Ya know, I have read some mighty sad stories in my lifetime, but this one-----THIS one shows me there are some teens that do have some sense. Better break out the kleenex, folks: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_sabrina_s_twilight;_ylt=AiBPWR5BTSU1MafatAETpPy s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNwN29uMTU2BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAxMjE 4L3VzX3NhYnJpbmFfc190d2lsaWdodARjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wd WxhcgRjcG9zAzYEcG9zAzMEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9 oZWFkbGluZV9saXN0BHNsawN3aXRobG92ZXRlZW4--

As she walked through the door, Sabrina Parker's big hazel eyes flared with surprise and she raised a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp. She was a huge fan of the "Twilight" book and movie series, and her friends and family had transformed this greasy garage into a Sweet 16's dream.

Homemade strobe lights illuminated walls decorated like the night sky and plastered with cast posters. All around were balloons in red, white and black. An enormous cake, iced to look like the chess board on one of the book jackets, held 16 blazing candles.

The crowd began chanting for Sabrina to blow them out. She bent in close and blew, but the flames barely flickered. She straightened up and shook her head. Realizing her distress, Matt Scozzari stepped closer and told her they would do it together. On the count of three, they leaned in and snuffed them out together.

In the three months since he'd first asked her out, Matt had noticed small changes in his girlfriend: The shortness of breath, the slurring in her speech, the weight loss. When he'd ask what was going on, Sabrina would just shrug it off as nothing serious.

But Sabrina knew her condition was very serious.

About a month after she started seeing Matt, Sabrina learned that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease — the same illness that had killed her mother and grandmother. A doctor told Sabrina it wouldn't be long before she would have to decide whether to go on a ventilator.

She'd told her closest friends about her condition, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to tell Matt.

Matt had been so sweet and gentle. For her Sweet 16, he'd bought matching pewter replicas of Bella's and Edward's rings from "Twilight: [COLOR=#366388 !important][COLOR=#366388 !important]New [COLOR=#366388 !important]Moon[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR]," inscribed with the words, "What would I do without you?"

How would he react when he found out she had this horrible, wasting disease — that she was dying?

She was petrified. She had already lost so much, and would lose so much more in the coming months.
She didn't want to risk losing Matt, too.

In Sabrina's favorite song, there's a refrain that goes: "Time slows down/Whenever you're around/Can you feel/This magic in the air?"

The song, by Taylor Swift, is called "Today Was a Fairy Tale."

Sabrina and Matt would understand soon enough that their story could have no happily-ever-after ending. The "magic" would be in how the brave and devoted ninth graders chose to use the time they had.

In so many ways, Sabrina Kay Parker was an average teenage girl. She was all about Facebook and Aeropostale. She played volleyball and softball. She loved roller skating and roller coasters, Taco Bell and "Twilight" hunk Taylor Lautner.

But a genetic abnormality made her unlike almost anyone else.

Her maternal grandmother, Lorna Kay Melton, died of ALS on Feb. 2, 1993, a year before her granddaughter's birth. Sabrina was around 3 when her mother, Melissa Kay Melton, began showing symptoms and just 4 years old when "Missy" died.

Sabrina's father, Asheston Parker, soon remarried, and the redheaded 6-year-old went to live with his parents, Noland and Zelma Parker.

The Parkers lived in constant dread that Sabrina would fall ill. Lorna had been 46 when she died; Missy had been 24. Sensing a pattern, Noland wouldn't breathe easy until Sabrina celebrated her 12th birthday without symptoms.

When she passed that milestone, and then her 13th and 14th, he dared to hope that the girl he and his wife had come to consider their own daughter had broken the family curse.

But in June 2009, Sabrina began complaining of earaches. Her voice had begun to grow more nasal and difficult to understand. Her grandparents took her to an ear, nose and throat specialist, but he could find no abnormalities.

Not long after she began eighth grade that fall, Sabrina asked her grandparents to write a note to her gym teacher, excusing her from doing sit-ups: She couldn't lift her head off the floor without putting her hand behind her neck.

"Is that normal?" Sabrina asked her grandmother.

"No," Zelma replied.

The next time they took her to the doctor about her ears, the grandparents mentioned Sabrina's sad family history. A pediatric neurologist ordered CT scans, an MRI, electromyography to evaluate the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. Sabrina even spent a night in a sleep lab.

"i didnt really sleep that good because i had all theas wires attached to me," she posted on Facebook.

Perhaps there was another reason: The test began on Nov. 6, 2009, the day Matt Scozzari finally worked up the nerve to ask her out.

David and Audrey Scozzari's son had experienced struggles of his own.

For a while, doctors thought he was mildly autistic. Diagnosed with a slight learning disability in grade school, Matt had trouble reading. His words would often come out in a jumble, making him the target of schoolyard bullies.

When he was in fifth grade, he watched his maternal grandmother — the one who'd nicknamed him "Casanova" for his way with the ladies — waste away from pancreatic cancer. He began disobeying his parents and hanging out with the wrong crowd.

But by the time he reached middle school, Matt had come into his own. He played football and soccer, and he had no trouble attracting girls.

Matt was more than a year younger than Sabrina, who had repeated a grade. There was something about Sabrina — a feistiness, a spark in her eye — that reminded him of his grandmother. After admiring her from afar for months, Matt approached her in gym class and asked her out. She said yes without hesitating.

They went to movies and the mall. Matt waited a month before kissing her for the first time.

Sabrina did her best to hide her illness, but it was getting harder every day. Her speech was becoming more difficult to understand, and she was having trouble with drooling.

Besides, she really didn't have anything to tell Matt. All the tests — including a blood scan for the SOD1 gene, a common marker for familial ALS — had come back normal.

But her doctor, fearing this was ALS, referred the family to one of the leaders in the field: Dr. Richard Bedlack, director of the Duke Health Center's neuroscience clinic. Last December, the family made the three-hour trip to Durham.

The girl Bedlack examined could speak fairly clearly, but her tongue movement was weak. Her arms showed signs of atrophy, the left worse than the right. Her "forced vital capacity" — the amount of air she could blow into a tube — was 89 percent of normal. She weighed just 105 pounds, about 32 pounds below normal for her 5-foot-6 frame.

ALS is hereditary in only 10 percent of cases. Bedlack would need to do some genetic testing to confirm it, but he was already certain of his diagnosis.

Sabrina was too young to remember her mother's battle with the disease, but she had been reading up on ALS. Hearing Bedlack say the words aloud, she wept.

Normally, the younger the patient, the slower the disease's progression. But Sabrina was deteriorating rapidly.

When the girl had calmed down, Bedlack told her and the Parkers that they had a lot of decisions to make during the next six months about how aggressive they wanted to be. Would she want a tracheostomy? A ventilator? He suggested Sabrina draft a living will to make her wishes clear.

For now, she agreed to have a feeding tube inserted. The surgery was done three days later.

The tube was just to help her get her weight back up, Sabrina assured Matt, but his mother wasn't buying it.

"Everything you're telling me sounds like something very serious," Audrey Scozzari told her son. "You need to be prepared for this."

Sabrina's 16th birthday was on Feb. 6. On Facebook, she gushed about the green satin dress she'd picked out for the occasion; Matt escorted her to the party.

After Sabrina had opened her gifts, two of her friends asked Matt to step outside. He could see they were on the verge of tears.

"Matt, it's about Sabrina," one said. "She's got Lou Gehrig's disease."

Matt didn't exactly know what that was, but he knew it was bad. His head swimming, he made his way to the pond on the property, sat down and began to weep.

Sabrina found Matt there.

"Are you going to leave me now?" she asked.

"I will never leave you," he replied. "No matter what."

They held each other and cried.

Later, Matt shared the news with his mother. Audrey Scozzari was a hospice volunteer and had cared for her mother in her final seven months. She explained the course that Sabrina's illness was likely to take.

"Matthew, that's a lot for you to take on, son," she said.

"Mom," he replied through his tears. "I can't just walk out on her."

Sabrina was facing some tough decisions, she told him, and it would be his job to support her.
"This is her journey," she said. "You can walk beside her, but you cannot control her journey for her."

Three days after the party, Sabrina went back to see Bedlack.

Her breathing capacity was now down to 62 percent of where it should have been. Bedlack talked to Sabrina again about the need to decide whether she wanted to go on a ventilator, but she was still not ready to commit.

She admitted she was still taking some nourishment by mouth. She knew this could lead to choking or aspiration pneumonia, but she wasn't ready to give up the taste of food.

Despite this and the feeding tube, Sabrina had gained just one pound since her first visit.

As her speech became harder to understand, Matt began acting as her interpreter. When her tongue finally betrayed her, she got an app for her new iPod Touch that allowed her to type out a sentence and play it back in a slightly mechanical female voice.

She wrote Matt notes. They developed their own private sign language. Matt would come home from school, drop his backpack and immediately head out the door to Sabrina's.

Sabrina told Matt everything. That she wanted to have children. That she wanted to be a doctor. That she didn't want to just drift off in her sleep, the way her mother had.

When she went back to Duke in May, Sabrina admitted that she had stopped taking her ALS drugs because she thought they were affecting her sense of taste. She also confessed to not wearing her neck brace or using a walker or cane — she didn't want to show outward signs of her illness at school.

Sabrina was down to 102 pounds.