My Personal Hero

My older sister is currently going through something that I cannot even begin to comprehend. A few months ago she called me and told me that she was pregnant with her second child. You could actaully hear the joy in her voice at the prospect of having another kid. Last night my mother called me and told me that I needed to call my sister, as she was going through some real trauma. So I called her up today and this is the situation: Now in her second trimester, she had a sonogram done to find out the sex of the child. First the doctor told her it was a girl; all good and fine so far--her first was a boy and now she was having a girl to balance everything out. Then the doctor told her that the child didn't have any thumbs that they could see. Her view: well people have been born with no arms and had good lives, no big deal. Then the doctor proceeded to tell her that the child had no eyes either. How does she respond? Well so what, she'll be handicapped, it'll make life a bit more difficult but it's not anything that can't be dealt with. Then some more bad news. The child has some major brain damage. What, so she'll be mentally retarded--tons of people have down-syndrome and still live perfectly happy lives. But that's not it, that's not it at all. The child is missing her thirteenth chromosme--assuming it lives through delivery, it will be a vegitable for the few months that it is able to survive at all. The only things it will be able to do on its own are breath and piss; no thoughts, no emotions, no actions--just a couple of organs working to no purpose. My sister is then left with a choice: bring into existence something that cannot even be called a life, or terminate the pregnancy. When I asked her today how she was doing, she said that she had cried out all her tears and was now beginning to cope with the situation--my sister is my personal hero.