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lessons The blessings these musical pursuits have brought to my life continue today I feel very fortunate that I am still able to enjoy each of these talents, especially as I watch other guys of my generation who were totally involved in sports in their younger years and are now relegated to sitting on the sidelines or watching them on TV In addition, my family doctor and my mom also recommended that I pursue as much education as possible so that I wouldn’t have to worry about getting hurt doing a manual job, losing time off work, and not taking home enough money to make ends meet I obtained my Master’s degree in english and secured a great job with full medical benefits My former wife and I have been blessed with three wonderful children We felt so blessed that we wanted to share our abundance with others and decided to adopt during our first adoption, we were almost disqualified because of my hemophilia It took a lot of educating the social worker on our case that my hemophilia was not an imminent threat to my life As luck—or fate—would have it, the same social worker remembered my diagnosis when a child named Am- mon came up on the hard-to-adopt network in Texas Ammon had Hemophilia A She immediately called us and asked if we would consider adopting him of course, we said yes! We came to find out that Ammon’s hemophilia was much more severe than mine Just six months after we welcomed him to our home and began the adop- …continued on page 16 Winter 2013 | Dateline Federation 15