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Show Sheila, A Little Girl with Great Courage, Invents A Game,'Let's Play Sunday School' Sheila Nelson of Minneapolis, Minne-apolis, a blue-eyed and brunette bru-nette young lady of five years whose cherubic face is generously seasoned with freckles, has just invented a game called "Let's Play Sunday School." The reason for this bit of little-girl contrivance is that Sheila no longer can walk to the Lutheran Church half a block up the hill from her home. And because of sidewalk bumps, it's equally excruciating excruciat-ing to get her to her real Sunday Sun-day school by wheel chair propelled pro-pelled by her mother. Indeed, she may never be able to make her way again to that house of worship at the top of the hill, a journey's end that seems more unattainable with each painful, passing day. So Sheila today must "make believe" about Sunday school at home. Severe rheumatoid arthritis of the neck, hands, wrists, knees and feet, cruelly intensified in recent weeks, account for her inability to travel up that hill to church on the Sabbath, to listen to biblical stories and to scissor paper cut-outs of Noah's Sheila addresses her "make-believe Sunday School" and tells story of Jonah and the Whale. She is under treatment at March of Dimes-supported Dimes-supported arthritis clinic in Minneapolis. ark "with everything that creepeth upon the earth," together to-gether with lambs and kneeling kneel-ing camels and other figures of the Nativity. Another 30,000 children in the nation each year are in the same aching predicament as Sheila the answer to which The National Foundation is seeking today with March of Dimes contributions. "It's difficult to believe," says Mrs. Ronald Nelson, the child's mother, "but many of my neighbors just won't believe that children are stricken by arthritis. They actually tell me after all my experience with Sheila that arthritis is a disease dis-ease that only the old folks get." Two years of caring day and -light for Sheila have taught ter attractive mother that u-.-enile rheumatoid arthritis is a ong way removed from harmless harm-less "growing pains." Mrs. Nelson, Nel-son, her husband and two other . hildren are often awakened in he night by Sheila's outcries although much of the time the child beats back her tears and fears. Once a week, Mrs. Nelson and Sheila travel tedious miles across Minneapolis to the March of Dimes-supported Children's Rheumatism Clinic of the University Uni-versity of Minnesota. There scientists study any blood changes in Sheila and, under the almost astronomical magnification mag-nification of electron microscopy, micro-scopy, also study specimens of tissue and fluid from her knee. For her part, at the clinic, the mother takes lessons in home physical therapy for the child. "Sheila is a withdrawn and tongue-tied little girl most of the time," her mother says, "but the cat doesn't have her tongue on Sundays when she 'opens' her Sunday school 'class' here at home. We think the likely reason for this is that when she was able to go to our church until some months ago, that was the one time and place where she somehow blossomed. blos-somed. If she did have pain then, and that was often so, she was just spunky enough not to let the Sunday school teacher and the other kids know about it." Through the exercise of prodigious pro-digious badgering, a stranger was admitted to Sheila's "at home" Sunday school a Sunday ago. Dressed in her blue organdy or-gandy best and seated on the living room couch, the young lady was recounting with appropriate ap-propriate gestures the story of Jonah and the Whale to a wholly imaginary audience of others of her small fry generation. genera-tion. With March of Dimes contributions, con-tributions, The National Foundation Foun-dation has been able to establish estab-lish four arthritis study centers across the nation and has made an additional 20 research grants in this one field. But more such centers and grants are needed if Sheila is to climb back up the hill to her real-life Sunday school; and if the torments of the other 30,000 child victims of rheumatoid arthritis are to t end. |
