In 1978, while attending a course on "Special Populations," as the U.S. Interior Dept. named disabled or "unusual" individuals, I first heard the terms TABS, an acronym for "Temporarily Able-Bodied" people.

The theory was that everyone might become disabled at some moment in their life, but right now, "able-bodied" applied. A broken ankle, leg, hip would take one out of the "able-bodied" and make that person disabled. Therefore, this article is addressed to TD's, "temporarily disabled" persons. Illness or disability can be devastating. It can wreck your future unless you take the offensive and treat it as a detour rather than a new highway.

This came to me this morning as I tried to eat various foods that tasted wonderful just last week. The difference: temporary disability called chemotherapy, which caused my taste to change in a day. Eggs, a favorite two days ago, are anathema now. "Delicious" cream cheese and a bagel. And so a detour is decreed, not a new highway called nausea and disaster.

Two bouts with breast cancer in the last twelve years with its attendant chemotherapy and radiation therapy have shown me that the main course of life can be pursued with annoying but short detours from the voyage already undertaken.

Going back to the 1920's when polio, then a dreaded and easily contracted disease, paralyzed my left side and part of my right leg and foot, I remember months in the hospital, plaster casts, and pain all as a side road, never as a complete change in direction.

You, who are TABS, now, keep to the straight road, but be sure to detour just enough to get through the crisis; remembering the "thinking reed" of Blaise Pascal that bends, not the oak of Antonio Machado that breaks in the storm.

After college, marriage to dear "winsome Johnny", at least one broken ankle, and two wonderful sons, I fell over the side of a hill in Puerto Rico at a college, when a rotted bamboo railing collapsed, shattering an already weak left femur. This did seem the end of the highway at this point. But, withal the excruciating pain of pulling that left leg straight, my small three-year-old son went down a steep dark hill to get me some water -- in a dark house, because he heard me say I was thirsty. At that moment, I knew the highway was not to be diverted. Because of that boy, and all the loving people, it could not be the end of the straight road.

In the hospital room, the view was of brilliant scarlet flamboyant trees in the patio of an elementary school. In traction, unable even to turn over, I looked forward to recess when the bright, smiling children came to play and duel with each other with the giant black pods of the flamboyants (also known as the Royal Poinciana). [Here ends the record.]