2016, at 97, it was something of a shock to discover that she’d left behind a multi­million-dollar estate. Almost as shocking: She had chosen to give $8.2 million to charity. Six million dollars went to educational programs at the Henry Street Settlement, a social services organization in New York City. An additional $2 million went to scholarship funds, including at Bloom’s alma mater, Hunter College. “She had millions,” says Lockshin, “and no one suspected it.”

Bloom’s bequest to the Settlement, the largest in its 126-year history, will help fund a program for disadvantaged students. “The gift has been transformative not just because of the good we’ll be able to do with it,” says David Garza, the agency’s 
executive director, “but because of the selflessness and the humility behind it.”

Sylvia Bloom’s story is indeed extraordinary, but it’s not as uncommon as you might think. Working-class benefactors—secretaries, teachers, janitors, and more—make headlines with awe-inspiring regularity. In 2015, a retired grocer in Milwaukee left 
$13 million to a local Catholic high school. The year before, a former JCPenney janitor from Vermont left a nearly $5 million bequest to a local hospital. Their stories are as rich and as full as their hidden bank accounts. “In a world that is in many ways survival of the fittest, they’re certainly a special class of people,” says Garza. Try these ways to give back to charity without breaking the bank.

These unassuming philanthropists share some qualities. The most obvious is that they often have no children. That’s one reason many of them were able to save so much of their humble paychecks. 
It also means they had no direct natural heirs. “People who are single are thinking about what good they can do with their money and what legacy they want to leave,” says Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Often that legacy touches on helping the children they never had. As a kid in Milwaukee, Leonard Gigowski took the 6:30 bus every morning to get to St. Francis Minor Seminary, a Catholic high school that later became St. Thomas More High School. After a stint in the Navy, Gigowski went on to become a butcher and a grocer. He never married—and he never forgot St. Thomas More. Gigow­ski visited regularly and sometimes would eat lunch with the students in the cafeteria. One time, he stood up and started singing the school cheer. His “kids,” as Gigowski called them, grinned and joined him. On his 90th birthday, in 2015, administrators arranged a surprise assembly for him. The kids sang “Happy Birthday,” and Gigowski led them in prayer.

Three months later came the bombshell: Leonard Gigowski had passed away—and he’d left behind a $13 million scholarship fund for St. Thomas More. “I nearly fell off my chair,” Mary McIntosh, the school’s president, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Gigowski may have been humble, but he led a very full life. He was an avid ballroom dancer—he had a dance floor in the basement of his modest suburban home. He also loved pigeon racing. He had a coop in his yard and kept meticulous records on each of his birds. “He told me he loved being around God’s creatures and caring for them,” says his friend Jeff Korpal.

But the school was his passion. Larry Haskin, Gigowski’s friend and the lawyer who helped him set up the Leonard Gigowski Catholic Education Foundation, says there was no doubt that Gigowski had saved his money with the intent of donating as much as he could to the students of St. Thomas More. “He wanted to have the greatest impact possible on future generations,” Haskin says. “He felt he owed his long life to God, his Catholic education, and his deep faith, and he wanted to pass it on,” Korpal adds.

Gigowski had a lot in common with Margaret Southern, a special-needs teacher from Greenville, South Carolina, who died in 2012 at age 94. Southern loved children and animals. Before she allowed Mike Shain, vice president of wealth management at UBS, to handle her investments, she made him promise to take in her dachshund, Molly, if anything happened to her. “I know you’ll take care of her,” she told him.

In fact, Southern outlived Molly by several years and had her buried in her yard. But she continued to worry about animals, especially those that were homeless. When she died, she left half her $8.4 million estate to the Greenville Humane Society—even though she’d never had any direct contact with the organization—and the other half to the Community Foundation of Greenville, which distributed the money to organizations that benefit early childhood education and special education for children. She also left money to various friends and family.

“It’s a wonderful surprise to wake up and find a very unassuming woman who cares greatly for our community and its children,” said Susan Shi, PhD, founder and chair emerita of the Institute for Child Success, a recipient of $25,000.

Southern’s wealth also came as a shock to most who knew her. She lived in a modest town house and got around Greenville in a gray 1980s-model Cadillac. Her money came from a few shares of stock left to her by her husband, who had died in 1983. She added to that through the ’80s, if only to feather a nest for others to use.

“What’s exceptional is she didn’t spend it on herself, and she was able to accumulate a lot of money that she wanted to direct to her dearest charities,” Bob Morris, president of the Community Foundation, told the Greenville News. “I haven’t met a lot of people like that.”

Did their generous natures help Southern and these other extraordinary givers live so long? It’s possible. Studies have found that people who are charitable, whether it’s via volunteering or donating money, tend to have lower blood pressure, less stress, and longer lives. One 2011 study even found that older volunteers had a lower risk of dying in a four-year period than nonvolunteers.

They certainly understood the importance of planning for the future. Careful, conservative investing—­putting money in the stock market and leaving it there to grow—has always been the ticket to a comfortable retirement, and that’s how these working-class benefactors built their legacies. For instance, when Sylvia Bloom was a young legal secretary, part of her job was to keep track of her bosses’ stock purchases. She’d take note of which stocks the lawyers were buying and buy a few shares for herself. “She invested in the market and didn’t spend it,” says Lockshin. “She followed the rules.”

Ronald Read was a blue-collar guy with blue-chip smarts. A gas station attendant and JCPenney janitor in Brattleboro, Vermont, he read the Wall Street Journal every day, following his investments in Ford, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and CVS Health. When he died in 2014 at age 92, he was worth $8 million.

But while he had watched his money carefully, he rarely touched it. After one of his last meetings with his attorney, Laurie Rowell, she insisted on walking her frail client to his car. They proceeded up a steep hill, passing empty parking spots as they went. When they got to Read’s 2007 Toyota Yaris, Rowell realized why he had chosen that spot: There were no parking meters at the top of the hill. “You would have thought he was penniless if you met him,” she says. (In fact, Read didn’t even want his lawyer to walk with him to the car, because he thought she might charge him for the time.)

Read’s frugality was sometimes mistaken for actual poverty. One morning, the man ahead of him in line for coffee noticed Read’s tattered clothes and promptly paid for his drink. He got his coffee that day, and most others, at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, which served some of the best java in town. “That coffee shop was beloved by a number of people,” says Rowell. “They took good care of him.” When Read died, hospital officials were surprised that he had left the bulk of his estate, nearly $5 million, to the hospital.

“Some of us knew he had some investments,” his stepson Phillip Brown told the Brattleboro Reformer, “but obviously he had a whole lot more that we didn’t know about.” Check out these bizarre things you didn’t know you could donate.

Not every working-class benefactor scrimped and saved. Kathleen Magowan, a teacher from Simsbury, Connecticut, had no idea she was rich until just before she died in 2011, at age 87. Not long before she passed away, she visited a small law firm for help managing her estate. When they asked how much she thought it was worth, Magowan guessed around $40,000. The real number: $6 million.

Magowan’s twin brother, Robert Magowan, had always managed their finances. They had lived together until he died in 2010. “She never had a demand for that kind of money,” her attorney, Louis George, told the Hartford Courant.

Some would go on a shopping spree if they became millionaires overnight. Magowan turned to charity. Her will outlined $5 million in bequests to 15 organizations, along with gifts to relatives and neighbors. She left close to half a million each to her alma mater, the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford; the McLean nursing home where she spent her final days; and the Simsbury public schools, where she had taught first grade for 35 years.

“All of us remember her very much as the schoolteacher who always had a twinkle in her eye,” Deene Morris, the former fund-raising director at McLean, told the Hartford Courant. “She loved engaging in conversation with all sorts of different people, and everyone loved talking to her. A schoolteacher. That’s how she lived in our hearts.” Next, read up on these 15 ordinary people who changed the world.

The post These People Donated Millions After They Died—But No One Knew They Were Rich appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Any day that I had to go to the airport was the worst day of 
my life, and as a traveling appliance salesman, I had to fly quite a bit. 
On this day in 2010, I was assigned to a middle seat. I was so big 
I couldn’t fit down the aisle facing forward, so I walked sideways, 
like a crab. I could see the other passengers’ fear like cartoon thought bubbles above their heads: “Please, God, don’t let that humongous guy be in the seat next to me!” I was five foot ten and weighed between 340 and 360 pounds; the exact number depended on whether you took my weight before or after one of my gargantuan meals.

When I finally squeezed into my seat, the seat belt wasn’t long enough to fit around my 52-inch waist. They never were.

The flight attendant said they had run out of seat belt extenders. They were going to have to get one from another plane.

More than 30 minutes passed.

“Great,” said the slender man in the window seat next to me. “I’m going to miss my connection because you’re so fat!”

I wanted to die. Right there, in that seat, I wished my life would just end.

I woke up the next morning knowing that I needed to change. I started looking for signs that might lead me toward a better life—and immediately a sign showed up. I turned on the TV and happened to catch an interview with former president Bill Clinton. He looked fit and full of energy, about half his former size. He said he’d been under the care of a doctor who put him on a whole-food, plant-based diet. That was all it took, he said. He lost weight without feeling hungry, and he was healthier and stronger than he’d been since his twenties. I never imagined my sign would come from Bill Clinton, but here he was.

I had no idea what a “whole-food, plant-based diet” was, but I ran with it, even though I couldn’t actually run to save my life. I went online and searched for a doctor who could help me. I came across Preeti Kulkarni, a naturopathic doctor. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I felt hopeful when she agreed to see me the next day.

So tell me about yourself,” said Dr. Preeti (as she liked to be called). I told her I had type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. I was on all sorts of meds for those.

“If you stick to what I tell you, there’s a good chance you won’t need any of those in a few months,” she said. “At every meal, just make sure that at least half your plate is full of fruits and vegetables and the rest is beans and rice or any other food that is not from an animal. If you do that, you’ll start feeling better. And with exercise, I think you’ll be really surprised how quickly things can change.”

She suggested I start with 20 minutes of light exercise twice a day. “Something you can enjoy, like taking a walk,” she said. “And I recommend that you go to a shelter and adopt a dog.”

“Exercise?” I said. “A dog?”

“A dog is a good companion,” she said. “Plus, you live in an apartment, which means the dog has to be walked. So you walk your dog twice a day, and that will be your exercise.”

“I’ve never owned a dog. What about a cat?” I asked.

“Have you ever seen anyone walk a cat?”

And so a few days later, I drove up to the Humane Society Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, near where I lived. I had already spoken with Casaundra, who was in charge of adoptions. She said she had the perfect dog for me, but she offered some advice: “Don’t look him in the eyes at first.” I knew that wouldn’t be a problem—I had trouble making eye contact with anyone. “Let him sniff your hand. Don’t try to pet him right away. Just give him a second. He’s a real sweet dog once he knows you.”

That didn’t sound like the happy golden retriever I’d had in mind.

Casaundra stepped out of the room, and I took a deep breath. My heart was pounding. Then I heard footsteps approaching. Dog nails on concrete. The handle on the door turned. The door cracked open. A black nose tried to push its way in, and then the door opened all the way. There he was: a large black-and-white dog with a big round body, shuffling into the room with his head hung low. He looked up at me and then dropped his head with a clear look of disappointment. Like, Really? This loser?

I suppose I looked at him the same way.

“He’s a border collie and Australian shepherd mix, to the best of our knowledge,” Casaundra said. “As you can see, he’s middle-aged and overweight, and that means he’s in need of a new routine, just like the one you told me you needed. Raider’s out of shape. His joints are swollen. He needs to start walking again.”

“Raider?” I asked.

“Like the Oakland Raiders. His owners were fans.”

I looked at him, petting him in silence. I wondered how many other dogs had come through here, and I wondered how many other humans, like me, were skeptical of the whole dog-human matchmaking process.

I didn’t want to let Ca­saundra down. I thought, This is what she does for a living, and she feels really strongly about this. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Why did someone give this dog up?” I asked.

Casaundra flipped through a few pages of notes on a clipboard. “There was a divorce. He was not being cared for the way that he needed. He spent a lot of time in a backyard by himself after his primary caregiver went off to college. And the family just felt like maybe there was a better home for him somewhere else.”

Raider sniffed my shoes. He looked up, and I scratched him behind the ears. He seemed to like that. When I stopped for a moment, he lay down on the floor near my feet.

“Aw, look at that. He likes you already,” Casaundra said. “I have a good feeling about this. Just be patient. You have to understand that his whole life has been uprooted. It’s going to take him some time to adjust.”

“The poor guy,” I said. It hit me how tough this dog’s life had been. I looked down at Raider, and suddenly the sadness in his eyes didn’t look like a reflection on me. It looked more like he was just done and ready to give up and die.

Like me.

I started to tear up.

“Can I ask you something?” I said to Casaundra. “Can I change his name? I’m a 49ers fan. We hate the Raiders.”

Casaundra laughed. “Yes, you can change his name. It might take him a while to respond, but why not? Fresh start.”

I named him Peety, after the dog in The Little Rascals, and we took it slow, just as my doctor and Ca­saundra had recommended. We had to. Peety weighed 75 pounds when a healthy weight for him was more like 50 pounds. But on our first walk together, Peety took the lead. We made it halfway down the block and then came back. Luckily for me, he didn’t walk very fast. You could practically hear my footsteps on the sidewalk as I swung each leg forward—thump, thump, thump, like the giant from “Jack and the Bean Stalk.”
The next day we made it to the end of the block. Soon he would lead me around the block. Then he’d want to keep going, and I would tag along.

At the same time, I was following Dr. Preeti’s instructions for plant-based eating. Maybe five or six days after eliminating animal products from my diet, I woke up feeling like a new person. I rolled out of bed with ease. My knees weren’t sore. I had also put Peety on vegan dog food. He appeared thinner and seemed to have a spring in his step. And he had stopped scratching all the time and shedding everywhere the way he had when I first brought him home.

At my second office visit with Dr. Preeti, I weighed five pounds less than the week before. “I’m actually surprised it’s not more,” I said, “because I feel different. I feel lighter.”

A few days later, I went to take Peety for his morning walk and he backed right out of his collar. He’d lost so much weight that it slipped off. My pants were almost falling off me too. I tightened my belt as far as it would go, but I realized that if my belt were to slip, my pants would fall to the floor. That would not look good in the middle of an appliance store. I needed to go clothes shopping—something I had avoided for years.

I would have ordered clothes online, but I didn’t know what size I was anymore. At Men’s Wearhouse, the bending and squatting, dressing and undressing in the tiny dressing rooms left me overheated and miserable. This wasn’t a victory lap. It was awful. I bought three pairs of pants and a few shirts and spent nearly $200. It felt like a rip-off. For the most part, what’s available for men over 300 pounds is the equivalent of a muumuu: low-end, loud Hawaiian-print shirts.

Sitting on the couch that night, I thought maybe I should give it all up. Maybe I was too far gone.

Then Peety jumped into my lap. He started licking my face, which made me laugh. I petted him, and he pressed himself into my belly and lay down on top of my thick thighs as if he were a tiny puppy snuggling up in a blanket. And then he looked up at me as if I were the greatest guy in the world.

“Oh, Peety,” I said. “Are you sure you’re not disappointed you wound up with me?”

He kept looking at me with those beautiful dark eyes. And then he smiled. I’d heard people talk about dogs smiling before, and I thought they were nuts. But he did. He opened his teeth slightly and pulled up the corners of his mouth.

Suddenly I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I was thinking about Peety’s happiness. “I’m sorry, son,” I said to him. “I promise I won’t let you down.”

Over the next weeks, Peety kept pulling harder and harder on the leash, raring to go. There were times when I couldn’t keep up, even though I’d dropped five pounds a week pretty consistently since I started the plant-based eating and walking. The misery of headaches, abdominal pain, and overall discomfort I’d lived with for years just disappeared. I felt good. Not just better, but really good.

I started taking Peety to different parks. I found one, Penitencia Creek County Park, just over a mile from our condo. According to the website, it was home to a stunning pond full of ducks and other wildlife, with golden mountains off in the background. How could something like that exist so close and I hadn’t even known it was there?

When we arrived, it was as if Peety had googled it on his own. He kept choking himself at the end of the leash trying to run ahead. I picked up my pace the best I could, trying to give him some slack. I thought about how Peety’s whole life had been lived pent up, caged up, or tied to the end of a leash. How could anyone allow a dog to get so out of shape that he didn’t even want to run? Changing Peety’s diet and taking these walks had freed him. Maybe it was time to let him experience what freedom ­really felt like.

We stopped, and I unhooked his leash. Peety took off like a sprinter at the Olympics: head down, body forward, legs moving so fast they almost overtook him. He flew down the path and didn’t slow one bit as he approached the edge of the pond. Instead, he leaped. My jaw dropped open as he sailed out over the pond. He must’ve traveled seven feet through the air before he landed in a great big belly flop. Peety swam so hard he practically lifted his whole front end right out of the water, beaming with pride and excitement.

“Woo-hoo!” I yelled.

When he heard me, he swam to shore, ran out of the water, beelined right to me, and launched into a reverberating full-body shake of biblical proportions. He completely drenched me with mud and pond water, and not for one second did it make me angry. In fact, I laughed. I loved it. And in that moment, I realized I loved him.

I was still laughing as he turned around and ran back into the water 
for another swim. Peety did the swim-to-shore, shake-off, and run-back-into-the-water thing about eight more times before I was able to get him to sit and rest for a minute. He was panting like crazy, but between the sparkle in his eyes and the sight of his tongue hanging out of his big doggy smile, I knew he was perfectly OK.

He looked up at me like I was the greatest guy in the world—and that’s exactly what I wanted to be for him. I wanted to fulfill Peety’s every dream. He’d come into my life, and simply by being here, he rescued me. And in that moment, I felt like the two of us could have done anything.

“Want to keep walking?” I asked him.

Postscript: O’Grey and Peety walked together for nearly five years, until Peety died of cancer. Today, O’Grey weighs about 180 pounds, competes in marathons, and trains with his energetic Lab mix, Jake. Still, to this day, Peety is never far from O’Grey’s mind.

If you want to hear more about Eric’s story, purchase his book Walking with Peety.  Just like O’Grey’s, these 11 weight loss stories are truly inspirational.

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The post After Struggling with His Obesity for Years, This Man Wanted to Give Up—Then He Adopted a Dog appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When my best friend, Colleen, was 38 weeks pregnant, she asked me to go with her to Babies “R” Us, one of the only children’s shops in Anchorage, Alaska.

She found out she was expecting around the time I found out I would never give birth. I was only 29, but doctors said that I had too many medical challenges to conceive, let alone carry a child to term. Find out the signs of infertility every couple should know.

Focusing on Colleen’s good fortune helped distract me from my own grief. I hosted her baby shower and sewed bedding and curtains for her son’s nursery. Now the only thing she needed was a changing table, which was what we had come to buy.

As we headed to the furniture section, a gray-and-white-striped onesie caught my eye. The red crab sewn on the backside smiled with bright eyes, suggesting it had a secret. Maybe it triggered memories from my childhood: digging for crabs in the Gulf of Mexico’s sands, eating them on the docks in Baltimore with my family, pretending I was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. If things were different, that crab onesie would have made me laugh.

Instead I said, “If I ever have a son, I’d want him to have that.”

Colleen stopped, grasping my wrist so I would stop too. “Sarah, you have to get it,” she said.

I shook my head no. I didn’t want a reminder of what I couldn’t have. Of course, my husband, John, and I had talked about adoption. But I worried that the process would only lead to more rejection.

That night, I told John about the outfit. “Maybe you should’ve gotten it,” he said, pulling me close.

I told him no.

The next Sunday, John and I went to church for the second time in more than a decade. In a city where people tend to come and go, we ached for connection and figured that this church, which had a reputation for being accepting, might offer that.

As we walked in, I noticed a tiny baby nestled in the arms of a woman with white hair tied back in a bun. His head rested on her shoulder, and on his backside was the same red crab I’d seen just eight days before. My breath caught. Read some more inspiring stories that prove it’s never too late to change your life.

I turned to John and whispered, “That’s the outfit I was telling you about.”

He cocked his eyebrows. Throughout the service, I was transfixed by the infant with fine blond hair sticking straight up from his head. I longed to hold him. I tried to distract myself by looking at the bright horizon over the snowy mountains.

At the end of the service, the reverend stood to make announcements. The white-haired woman walked up beside him, holding the infant.

“Most of you know this woman, and many of you know her daughter’s situation,” he said. “But what you may not know is that this baby needs a home, and he needs it by Thursday.”

I was afraid to make a sound.

The reverend continued, “If you or anyone you know is thinking about adoption, please see us after the service.”

I felt a hand on my lap and looked at John. He had tears in his eyes too.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he whispered.

We picked up our coats and, with our fingers interlaced, walked to the area where a group of people had congregated around the woman and the baby.

The grandmother beckoned us forward, and I saw the child’s face for the first time—round with almond-shaped eyes and full lips. John was brave enough to hold him, but I was not. She took our phone numbers, saying the family would follow up.

That evening, they came to our home. The grandmother entered with an air of confident grace, but the young mother, carrying her baby, struggled to look us in our eyes. I didn’t know her, but I wanted to hug her. We sat in our living room with a plate of cookies and cups of coffee.

Before we sat down, the mother asked whether I would like to hold her baby. This time I said yes. He fit perfectly in my arms.

Over the next hour, we learned that he was four weeks old and that twelve families had volunteered to adopt him. The mother shared that she had many challenges that prevented her from parenting. Rather than letting her son became a ward of the state, she was choosing to relinquish her parental rights to the best family. If she picked us, all she asked was that we let her be involved in his life in some way. We agreed wholeheartedly.

I never mentioned the crab onesie. I wanted her to make her decision without being influenced by that coincidence.

When they stood to leave, I passed her baby back to her, and John and I waved goodbye as they walked to their car. Then we turned toward each other, embracing silently.

The next morning as I brushed my teeth, my phone rang.

“We picked you” was all I heard.

Two days later, the baby moved into our home. After six months, our adoption was finalized. Our six-year-old son continues to be the best unexpected thing that will ever happen to me. And that crab onesie remains neatly folded in one of my dresser drawers, where I plan to hold on to it—forever. Read some more touching adoption stories that will melt your heart.

The post A 4-Week-Old Baby Was in Desperate Need of a Home. The Couple That Took Him in Knew He Was Meant to Be Theirs. appeared first on Reader's Digest.

I’m kneeling on the floor of a cheap roadside motel somewhere in western Tennessee. Next to me, leading me in prayer, is a large middle-aged man with cerebral palsy named Ronnie Simonsen.

He says, “Bless my mother, my brothers and sisters, and my pastor back home in New Hampshire. God, bless Bob Hope and Cher … and all three of Charlie’s Angels. Especially Jaclyn Smith.”

And then Ronnie says, “And Lord, please help us get to California quickly, where I know I’m going to meet my spiritual brother, Mr. Chad Everett, the star of CBS’s drama Medical Center.”

And here, I interrupt Ron. I say, “Ron, you know, we might not meet Chad Everett. We’re not sure that’s 
going to happen.”

He says, “Yeah, yeah, I know, but keep praying. Keep praying.”

I first met Ronnie about eight years before that. I was working at a summer camp for people with disabilities. I was a counselor there, and I had brought along a video camera because I was also interested in making films.

Ronnie came right up to me and wanted to talk about movies and TV. He had cerebral palsy in his legs, but he also had a combination of autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It manifested itself in this fascination with television and movie stars from the 1970s, which is when he was a kid. Learn the things you should never say to a parent of a child with special needs.

He spent most of his childhood in hospitals, and he became particularly obsessed with the people who played doctors on television. He took comfort in their calm voices. There was one man, above all, whom he held as sort of like a god, and that was Chad Everett, who played Dr. Joe Gannon on CBS’s Medical Center.

I really liked Ron. He was fun. He was great on camera—he loved to be on camera. We made lots of videos together at the camp.

Some of the most popular videos were these newscasts we would do. (We made our own news show.) Ronnie was fantastic at that, especially when we could go downtown and he would interview people on the street. He was this large man, and when he would talk to people, he couldn’t stand up for too long, so he would lean on them for balance while he was asking them questions. And he would get them to do skits. He had this real ability to bring people out.

These films that we made developed this underground popularity. Eventually I was able to get some funding to make a film where we would drive across the country with five people with disabilities from this summer camp.

We were going to go from their houses in New England all the way to Los Angeles. Everyone on the trip had their own hopes and dreams for going to California, a place they’d never been. But Ronnie’s dreams overshadowed everybody else’s.

To him, California was the Holy Land. It was the place where he was destined to meet Mr. Chad Everett, his spiritual brother. It was his biggest dream. (He told everybody, “It’s my biggest dream.”) These quotes about dreams prove that no dream is too big.

He took this biggest-dream mission very, very seriously. It kind of stressed him out. I felt like this whole situation was mainly my responsibility as the director of this ridiculous film, and I decided I would be Ronnie’s roommate across the country.

And that’s how I ended up in this hotel room in Tennessee, praying with Ronnie Simonsen.

As Ronnie prays, I say my own little prayer. I’m not a very religious person. I had never really prayed much before. I’m 29 years old, but this is the first time I pray in earnest. I say, Please, help us get to California safely. And please, when we get there, give me some guidance. Help me to solve this mess that we’re going to have when we get to California. Because I have this secret that I haven’t shared with Ron. I probably should have shared it with him, but I just can’t.

I’d gotten in touch with Chad ­Everett’s agent before we went on the trip, and I’d asked if we could set up a meeting between these two people. I knew it was going to be a fantastic moment on film.

But his agent made me understand that Chad Everett was a very busy man, and that he wasn’t going to have time for something like that. In fact, he didn’t really wanna encourage his obsessive fans.

I probably should have told Ronnie that, but he didn’t take disappointment very well.

I’d helped Ronnie write letters to numerous celebrities over the years. Ronnie was so excited, ’cause he got this head shot in the mail. It was a smiling picture of Chad Everett. Ronnie memorized every word that Chad Everett had signed on this picture.

It said, “To Ron, Life’s not meant to be lived in reruns. Watch me in the new show Love Boat! Walk in the light, Chad Everett.”

And so all the way across the country, as we were driving from Texas to the Grand Canyon, Ronnie would go over the contents of that letter with me.

He would say, “What does that mean, ‘Life’s not meant to be lived in reruns’? And what does that mean, to ‘walk in the light’? I’m walking in the light, right?”

And I would say, “Yeah, Ron, you’re walking in the light.”

When we reach California, it’s a wonderful moment. We all go swimming in the ocean, and everybody’s really happy. Except for, of course, Ron. Because he’s on a higher mission.

He and I come to this agreement: Everyone else involved with the film is going to fly home, and he and I are going to spend a few more days in Los Angeles.

On our last day in California, we hatch an idea. We go to this town near Malibu, out in the hills, where Ronnie had heard that Chad Everett lived. We go to a shopping center, and Ronnie gets really excited because he interviews this kid who apparently had bagged Chad Everett’s groceries. Then someone else tells us that they know the street that Chad Everett lives on.

Ronnie says, “I just wanna see what his house looks like.”

It’s a gated community, and I find myself sneaking past as the guard’s not looking. We get to what we think is his house.

Ronnie says, “I just wanna take a picture in front of his house.” So ­Ronnie gets out, and it’s not until we’re hiding in the bushes and we’ve been there for over an hour that I realize that this is a terrible idea. Why are we here? What did I think was going to happen? I had this crazy idea that Chad Everett would see Ronnie and he would understand that this was someone that he should get to know. But of course, if Chad Everett walked out of that house, Ronnie was going to rush toward him, and someone was going to call the police. It was going to be a disaster.

So it was a certain sense of relief that I felt when a security guard came up and told us that we had to leave. And that film ends with Ronnie kissing Chad Everett’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s a good ending, but of course it’s not the ending that Ronnie and I wanted for that film.

As we took the film to festivals around the country, Ronnie became a little bit of a celebrity, and it was funny because that didn’t mean anything to him, to be a celebrity himself. He would ask anybody in the audience at the festivals if maybe they knew a way to get this film into Chad Everett’s hands. That’s all he cared about.

Throughout that year, Ronnie would call me up and he’d say, “You need to send a tape to this person because they might know Chad Everett’s daughter.”

I was starting to get kind of annoyed, to be honest. I was like, Man, we went all the way to California. Why can’t he just drop this whole thing?

And I was kind of annoyed with myself, too, because I had become tethered to this dream of Ronnie’s.

On top of that, I had a version of the dream that was a nightmare for me, which was this: that Ronnie would somehow meet Chad Everett … and I wouldn’t be there. If Ronnie were to meet him and I wasn’t there, I didn’t think I could live with myself. I honestly felt that way. I was in this state.

Then one day I got a phone call. There was a deep voice on the other end of the line, and it said, “Hello, this is Chad Everett.”

I said, “No, it’s not.” And he said, “Yes, it is.”

And it was Chad Everett. He had seen our film, and he liked it. He liked it a lot. In fact, he agreed that if we could get Ronnie to California, he would meet Ronnie. And he would do an interview with him. I hung up and I drove three hours to Ronnie’s house, and I said, “Ronnie, Chad Everett saw the film, and he wants to meet you.”

And Ronnie said, “Oh, boy!!!” Read about more random acts of kindness that changed people’s lives.

For two weeks straight, Ronnie couldn’t sleep. All he could do was call me up and talk about exactly what was going to happen.

Eventually, we fly out to California. The whole way, Ronnie’s clapping his hands and rocking back and forth. Everyone he meets, he tells them that he’s going to achieve his biggest dream—he’s going to meet Chad Everett.

I said, “We’re going to do this on a beach, because it’s a big, wide-open space.”

I think this is a good plan until we get to the beach and I’m walking with Ron on the sand. At this point Ronnie’s legs are really kind of 
giving out, and he can hardly walk 
on solid ground without assistance.

We sit him down on a beach chair, and I’m trying to think, Where else could we do this?—when this convertible pulls up down at the other end of the beach, and the license plate says Sir Chad.

This handsome older man steps out, and he starts walking across the beach. He’s a hundred yards away, and Ronnie spots him.

He yells, “Is that Chad Everett?”

And Chad Everett yells back, “Yes, it is! You betcha!”

And Ronnie hoists himself up out of this chair, and he starts running across the beach. I’ve never seen Ronnie run ever. And he is running across the beach. He’s kicking up the sand.

He’s going, “Chad Everett! Chad Everett!”

I think he’s going to fall and wipe out, and Chad Everett’s going, “Slow down! Slow down! Slow down!”

Ronnie’s running toward him, and he looks like a little boy.

And when he reaches Chad Everett, he throws his arms around him, and he says, “Chad, I’m so happy to see you!”

They have a wonderful time. They do skits together on the beach. Ronnie interviews him. And they say a prayer. It’s wonderful.

We take the red-eye home that night, and Ronnie’s exhausted. He’s a man who hasn’t slept for weeks. He says to me, “Well, Arthur, we did it.” And then he finally goes to sleep.

After that trip, I didn’t hear from Ronnie for quite a while, and that was strange because he would call me so often. When I finally did hear from Ron, he had some bad news. He had been diagnosed with leukemia, and his mother told me privately that he was given six months to live.

Ron said to me, “Look, I know that Chad Everett’s a really busy man. But do you think you could tell him about this?”

I said, “Sure, Ron. I can let him know.” So I did. I told Chad Everett.

And an amazing thing happened then.

Chad Everett started calling Ronnie every Sunday, and they would talk. Without fail, he called Ronnie every Sunday.

And Ronnie outlived that diagnosis by months and months. He lived for over two years. In fact, he went back to California and saw Chad and had a party to celebrate.

Eventually Ronnie did die of that disease.

I thought a lot about the lessons I had learned from Ronnie Simonsen. About the importance of having a biggest dream, no matter how silly it is.

But I often wondered, Did I spend too much time chasing this other person’s dream that wasn’t really my dream?

Then, recently, we were putting together a compilation of tapes that we’d made with Ronnie.

The editor called me up and said, “Hey, I’ve got this audio track I want you to hear.”

It sounds like it’s someone who’s going up the stairs or really out of breath. And then I hear my voice going, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

It’s the audio from my camera as I’m filming Ronnie running toward Chad Everett. And as they hug, I swear you can almost hear my heart beating out of my chest. I’m so excited.

If you had asked me “What’s your biggest dream?” ten years ago, it would not have been “to meet the star of CBS’s Medical Center.” But through Ron, that became my dream.

And I’ve always wanted to thank Ron for sharing it with me and for making it come true. Read on for more heartwarming life lessons from people who spent time with the dying.

The new book from The Moth, 
Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible, is available online or at your local bookstore.

Every product is independently selected by our editors. If you buy something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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When Sherrie and Michael Lloyd first got married, they had nine credit cards between them, and they were piling up significant debt. Six years later, this southern California couple has two kids under the age of four and they’re debt-free with a healthy savings to boot. Here’s how the Lloyds managed this remarkable turnaround.

The cause of debt

The Lloyds had accrued some medical bills from Sherrie’s two pregnancies and Michael’s appendicitis. Then, two years ago, the couple decided to buy a house, but they underestimated the cost of homeownership. While they had no problem paying the mortgage and utilities, they hadn’t factored in unforeseen expenses—they needed to pour money into foundation repairs, roof issues, and a leaky shower. While they were able to get the medical bills under control, the home repairs added up fast. If you’re trying to get your debt under control, you may want to break these money saving “rules” that experts don’t believe in.

How they paid it off

After signing up for a six-week class called Financial Peace—they found it through their church; it’s based on the best-selling Dave Ramsey’s Complete Guide to Money—the Lloyds were inspired to take charge. Sherrie says the class taught her to see that “you can’t use your money for the future when it’s tied to the past.”

Using Ramsey’s financial principles, they first saved up $1000 for an emergency fund. Then they consolidated their nine credit cards down to two and employed Ramsey’s “snowball” approach by paying off their smallest debts first (most of their medical bills) before tackling the larger amounts. Their final—and toughest—step was to transfer their remaining debt—$18,000—onto one interest-free card and then give themselves an 18-month deadline to pay it off. It might be more doable than you think—these money saving tricks can help you save $1000 in just one month.

Why this worked for them

The effectiveness of the Lloyds’ financial plan came from their ability to see progress right away. By paying off $1000 in credit card debt per month, Sherrie and Michael could actually see the debt going down. They also tackled their problem as a team. “In a marriage, you’re in it together—both working toward a solution together,” Sherrie says. Since Michael is the tech-savvy one, he created a chart using Microsoft Excel to plot out their budget. They could see their monthly expenses clearly: Mortgage, utilities, phones, cars, plus the accelerated $1000 credit card payment. They also allocated $100 per month into savings to build up their emergency fund, and the remaining balance had to stretch itself out to pay for other expenses like food and gas.

What they sacrificed

To make this happen, they had to give up a few trips. Rather than charge airfare to visit family on the east coast, they decided to save up airline points and go at a later time. It also meant saying no to certain luxuries, like eating out and going to the movies or amusement parks. Instead, they took their kids to free community events. They saved money on the kids’ clothes by getting hand-me-downs from friends. The couple says their sacrifices were worth it in the long-run. “Know your priorities and what’s important to you. For us, it was important to figure out our goals and pay off debt,” Sherrie says. She quotes one of Ramsey’s bits of wisdom: “Adults make a plan and stick to it, and children just do whatever they feel like doing.” Going forward, their “adult plan” is to put aside three to six months of living expenses into savings to avoid unexpected expenses or a job loss sending them back into debt.

How this could work for you

Finding financial peace is not just a fairy tale or a nice story for someone else, writes Dave Ramsey on his website. Just remember you’re not alone; there are resources that can help you get back on track. “Everyone deserves to feel confident about their finances,” reports Credit Karma, a company that supplies tools, education, and opportunities to get out of debt and improve your credit score. And take advantage of these tips for living debt-free here.

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These Warriors Don’t Like Losing Either

By Mark Oprea, From narratively.com

All athletes want to inspire, be it with a game-winning homer, a diving catch, or a no-hitter. The 33 men and two women who play on the Warriors softball team are no different. They just have less to work with.

The Warriors—whose full name is the Wounded Warrior Amputee Softball Team—are a traveling collective of veterans from around the country. They all have different wounds—­missing legs, arms, eyes—but they share a mission: shattering preconceptions, in themselves as well as in the crowd. “All of us were injured,” says Cody Rice, a 33-year-old outfielder and former airborne infantry squad leader who lost his right leg to a mine in Afghanistan. “We didn’t think we’d be able to do normal things again. But you get on the team and you realize that there’s nothing holding you back except yourself.”

The only thing holding the team back on this weekend in July 2017 is a nasty losing streak. The Warriors play about 80 games a year, all against able-bodied teams, and they just lost all four at a tournament in Minnesota. They’re looking to get back on track as they walk into Canal Park in Akron, Ohio, to play against a team of local celebrities led by the city’s mayor.

The Warriors have a lust for life on and off the field. Prior to game time, Rice, from Newark, Ohio, banters with teammate Josh Wege (“No leg-y Wege,” as Rice calls him) in the dugout. Seated nearby and cleaning off her bat-
attachable prosthetic arm is Danielle Green from South Bend, Indiana. “All this is very, very therapeutic,” she says. “It’s all about, ‘Let’s see what I can do, how high I can take it.’”

Green’s first love was basketball. She played guard for the University of Notre Dame in the mid-’90s and went on to enlist in the Army in 2003. A year later, seven weeks after marrying her husband, Green was on security duty at a National Police Station in Baghdad. “We got this eerie feeling that something would happen,” she recalls. She climbed to the roof, and a rocket-propelled grenade whizzed by her, exploding a barricade. “It clipped me, knocking me down to my right side.”

She woke up in a hospital bed with her sergeant standing at her side. “I said, ‘Sarge, is my arm missing?’” says Green. She was asking about her left arm, the one that had tossed so many basketballs through so many hoops. “And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s gone.’ I broke down for a second or two.” Her sergeant did have one piece of good news: “He said they went back to the rooftop and got my wedding rings.”

At Canal Park, it’s the bottom of the fourth, with the game tied at nine apiece and runners on first and third. Cody Rice is at the plate. The first pitch, a strike. Rice readjusts his stance and cleans his bat against his prosthetic leg. He smacks the next pitch into center field. The runners score, and Rice races around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. He’s greeted in the dugout by jubilant high fives all around. The Warriors go on to win the game.

“What do you think?” Coach Bucky Weaver asks a young fan waiting for an autograph afterward. “Not bad for missing a couple of parts.”

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When Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a 24-year-old who had been confined to a wheelchair for most of her life, was charged in the murder of her mother DeeDee in 2015, those who knew the two were in shock. Gypsy had a history of leukemia, asthma, muscular dystrophy, severe allergies, and other illnesses, and her mother was her doting caregiver.

But as the facts surrounding the murder began to unfold, it became apparent that things weren’t at all as they seemed. Gypsy was the victim of a type of medical child abuse known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The shocking-but-true tale is now the subject of a Hulu miniseries called “The Act” starring Patricia Arquette as DeeDee and it has left many viewers wondering how any mother could willingly and willfully harm their own child. This condition is a form of child abuse—here are 12 subtle signs that a child is being abused that everyone should know.

What is Munchausen syndrome by proxy?

Marc D. Feldman, MD, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, has devoted his career to understanding the condition and other related disorders. “Munchausen syndrome by proxy occurs when a caretaker either feigns, exaggerates or induces illness in a child victim to gain attention and sympathy,” he explains. (Munchausen’s syndrome refers to acting as if you are the one who is ill. Both conditions are named for a fictional character—Baron von Munchausen—who was based on an 18th-century German officer known for exaggerating his war stories.)

Sometimes financial gain or other tangible rewards are the motivation. “This is called malingering by proxy,” he says. “It can start out as loving the attention and then shift to money over time,” he says. This was the case with Gypsy and her mom. Many sympathizers sent cash, Habitat for Humanity built them a home, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation sent them on multiple trips to Walt Disney World and gave them backstage passes to a Miranda Lambert concert.

How common is Munchausen syndrome by proxy?

“It is unusual, but I wouldn’t call it rare,” says Dr. Feldman. “It is bathed in deceit and we can only count cases where deception has been found out.” There are many barriers in diagnosing Munchausen syndrome by proxy, says Joni E. Johnston, PsyD, a clinical and forensic psychologist in San Diego, Calif. “It’s not routine to question a mom when a child is ill.”

How does Munchausen syndrome by proxy happen?

Often the condition begins with real illness: Gypsy did have legitimate health issues soon after her birth. “Often, the child is viewed as impaired or imperfect in some way,” Dr. Feldman says. Another common denominator in cases is a lack of proper bonding between parent and child. This may occur because a child spends days or weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit right after birth; in some cases, untreated postpartum depression may play a role. “The lack of bonding predisposes some moms to engage in this form of child abuse.”

“Having a sickly child can provide a person with an instant definition as to who they are and what they were placed on this earth to do,” Dr. Feldman says. His latest book, Dying to be Ill: True Stories of Medical Deception, details the lengths that some mothers go to harm their children and the toll it takes on their child victims.

Fathers are rarely the culprit in Munchausen syndrome by proxy, he says, though they may turn a blind eye to the abuse and fail to protect the child. “Many of the abusers have a history of Munchausen syndrome,” adds Johnston. “They may have started out by using their own illness to gain attention, and then they transferred it on to a child.” Identifying bizarre beliefs in yourself can be a challenge—here’s how to tell if your weird thoughts are normal or not.

What are the consequences of Munchausen syndrome by proxy?

“Sometimes the child victim is pressured to continue the charade,” Johnston explains. “Children victims are raised from day one in a bizarre reality and told all of these things that later turn out to be blatant lies,” she says.

“Most victims are infants or not yet verbal, so there is limited capacity to speak out. When they are older they may feel helpless and have become very dependent,” Dr. Feldman says.

There are times when savvy health care professionals or keen observers grow suspicious and call attention to the matter. The first call to action is to get the child out of the toxic environment, he says. Recovery is a long and challenging road.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy survivors may remain physically or emotionally impaired, Dr. Feldman says. Many report depression and or post-traumatic stress disorder that overshadows their adulthood. Survivors of Munchausen syndrome by proxy are less likely to seek medical care as adults, which could lead to undiagnosed illnesses.

Gypsy is currently serving 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder. As far as the abuser, jail time is unusual in cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. “That’s unfair considering that the estimated mortality rate of Munchausen syndrome by proxy is as high as 9 percent, making it one of most lethal forms of child abuse,” he says. Caregivers may not always intend to kill their victims, but repeated induced illnesses can lead to death.

Another Munchausen syndrome by proxy case that made headlines involved the death of a five-year-old boy. While hospitalized, the boy’s sodium levels increased dramatically and he ultimately passed away. His mother, Lacey Spears, had documented her son’s long history of health problems on a blog and on Facebook. She was charged with second-degree murder for injecting sodium into the feeding tube in his stomach.

Not all Munchausen-by-proxy cases end in murder. Typically, parental rights are terminated and the parent may be placed on probation. Often times the victims may not even realize what happened until much later when their parents are removed from the house. “When the parent is taken away, it’s like losing a parent ten times over because even when mistreated, people still love their parents and then they must come to grips with the reason their parent was taken away,” Johnston says.

What is Munchausen by proxy by Internet?

The advent of social media has further complicated this complex illness largely by offering up a new outlet for endless sympathy and attention. “There are instantly accessible and endlessly supportive groups out there that will pray with you and cry with you if you purport your child to be ill,” says Dr. Feldman who was the first to identify Munchausen by proxy by Internet.

“It used to be that these moms had to read up on procedures and medications and really decide how to sicken their child, but now you can take a shortcut for the same attention by posting about ‘suffering’ online,” he says. Here’s one woman’s horrifying story of Munchausen by Internet.

If you suspect someone you know is a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, call the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453).

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Four years ago on a late night, Colette Smith, 53, sat alone in her living room watching TV. The rest of her family had gone to bed earlier. Suddenly, she noticed her heart-rate speeding up. It slowed, but then happened again a few minutes later; this time the rapid pulse continued for ten minutes. “I thought it was strange, and it had never happened before—it made me sit up and pay attention.” She woke up her husband, and together they guessed that she was having heart troubles. Smith wasn’t. But she was experiencing the symptoms of a deadly disease.

Her husband drove her to the ER where a doctor suggested they do a CAT scan to check for blood clots in her lungs. “I knew when the doctor came to give me the results of the CAT scan that he looked concerned. He said they found a nodule in my left lung and several in my right. He told me to follow up with my primary care doctor. I didn’t think anything of it, though.” The presence of nodules don’t always mean a cancer diagnosis—here are 13 things to know about lung nodules.

When her regular doctor thought the CAT scan results were inconclusive, and Smith put the event out of her mind. “A year later, my primary doctor called me back and said he wanted to repeat the CAT scan to see if anything had changed.” She went in, and the next day she got a call from the doctor—even though he was away on vacation. “I knew that wasn’t good. The nodules were still there, and he wanted to do a PET scan.”

Though Smith’s PET scan results were also inconclusive, her doctor wasn’t satisfied. “I asked what he would do if he were in my shoes—he said he would take it one step further.” Smith found a highly recommended cardiothoracic surgeon. “He looked at my scans and said he could tell right away it was 1A lung cancer. I wasn’t so sure, so I asked for a biopsy.” When the biopsy was inconclusive, Smith’s surgeon recommended she get surgery to find exactly what they were dealing with. “I had the surgery and he was right. It was stage 1A lung cancer. The surgeon removed the upper lobe of my left lung, along with lymph nodes that may have been affected.”

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death among men and women; about 142,670 people will die from the disease this year alone. Though smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer, many people—like Smith—develop it with no history of smoking. Often, patients will have no obvious symptoms until the cancer has spread. If symptoms are present, they’re likely to be a chronic or worsening cough (here’s when to worry about a cough that won’t go away), coughing up blood, chest pain that worsens with deep breaths or laughter, hoarseness, loss of appetite, weight loss, shortness of breath, fatigue, chronic lung infections, and sudden onset wheezing. Shoulder pain may also be a symptom—though that’s just one of possible reasons you have pain in your shoulder.

Though her recovery was difficult, Smith is feeling much better. She credits her walking routine and regular therapy with a mental health provider. “It’s amazing how much movement helps with pain management. Finding a therapist was also helpful because I needed someone I could trust and connect with outside of my family, who could help me understand it all.”

Because her doctors caught the cancer early, Smith did not require radiation, chemotherapy, or other targeted cancer therapies. After surgery, Smith was declared cancer-free. “I was one of the lucky ones,” she says. Smith continues to get scans every six months to check for recurrence. She’s also joined up with the American Lung Association to become one of their Lung Force Heroes—survivors that help raise awareness about the disease. (You can learn more about Lung Force and fund-raising efforts here.) Smith’s words of advice to others facing a frightening diagnosis? “This is probably one of the worst things you’ll ever face, so be sure to get care that you’re comfortable with—don’t settle for less.”

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The Red Cross, now approaching its 138th year in existence, is known for performing some of the most heroic acts in the world, but its origin story is far from rosy. Before we start at the beginning, let’s cover the basics:

What is the Red Cross?

Red Cross societies exist in 190 countries all over the world. Their mission: “The American Red Cross prevents and alleviates human suffering in the face of emergencies by mobilizing the power of volunteers and the generosity of donors.” This organization bands together willing volunteers with worldwide issues in need of them and provides a channel for anyone to help out in times of crisis. You can take a look at some of those issues in these 19 photos of the most inspiring Red Cross rescues.

Who began the Red Cross and why?

In 1860, Swiss businessman and social activist, Jean Henri Dunant, witnessed atrocities of war, and countries not prepared or equipped to ease the suffering of those who had been injured in the Battle of Solferino during the second War of Italian Independence. Dunant organized a group of volunteers to help bring water and food to the injured, to assist with medical treatment, or write letters to the families of those who were dying. After that moment, he knew that more had to be done, and he wrote the book, A Memory of Solferino, which urged the public to create an organization which would assist the wounded, regardless of which side they fought for during times of war. His writing inspired countless others to rally behind him in the creation of the International Federation of the Red Cross.

Why was it founded?

On June 24, 1859, Emperors Napoleon III and Franz Joseph I went head to head in what would later be known as the Battle of Solferino, commanding a combined total of about 270,000 troops onto the field for a single day of battle. When all was said and done, nearly 40,000 were either dead, injured, or missing, many of whom were simply left to die on the battlefield. In the days that followed, spectators crowded the fields, looking for loved ones, scavenging items they could sell, or simply taking in the horrors of the battle, including Jean Henri Dunant, who was traveling in the region to try to gain a meeting with the French emperor to discuss a business opportunity in French-controlled Algeria. Dunant describes some of the horrors that he saw that day, such as amputations without anesthetic, and groaning, fly-covered men who were left for dead. “Some, who had gaping wounds already beginning to show infections… begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death struggled,” he wrote. What he saw that day stayed with him for the rest of his life.

What does the Red Cross do now?

The modern-day Red Cross is much more than a mission to nurse soldiers during wartime. Due in large part to Clara Barton’s direction of the American Red Cross in the late 1800s, the group began to devote itself largely to disaster relief, and epidemic treatment. This effort continues to this day. Another large change has been the variation of the symbol, the red cross. Given the association of the cross with Christianity, over 30 Islamic nations use a red crescent, and Israels’s national first-aid society uses either a Star of David (for domestic aid) or a red crystal for international operations. Each of these symbols has been approved during the Geneva Conventions and under international law, it is illegal to deliberately target these humanitarian workers—however, in the last several decades, there have been dozens of instances of intentional targeting of Red Crescent and Red Cross volunteers.

One of the easiest ways you can help the Red Cross is to make sure you are able to donate blood and make an appointment at the Red Cross website. But, donating blood isn’t the only way you can help out—the Red Cross also encourages donating your time if you can, along with these other things the modern-day Red Cross wants you to know.

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How to survive a layoff

One of the best survival tips for post-layoff is to look for a new job and to play ball! According to a 
happiness study from the University of 
Alberta, participating in physical activity increases life satisfaction three times as much as being unemployed reduces it. Also, try these other tips to bounce back after losing your job.

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This space program has been tested on animals

“In the early days of rocket science, no one knew what the effects of weightlessness would be,” writes Space.com. So rocket scientists launched animals— mainly dogs by Russia and monkeys and chimps by the United States— up into space to test the effects of space on living beings and determine whether humans could survive a trip to and from space. However, NASA clarifies it only sends animals into space when “absolutely necessary,” preferring instead to conduct experiments via computer modeling and the like. Find out 13 more things you never knew about space travel.

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