Focus Story Structure Exercise

There are 20,000 injuries in high school football each year — 12 percent of them permanently disabling the victims.  Thirteen youths died last year.  Thirty-five percent of the injuries are to the neck or head.  Most critics blame the helmet. 

 

Pete Stenhoff 16, a junior at Chula Vista High School in Redmond, California, is confined to a wheelchair for life. 

 

Stenhoff was hurt in a game during his senior year. He rammed his head into the ball carrier’s chest and cracked vertebrae in his spine. .  “I knew the risks involved when I decided to play football,” he says, and adds, “I wish I would have known just how bad it could be.”   At the time of the accident, he weighed 210 pounds, and now he only weighs 172 pounds.  He didn’t graduate with his class is and trying to get his diploma by taking correspondence courses.  He is not bitter. 

Find That Lead Exercise

1)      Scene-setter Leads

 

Patients without Border

By Sara Corbett New York Times

 

        Long before the dentists and the doctors got there, before the nurses, the hygienists and X-ray techs came, before anyone had flicked on the portable mammography unit or sterilized the day’s first set of surgical instruments, the people who needed them showed up to wait. It was 3 a.m. at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Virginia — Friday, July 20, 2007 — the start of a rainy Appalachian morning. Outside the gates, people lay in their trucks or in tents pitched along the grassy parking lot, waiting for their chance to have their medical needs treated at no charge — part of an annual three-day “expedition” led by a volunteer medical relief corps called Remote Area Medical.

 

     http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18healthcare-t.html?ref=health

 

2)      Direct Address Leads

 

Lawyer: Woman who got HIV wasn’t told organ donor was risk

By Charles Rex Arbogast USA Today

  

   A woman in her 30s who is one of the four organ transplant patients infected with HIV and hepatitis  was not told that the infected donor was high risk, and had previously rejected another donor “because of his lifestyle,” her attorney said.

 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-16-hiv-transplant_N.htm