MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The Make-A-Wish Foundation is in the business of making dreams come true for seriously ill young people and those wishes cover quite a range. The foundation has sent sick children to Disneyland. They've allowed kids to meet sports heroes and movie stars. They even allowed a youngster to spend a stint here at NPR.
But Gideon Sofer's wish is in a category all its own. The 21-year-old college student from New Jersey suffers from Crohn's Disease. It's a chronic intestinal disorder that affects an estimated half million Americans. He's also an avid stamp collector and his dream combined those two facets of his life.
Sofer asked for a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. Postmaster General to convince the post office to publish a stamp that would raise awareness about Inflammatory Bowel Disease or IBD, a constellation of ailments that includes Crohn's Disease.
Today Gideon Sofer got his wish. This morning he sat down with Postmaster General John Potter here in Washington, D.C., and this afternoon he's come by our studios to tell us about that meeting. So good to talk to you, Gideon.
Mr. GIDEON SOFER (Crohn's sufferer): Thanks for having me.
NORRIS: Gideon, I'm trying to imagine the conversation when the Make-A-Wish Foundation first called you and they said, we're going to grant any wish you have. You can have anything you want in the entire world. And you tell them, I think I'd like to meet with the Postmaster General.
Mr. SOFER: Well I ask myself the question, you know, if I really had a limited amount of time, if I really were to die tomorrow, what did I really want to see happen in my life today. And that answer was to see the stamp come through to fruition. And in order to do that I seriously considered meeting the postmaster, because I thought that that might be one of the best ways to try and convince the postal service to go ahead and issue the stamp.
NORRIS: You've come armed with documents. I take it you carried that same stack of papers into that meeting with the Postmaster General.
Mr. SOFER: I carried it, yes.
NORRIS: If you only had a short time to meet with him and this is your one shot to sit down with the Postmaster General, what did you do to make sure that you connected, to make sure that you made your case and knew that you actually punched through that veneer and convinced him?
Mr. SOFER: I told him that many people have the idea that this disease is, you know, a lifelong condition and you an pop a few pills a day and everything will be okay. And that it's not life threatening or that it can't be terminal. And the reality is that this disease kills. And that I almost died from multiple hospitalizations, but most recently being in the hospital for six months during 2003 after I graduated high school. You know, I was accepted to school at UC Berkeley and I had to defer my admission for two years.
Because I was basically knocking on death's door, just clinging to life, in the hospital going in and out of the intensive care unit for multiple operations. And I had organs failing, IV therapy. And many patients, believe it or not, are also in the same boat. And that's why early detection is so key to be able to stop the disease in its tracks.
NORRIS: What kind of power does a stamp have?
Mr. SOFER: You know the postal service has a really quiet way of initiating massive change when they issue stamps. When I was in high school they came out with the diabetes stamps. And all of the sudden all the news anchors on the regional news started promoting all these fundraisers and these marathons and these walkathons for diabetes.
And it's just out of the blue this hadn't been done before all these local events and regional events starting happening. And it really put the focus on diabetes and put it into the limelight when the postal service decided to commemorate that idea.
NORRIS: If your dream comes true and the post office does issue a stamp to raise awareness about this constellation of ailments, what might that stamp look at?
Mr. SOFER: That's not my domain. I had, to be brutally honest, I'm not naturally born artist. But I think that if something creative has been done for all the other stamps that have been out there, something creative can definitely be thought of for the condition. If it has to get down to the nitty-gritty and needs to be a picture of one's digestive tract or organs or whatever it is, then you know what, let's get it out there. Because at this point it's people's lives we're talking about.
NORRIS: Gideon Sofer, thanks so much for taking time to come in to talk to us. All the best to you.
Mr. SOFER: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
NORRIS: Gideon Sofer, he was talking to us about his work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to make his dream come true, a stamp to raise awareness about inflammatory bowel disease.
Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.