I have a lovely friend named Leenie Quinn. She was born with one hand and never let her “disability” stop her from anything. Often, I’d forget that she had one less hand and soon learned this girl could do far more with one than I could with two. In high school, she excelled at sport after sport which she continued at Stonehill College. There, she began to follow her dream of becoming a nurse. Leenie was BORN to take care of people. And when I say that I would trust my life in this girl’s ONE hand over the two hands of many others, I mean it with all sincerity.
Leenie graduated May 2011. She worked her ass off and got into into the nursing school of her dreams, NYU, where she would study to be a geriatric nurse.
This Spring, Leenie excitedly took the next step to achieving her true calling and NYU ripped it away before her first week of class was even over. Why? Because without letting her prove herself, they did not believe she could do her job with only one hand.
NYU tried to save themselves by giving her a “dexterity test” for which she had to perform 7 difficult tasks that surely her 2-handed peers would not have been able to perform yet either. This was confirmed by speaking with a number of other universities. NYU failed her and offered an in-house transfer to any other major, but that’s not what Leenie had worked so hard to achieve.
Please help spread Leenie’s story and don’t let NYU get away with this!
You can start by liking this Facebook page:
Feeling strangely sentimental these days.
I’ve just been sucked into a vortex of family functions.
SOS.
