Good Words, Good Deeds, Good News

compiled by Meemaw

Couple Adopts Three

Stanley & Kerri had fostered three children, aged 10, 8 and 6, for several months after the children’s parents’ rights were severed. They have recently adopted all three of them, boosting the size of their family to eight! They worked with a foster care agency in Georgia called NECCO which also helps people reunite with their biological relatives.

The family hopes others will open their homes to children in need.

Kerri said, “We just fell in love with them, and we weren’t going to let them go back into the system,” to which Stanley added, “If not us, then who?”

K9 Officer Saves Autistic Teen

Officer Chris and his K9 partner Ruger are being praised for finding a Florida teenager who went missing.

When they found he was missing, Chris knew that they had to act quickly because the teen is autistic. Finding a sock belonging to the boy, Ruger sniffed it and took off down the street. He slowed down when he found the teenager in a parking lot in a busy part of town. When the teen saw Ruger he started yelling and attracted another officer’s attention, and he was returned home. The officer told him he was glad the kid had yelled because they were worried for his safety.

“You did a good job calling us over, okay? When you see the police, you say something to them,” one officer told the teenager.

Ruger also does more than rescue missing persons. He also loves connecting with the community’s children who love him in return, according to a video from the sheriff’s office.

Middle School Students Save Bus Driver

Five middle school students riding a bus to school took heroic action when their bus driver lost consciousness while driving the bus.

The driver suffered an asthma attack during which she lost consciousness three or four times. The students noticed what was happening and stopped the bus. She woke up and gestured to her pocket, where her medication was. Some helped her with her meds and another of them called 911. She was taken to the hospital, where she made a full recovery.

She had kind words for her rescuers, stating, “I’m grateful for my students. They’re the ones that saved my life and everybody else’s on that bus.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, “Asthma is a lung condition that makes your airways narrow. It causes symptoms like coughing, wheezing, or shortness of breath that make it hard to breathe. Most people with asthma can manage their symptoms with a combination of medication and habits. But sometimes, asthma symptoms flare up and worsen more than usual. This is an asthma attack,” the website read.

Police Officers Save Unresponsive Man

Police officers had been called to a restaurant for a medical emergency. Phillip had been having breakfast with his accountant when he passed out. When the officers got to the restaurant, Phillip wasn’t breathing and had gone into cardiac arrest. The officers rushed to administer CPR and then used a defibrillator to get his heart started and stayed until he was talking to them.

“It was a miraculous recovery to get to the scene of someone who was completely unresponsive, to going through that entire process to being able to speak,” the Old Westbury Chief of Police said.

Three weeks later Phillip got to meet the officers. “It’s emotional because without them, I’m not here,” he said. “The most important thing to me is how these people responded. A minute here, a minute there, I would be dead.”

“These guys did the right thing, and I’m alive because of it,” the retired banker and grandfather added.

Later, the police department presented awards for the rescue to the three officers involved. “A grandfather. It’s great to see. It means a lot,” one of them said. “It’s kind of what we all signed up to do. I became a police officer to help people and I got to do that.”

Assistive Glasses Help With Dementia Sufferers

A British company called Cross Sense, LTD has won a £ 1 million prize for developing a pair of AI smart glasses with a camera, microphone, speakers and assistant to help those with dementia stay independent for longer.

The glasses can look at what the person is doing and respond with warnings of possible danger, and help the person with answers to questions the person asks using a helper called Wispy. They are also programmed to sense if a person’s condition changes. The lenses also have floating text for more help.

CrossSense Ltd provided the AI software, but the team had been working with frames produced by various hardware companies. These can be fitted with prescription lenses and are compatible with hearing aids.

The glasses were tested with 23 pairs of people living with dementia and their caregivers. They will be tested in the last quarter of 2026 in people’s homes to see how well they work. Smartphones with the same AI program should be available at the end of this year, and the glasses should be available in 2027.

Dr Foyzul Rahman, an expert in cognitive decline at Loughborough University who was not involved with the project, said the breakthrough made by CrossSense was offering real-time prompts and feedback during tasks rather than providing simple one-off reminders.