Allison Rizzolo, Saved by a Blood Transfusion, Hopes to Inspire Others

Allison Rizzolo

From TV station KVUE in Austin, Texas comes the story of Allison Rizzolo, who was in a bad crash and needed a blood transfusion from a donor. Now she donates blood and hopes to inspire others to give.

Allison was in a road rage incident while on her way to work. She said a car sped up to get in front of her, cut her off, and hit the brakes. Allison’s car crashed into the back of the car, and her car flipped five times. She says she is lucky to be alive after losing half her blood volume in the aftermath of the accident.

“I just lost blood so quickly and so fast. I was, fortunately, able to get to be transported to the hospital very quickly, and they were able to give me that transfusion and enable me to survive,” she said.

Now she hopes to inspire others to be blood donors, knowing it can be life-saving. It was for her.

Read the whole story at KVUE.

Natalie Walks Again After Doctors
Tell Her Parents She Never Would

Follow this link or click on the photo above to see the story in its entirety at Epoch Times.

We think doctors can at times be miracle workers. We don’t disparage them at all. But in Natalie’s case, her parents didn’t want the doctors to define Natalie’s outcome from a medical spinal cord issue by limiting her to their admonition that she never would walk again. Said Natalie’s mother:

“Doctors are not God. They are human just like all of us. They make mistakes and they cannot tell what the future holds. Don’t ever give up on yourself or your child.”

In this story from the Epoch Times, you’ll also find a compelling video of Natalie walking in a therapy session.

We’re almost at a loss for words after seeing this amazing story. Almost. Two words come immediately to mind, though” GO NATALIE!

Mother of 3 Overcomes Drug Addiction to Graduate From College at Age 48

Epoch Times reports: From drug addict to 48-ear-old college grad

Mother of three Ginny Burton, 48, was introduced to substance abuse by her mother at the age of 12, starting off with marijuana. According to CBS, she went on to become hooked on cocaine and methamphetamine.

Burton became a regular in juvenile detention centers in her young life, where the seed was planted that motivated her to go to college to understand and ultimately change the justice system after what she characterized as injustice within the system. She enrolled at Washington University and graduated this spring; afterwards she intends

Read the inspiring story here: Drug Addict Turns Her Life Around

Jennifer Vassel’s Birthmark Inspires Not Only a Book, But a Self-Love Brand for Kids

Jennifer Vassel

From Black Enterprise comes the story of Jennifer Vessel, a woman who was born with a birthmark covering a large portion of her back and shoulder that she was ashamed of and tried to hide during her childhood. However, when she reached college, she said she was tired of trying to hide it all the time. Instead, she embraced it, which eventually led to a book, “I Am Unique,” and the evolution of her mission to “inspire girls to live their lives undimmed.”

Please read the Black Enterprise story here: From Insecurity to Impact: How This Woman’s Birthmark Inspired a Self-Love Brand for Kids

Nick Woodman, 37: GoPro Billionaire

GoPro-ForbesAn inspiring business story from Forbes of the man behind the GoPro camera and how he became a billionaire by age 37: The Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company.

He slept in his VW minivan, surfed, hit trade shows and kept improving on his idea. His first year sales were $350,000. In 2012 they were at $521 million, and the San Mateo, Calif. firm currently is valued at $2.25 billion.

Rep. Giffords Shares Special Bond with Veteran Invited to State of the Union

This story about an Iraqi War veteran who helped inspire Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ fight to come back from a devastating brain injury caused in a shooting just over a year ago is worth a read:

By Dustin Volz
Cronkite News
Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012

 
WASHINGTON – Just hours before the State of the Union address Tuesday, Brian Kolfage was in Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ office, reflecting on the determination and perseverance of the congresswoman.

“She’s a tough woman,” Kolfage said of Giffords, whose recovery from a 2011 shooting captivated the nation. “I know she’ll overcome it (her injuries) and she’ll be stronger.”

But before Giffords inspired the nation, Kolfage – who lost both legs and an arm in a 2004 mortar attack in Iraq – inspired her.

Read the entire story here: http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2012/01/giffords-shares-special-bond-with-veteran-invited-to-state-of-the-union/

Tim Tebow – Inspirational or Offensive?

Denver Broncos quarterback, Tim Tebow.
A story on Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow is low-hanging fruit for us. It’s a little too easy to line him up as another athlete with an inspiring story on this website and write an article about the man who to us is such an inspiration and a great story that should make everyone smile, at least just a little, and feel good inside. So we didn’t do our own piece, we waited for the other media to write one. And we waited all season. We waited while the Tebow-bashing and criticizing played out in the mainstream media.

Frankly, it confuses us that anyone could watch this athlete, understand his back story, and come up with the conclusion that his is anything but an inspiring story. Most of the media doesn’t seem to get it. Which just goes to show you how out of touch most of the mainstream media is with mainstream America.

Eighty-five percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. So you’d think that Tebow giving praise to his “Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” very publicly after every game would be no big deal, not news, not a “man bites dog” story, but the opposite. Other football players at every level get on bended knee for a brief moment, bow their heads, cross themselves when they’ve scored a touchdown. Not all of them, of course, but enough to notice. Maybe Tebow, whose kneeling pose in prayer has become known as “Tebowing,” holds his prayer a little longer than the others. Or maybe it’s that he’s been so open about his faith, that when he points his finger to heaven reflecting the cheers and applause that shower down upon him when he scores up to a higher power, everyone knows exactly what the gesture means. Other athletes do it constantly. But maybe there’s some ambiguity in their gestures because they don’t talk about their faith as openly as Tebow does.

A little background on Tim Tebow, just in case you didn’t know (and you might not, because most of the media doesn’t focus on the back story):

• Tim was born to Baptist missionary parents in the Philippines.
• While she was pregnant with Tim, his mother, Pam, suffered a life-threatening infection. She went into a coma. She also suffered from dysentery. She was treated with an array of drugs as a result – drugs that shouldn’t be used on a pregnant woman, because of the danger to the fetus. She pulled through her illness, but doctors warned her to expect her baby to be stillborn. They said if Tim went to term and survived, that he could be severely disabled as a result of the drug treatments she received. They asked her to consider an abortion. Pam refused.
• In a high school game as a sophomore, Tebow hurt his right leg on a play in the first half of a game. His coach told him to toughen up, that it was probably just a bruise. Tebow continued to play and in the fourth quarter, ran for a score-tying 29-yard touchdown. After the game, x-rays showed a broken fibula. And not just a hairline fracture – a “jagged break of his lower leg,” as his coach described it. He didn’t play the rest of the year.

You’ve probably seen this drink commercial, “Appreciate That,” where Tebow outlines the things people have said he couldn’t do:


Overcoming adversity? Yeah, just a little. Inspirational? We think so.

We wanted to highlight this piece of commentary by the Miami Herald’s Linda Robertson: Inspirational or offensive, Tim Tebow’s no phony. Unfortunately, however, her column is no longer accessible through the Miami Herald website, so we’ve had to link to the only place on the web we’ve been able to find it. It’s poorly copied and pasted — there are no paragraphs and some sentences run into the next, but it’s still readable. We hope you enjoy it.

Betty Ford Dies at 93

Betty Ford (White House Photo)
Betty Ford, former First Lady and wife of late former President Gerald Ford died yesterday at the age of 93. She admitted a long-time addiction to alcohol and prescription pain-killers and her recovery from them led her to open the Betty Ford Center to help others similarly addicted. Read the full story.

Some quotes about her:

“She has been an inspiration to so many through her efforts to educate women about breast cancer and her wonderful work at the Betty Ford Center.”

— Former first lady Nancy Reagan

“She was an authentic and genuine hero in the recovery world. … It’s sort of hard to imagine her absence on this earth.”

— Carl Sferrazza Anthony, former speechwriter for Nancy Reagan and author of
“First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives & Their Power”

The Homeless Man with a Golden Voice

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfCgfxxeaZA]
By now you’ve most likely heard the name Ted Williams in the news. No, not the deceased baseball great, but this Ted Williams: Homeless Man With a Golden Voice.

The story of Ted Williams initially was reported by the Columbus Dispatch. They’ve got an entire page devoted to coverage of him now: The Man With the Golden Pipes.

But which story of inspiration do you take from Ted Williams’ riches-to-rags-to-riches story?

There’s a back-story, as there usually always seems to be in these kinds of stories, to Ted’s recent burst onto the scene after that initial Columbus Dispatch video went viral and was viewed some 13 million times. It’s complicated, that back-story, but the threads all tug at your emotions. Which one is the story of inspiration? The one of Ted, battling with various addictions, living on the streets, being rediscovered? Or the one of his former wife, a woman who raised the couple’s four daughters as a single mom, and who also took in another child that Ted had with another woman? Here’s that story in today’s New York Daily News. In all, Ted has nine children.

Or is it, perhaps, Ted’s 90-year-old mother, who gave up trying to cope with her son and gave him up to God to watch over, praying for him all the while, and all the while trying to convince her son to embrace God. She’s been a member of her church for more than 50 years. She spelled out her story on this morning’s “Good Morning America” show.

Wherever you look throughout the timeline of this story, there are numerous levels of inspiration. Where do you find yours?