Feel Good Real Stories!

I'm sharing real stories they carry positive vibes, inspirational and they made me smile. Some of stories may give nice messages too.
I read this story today and it made me think to how helping someone changes their lives. I'm highlighting last paragraph to remember. Source


A gunshot victim finally got to thank the medical student who saved him 25 years ago


A Maryland medical student who took a wrong turn after getting lost answered a young gunshot victim's prayer.
Now, 25 years later, Baltimore resident Damon Walker reunited earlier this month with the medical student who drove toward the chaos instead of running from it.

"I constantly think about that moment of being in the gutter and not having any hope to live, you know, knowing that death was imminent," Walker told CNN on Friday. "I said a simple prayer that it would be nice if somebody came to pick me up.

Walker says he couldn't believe it when a car pulled up and "an angel" came to help him. It was Dr. Michael Franks. A medical student at the time, Franks saved Walker's life that night on New Years Day 1996.


Neither man knew what happened to the other

The November reunion, as seen on was the first time Walker and Franks had met after the trauma of that night wove their stories together. Walker and his mother found the Good Samaritan after some online searching and a phone call to Franks, who is a urologist with Virginia Urology. Franks did not know what happened to Walker, or even if he had survived.

He didn't have long to live
They revisited what happened that night and the moment that brought them together.

Walker, then 18, was leaving a club with friends around 3 a.m. after a New Year's party. They were trying to hail a taxi near Oriole Park at Camden Yards when a car pulled up with several men in it, Walker says. A fight broke out and a few men assaulted Walker.

"He grabbed me and put me to the ground," Walker said.

Walker gave what he had, hoping the attackers would go away after the robbery. Walker jumped up as they left and was met with three gunshots -- one to his thumb, another through his chest and a third through his abdomen.

As he fell to the ground, Walker realized he had been paralyzed, he says. He prayed for someone to come help him, and that's when Franks appeared.

"He went through the flow of traffic, he went opposite of what everybody was running from," Walker said. "He went through that, and you don't really see many people do that type of thing."

Dr. Michael Franks was a medical student when he heard gunshots and found Walker in the street.
Franks says he heard gunshots. Soon after, he got out of his car and saw Walker had been shot and was barely breathing.
As a University of Maryland medical student at the time, Franks knew Walker was in trouble. He opened his flip phone and considered dialing 911, but he realized he could get Walker to R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, which was nearby.

"If anyone can take care of this guy, who probably has 10 to 15 minutes to live, it's that place," Franks said. "So, I just made a decision to put him in the car and take him to the front door to cut out 911."

How Walker is giving back to other victims

Franks says he doesn't seek out the spotlight. The self-professed introvert is a surgeon who is used to medical emergencies.

"It's hard for me to talk about," Franks said. "I'm a doer, I think anyone would have done that, but I know maybe in retrospect, maybe not."

While some choose to think of Franks as a hero, he thinks the real story is about Walker and the remarkable way he's chosen to live his life and give back to his community.

After getting out of the hospital, going through physical therapy and adjusting to his life in a wheelchair, Walker says he dedicated himself to learning and reading, as he was "functionally illiterate" at the time.

He worked as a peer counselor. And now he's a violence prevention specialist at a local hospital. Walker tries to help gunshot or stabbing victims get jobs or assist them however he can.

Walker recalls the level of care he got when he was shot and just how well people took care of him, from helping him medically to making him laugh when he needed it.

"If you help these people heal, you might be healing more than a bullet wound," he said. "You might be healing some aspect of not trusting the system, not trusting people that now they can offer understanding to other people that go through the same thing."Letting Franks know how he's giving back to his community was part of why he wanted to reconnect with him, Walker says.

"I wanted to let him know that what he did not only helped save me but helped save my community," Walker said. "I know I wouldn't have been able to give that (to my community) if it wasn't for him helping me that day."

 

Today, I came across another real story of
How a kind gesture and a strand of Christmas lights connected a community source

In Towson, Maryland, there is a street called Dunkirk Road. There are 32 homes on Dunkirk, where families of various races, religions, and political views live. The neighbors are all close friends.

So when Matt Riggs, who lives on the block with his wife Kerry, found out his neighbor across the street was struggling with depression in December of 2020, he decided to spread some holiday cheer. Riggs, who had been having a hard time himself during the pandemic, hung his Christmas lights early because he needed some joy. He managed to get one of the strands across the street, over a tree, and connected it to his neighbor's house.
Soon, house by house followed, connecting their lights until the entire block was lit. Riggs tells CNN they all did it again this year, with one neighbor making a metal sign by hand that reads "Love lives here."

An enlightened idea

"I was decorating for the holidays and I was a little bit early. It was actually before Thanksgiving, but it was such a dark time for all of us. I really didn't want to wait anymore," Riggs recalls of last season. "I wanted to go ahead and get things lit up. So, I was climbing the tree and running lights up in my tree and I wanted to see if I could get them to go across the street. And I was so excited when I did get them to go across the street and stay lit."
Riggs' neighbor Leaba Commisso was next.

"Once Matt did it, I talked to my across the street neighbor and I was like, 'Hey, let's do it too,'" she says. "It'll bookend the block, you'll drive through one light and then when you leave the block, you'll drive out of it. But it's a lot harder to hang those lights than one would imagine.

That's where Tom Desert came in. He's the handy neighbor who soon figured out how to rig one strand after another, making a canopy over the block and planting anchors in each lawn to hold the strands in place.
"Once there was a job to be done, Tom came out and he was helping us because it's really hard. They're heavy, those lights," Commisso says. "Tom was able to get our lights up and then we were like, everybody let's do it. "
She says a bunch of neighbors got in the car and "cleared out Home Depot."

A message of love

Neighbor Melissa DiMuzio, decided to add a nice touch. While binging shows on Netflix, she bent wire hangers into a sign that reads "Love lives here." She wrapped it in lights and Desert helped get that displayed too.

"I had missed out on actually hanging my own strand, and I really wanted to participate," DiMuzio tells CNN. "It was moving to see just like six or seven light strands going across the street. And so I made the sign."

DiMuzio polled neighbors on what the sign should say.
"That gave me permission to think outside of the happy holiday arena," she says. "The last one was love lives here, which is actually on a wooden plaque in my garage that my mom gave me."
Desert says it was a perfect fit.

"We have 32 homes on this block and despite the differences in opinions and beliefs, however you want to look at that, everybody here loves one another," he says. "I think that love lives here is explanatory of how it works on this block."
Commisso agrees.
"It is a very special place," she says "We parent everybody else's children around here."
This year, the block even added a big mailbox, where kids can leave their letters for Santa Claus to mail to the North Pole.