Make A Wish Sailing

A Texas family sponsored in Williamsburg by the Make-A-Wish Foundation wound up their vacation with an outdoor adventure by sailing on the York River. Earlier we got rained out but rescheduled the next day under cloudy and cool conditions. It was actually quite pleasant.

Rumisha Rice explained gently the condition of their 10-year-old daughter Madison, but first she cautioned against approaching her service dog, a golden lab.

“Her saddle explicitly states Service Dog and advises people not to pet her. The reason is that while it’s nice for people to pet a dog, this one is a working dog. Anything like petting is a distraction to her work, which is to protect Maddie.” Today we switched out her service dog saddle for a doggie life preserver.

“Maddie suffers seizures and has water on the brain. She has cerebral palsy and is legally blind. She’s ten but she’s the size of a five-year-old.” Rumisha and her other daughter Lexis held Maddie all afternoon. “They are siblings whom we adopted. They have an older brother adopted by another family, but they haven’t seen him in years. We don’t know why. It’s complicated. Our older children live an hour-ish from our home near Houston.”

With us on the boat were my sailing buddy Paul Schoch and his stepson Sam Baird, who was working on a set of math problems associated with sailing. I tried to explain the apparent wind vs. the true wind. He got the gist and did a good job on the helm running the close reach and the beam reach. Madison’s dad Larry Rice was on the helm most of the time.

Back to Madison. I asked what the dog, whose name is Priscilla, actually does besides comfort Madison. “She was trained literally from the day she is born by a group called 4 Paws for Ability. In our case, Priscilla can detect Maddie’s seizures before we can. She can also detect her migraines and even low blood sugar. Other dogs that are trained for the deaf will tap them to alert them to something.

“In Maddie’s case, if Priscilla detects a seizure she’ll lick her energetically on the side of her face to calm her and to alert us. If it’s more serious, she’ll bark. Everywhere Maddie goes, Priscilla follows. She gets on the school bus with Maddie and goes to school with her. There are only three places she can’t go, in general: the kitchen of a restaurant, a hospital OR, and a public pool. But we have a pool behind our house.”
Priscilla has been with the Rice family for a year and a half. “We don’t train her,” Rumisha laughed. “She trains us.”

We tacked out the river five times on a close reach and rode a beam reach back on rising seas. Rumisha stroked Madison’s hair and held her. “I love Maddie and I love Lexis. They have made me a better person. I wouldn’t be who I am today without them.”