Chana Malka Klein matches people, not diagnoses
Fifteen years ago, my friend was crying to me over the phone. Her daughter was one of those golden girls everyone envies, the kind of girl who was always the lead in school plays, head of G.O., yearbook editor, and had amazing middos. I was one of the few people in the world who knew that behind the perfection lay a secret medical condition. She could live a perfectly normal, healthy life, be married and have children, but, “If anyone finds out,” my friend sobbed, no shidduch would get further than round three.
“I reached out to an organization, and they told me that since she has a medical condition, they’ll just have to match her up with someone similar. ‘A medical goes with a medical,’ they told me.”
My first thought? No, that just doesn’t work. You can’t lump two people with medical conditions together because “they’re the same.”
That was the moment I gained the clarity that started Mesos Dodim: A medical condition doesn’t define a person. Girls and boys are people first, a diagnosis second.
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