A Chance to Dance

So let me tell you how it all started... I had this chick I followed on Instagram.  And she is a youth director at a local church.  She posted the verse one day "But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. Luke 14: 13-14

She went on to write, "This verse has always intrigued me.  I always think about this verse when I'm at a party of something.  I really do wanna do this some day."

I responded to her post with this..."Let's throw a party.  I know plenty to invite."  She said, "I am so not joking.  Can we please?"  And I said, "It's been started.  How does June 14 look for you?  We're on it.  We need a good name for our "dance".  Been discussing with our teens here and they are fired up."

She said, "Oh my gosh. oh my gosh. oh my gosh!!  I need your number.  I wanna talk.  I am so very excited!"

And so it was born... A CHANCE TO DANCE.

Brandi and I planned to meet the following Monday (Brandi is in the hot pink hair below.  I brought a few folks from my team, in particular, the talented, Emery Thibadeaux who is graphically a genius, and the rest as they say is history!

The date stuck!  June 14th rolled around, and we had 150 people at the event.

Many of the employees of MMPT were there to dance with the kiddos.

And Brandi had volunteers from the WM Baptist Church youth group there to act as peers/ friends to our teens and young adults.

Everyone who came had to pay $5 at the door, as we wanted it to be a legit dance.  We had tee shirts made up and all went away with one.  We also sort of made it a neon theme.

Below are Shelbi and Craig from MMPT.

And this is Sam, whom I have worked with since she was about 8 months old! I was the one her mama (in the first photo of the blogP called the night her 31 year old husband had a sudden and shocking heart attack.  I have very special relationships with many of my patients and their families.

This is Trey.. and he is dancing just about as hard as he can dance to Michael Jackson, his favorite!

Michael is special to me too.  One of my first patients.  He aged out of the program I once was able to treat him through, but he still comes every single week to MMPT for us to work with him.  Everyone loves Michael. In this particular picture, it's Madison loving Michael.

As often as we could, we would lift the kids out of their chairs to let them dance with us in an upright position.  I think they thoroughly appreciated it!

These are the times it is cool to be a PT.  I was teaching those young students how to lift a person with a disability carefully to not hurt themselves nor the kid/ teen/ adult.  And they were operating soon like old pros!

Here's Josh.  Been knowing him since he was born!  He grew up on my street as kids.  And now, he is 34 years old!  Crazy!!

This is Patchez, our OT in the pediatric department in our WM clinic.

And it was really cool to have the boys from MMPT hanging out with the other dudes who were our guests!

You can see the entire album of pictures, here.  And I also have a ton of photos and videos which I have not yet uploaded.  I hope to do that this weekend.

You can check out our MMPT blog post all about the dance, here. Emery put a blog on our mmptinc.com site.  It was one of those nights that you say, "I'll never forget".  It was beautiful.  It was inspiring.  It was just plain awesome!!

MO