Best Helping Hands (page 2 of 4)

• Best of America

Accepting Help

Two months later, reality flooded in. His physical therapist placed a tray with a small LEGO block on one side of it on a chest-high table in front of Cook. "See if you can move that to the other side of the tray," she told him. "I'll check on you later."

He'd regained a bit of mobility in his right shoulder by then, though his hands were still useless. "I gave it everything I had," says Cook, "and all I could do was move it a few inches. It took half an hour and two breaks. I was covered in sweat." He broke down and bawled.

"I just lost it," says Cook. "I had been thinking I'd get better. I cried all day and kept shouting at my legs, 'Move, damn you, move!'"

It was the first of many losses. Unable to return to work, he was forced to give up his comfortable lifestyle, including the two homes he loved. Eventually, his fiancée and her child also moved on. "That boy was a surrogate son to me," says Cook. "I taught him to tie his shoes. He called me Dad. My darkest moment was when they left." He contemplated killing himself, but the accident had robbed him of the ability to act on the impulse.

In retrospect, Cook sees their departure as a lifesaver. "It forced me to become independent," he says. He started by addressing his basic needs. He had the house he now lives in gutted and made wheelchair accessible. He hired a caregiver to help him get out of bed and going each morning, a process that can take up to three hours. And, after regaining movement in a few fingers, he taught himself how to steer his electric wheelchair.

Still, he occasionally suffered crying jags and bouts of depression. To help combat his isolation, he joined a support group, but he stopped going to meetings after they left him emotionally drained.

About the same time, a friend began looking into companion animals for Cook and stumbled onto the website for a program called Helping Hands, which trains capuchin monkeys -- once used by organ grinders -- as service animals for the disabled. At the organization's Monkey College in Boston, the little black-and-brown primates, with punk-rocker hair tufts, learn an array of tasks in simulated apartments full of adaptive equipment for the disabled. The most intelligent of the small monkeys, capuchins are extremely dexterous and can use their humanlike hands to manipulate objects. Like much bigger chimps, they have very strong arms.

Minnie, for example, can pick up a frozen dinner weighing two pounds, nearly half her weight. Grasping it in one hand, she climbs onto Cook in his wheelchair and, from his shoulder, places it into the wall-mounted microwave. Or she can grab a jar of pasta sauce, open it and pour it over precooked noodles.