Appreciating differences
You might say that Lisa Lewitzke single-handedly has been raising awareness of childhood strokes.
Lisa is using the month of May to try accomplishing an everyday task each day using only her right hand. She’s blogging about her experiences to share what it would be like to be one-handed in a two-handed world.
Lisa’s own awareness began in 2009, when Wyatt, her then-infant son, was diagnosed with hemiplegia from a stroke he suffered before he was born.
Read more
Please click here for columnist Jim Stingl’s feature on Lisa’s efforts in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
For the Children’s Hemiplegia and Stroke Association, go to www.chasa.org.
“Wyatt lives his life basically one-handed because the stroke affected his right side of his brain, so his entire left side of his body was affected by that. So he does a lot of things one-handed,” explains Lisa, an associate at Landaas & Company. “To honor Wyatt and to kind of see how difficult his every day really is, I chose a task each day to do one-handed to see if I could or could not do it.”
Lisa’s blog (wyattsway.wordpress.com) recounts her struggles to wrap presents, zip a coat, peel an orange, play video games, do laundry, shop for groceries, make lunch, eat yogurt and more.
“I hope that people just take a moment to pause, that they look at their family and their kids and just take a moment to appreciate what they have in their lives. And I just want people to be aware that this happens to kids,” Lisa says. “And I think just the acceptance that everybody is different is really what I’m trying to promote.”
Landaas & Company video by Peter May
(initially posted May 20, 2013)
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