Arianna  Rose, our six-year-old daughter, wants to be a ballerina when she grows up.  She can imagine herself leaping, flying with graceful ease, across a wooden stage floor; yet she and I both know that this probably can not be achieved.

For you see, Arianna happens to be in a wheelchair due to spina bifida.  She cannot walk unless it's for short distances, and then it's on a pair of crutches.

Arianna's birth was a day of joy that rapidly turned into heartbreak.  She emerged from my womb, pink, healthy, and squalling at the top of her lungs ... then came the devastating sight of the purple, baseball-sized lump situated on her lower back.  The room grew deathly quiet as the doctor pronounced that our daughter had been born with a condition known as mylomeningocele, or, in layman's terms, spina bifida.

She would be paralyzed from the waist on down.  Arianna would probably never walk.  It was the worst possible moment in our lives.

Meanwhile, our brand new baby daughter continued to scream and cry, as most newborn babies do upon emerging into the world.

Two days later, Arianna had the first of numerous surgeries.  We would be facing years of tests, doctors, nurses, needle pokes, x-rays, and surgeries, hours of sitting by our daughter's hospital bed, praying and petitioning to God to let her survive, especially when she had major operations done on her back or lower limbs.  Our world, our dreams for Arianna had come crashing to an abrupt end.  Our lives would never be the same.  We had unwillingly and unknowingly become parents of a child with serious special needs.

~To be continued!~