The children skip noisily through the museum, rambunctious as any normal 9-year-olds on a field trip from school. Suddenly they stop in their tracks, startled by a sight so strange they have no idea how to respond.

Strapped into wheelchairs, breathing tubes snaking from holes in their throats, feeding tubes plugged into their stomachs, a procession of very different children is wheeled past the exhibits. Their heads loll, their mouths drool, their limbs are twisted and stiff. Most cannot see or speak or move. They cannot even breathe without help.

Tentatively, the school children approach.

"What's his name?" one asks shyly, staring at the splints that bind one child's hands and feet, wincing at the gurgling sounds coming from the tube in his neck.

"What happened to him?" asks another.

His name is David, says the kind lady in the white coat who wipes his mouth and strokes his head. David is 6, she tells them. He's very sick, and he can't speak, but he likes to go to museums _ just like you.

"How do you know what he likes if he can't tell you?"

It is a question caregivers are asked all the time. How do they know if any of the extraordinary efforts they pour into these profoundly brain-damaged children make a difference? The trips to the museums, the Halloween parties with costumes, the formal sit-down Thanksgiving dinners for children who cannot eat?

"Where does David live?"

He lives a few blocks away, in a world few people ever see _ two cheerfully decorated wards inside a soaring, Spanish-style brick building overlooking Central Park, a place called the Specialty Hospital.

Here in the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center, 50 of the sickest, most vulnerable young people live out their lives.

Their stories are tragic: babies born prematurely to drug-addicted mothers, a boy who nearly drowned in the bathtub as an infant, infants doomed from birth by genetic abnormalities with strange-sounding names and grim consequences.

To visitors, Specialty can appear a deeply disturbing place, one that hums with intimidating machines and ever-present reminders of the fragility of life. Inevitably, it is also a place that raises stark and troubling questions about costs of care and quality of life and even what it means to be human.

But for those who live and work here, Specialty represents all the joy and happiness and nurturing safety of home. For although this is a world haunted by disease and suffering, skepticism and death, it is also a world filled with compassion and care.

Most of all, it is a world filled with love.

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