SANTA ANA – Dani Morrison kneels on the asphalt, offering the man in the wheelchair a homemade sandwich and a tumbler of cold water. She addresses him as “Parker,” but it’s unclear if that is his first or last name.

He is a homeless transient Morrison has encountered near her neighborhood – behind Target, in front of a liquor store, on the bicycle trail where she meets him on this day. Always, as Morrison sees it, vulnerable.

The bike trail is semi-secluded from neighboring buildings by bushes, and she worries that someone might bother him.

His face, hands, swollen bare feet and clothes are streaked with grime. His speech is slow and his voice soft amid the rhythmic bump of cars jolting over the railroad tracks a few hundred feet away on Bristol Street.

Morrison and her husband drove a few blocks over from their Columbine Avenue home, hoping to persuade Parker to let them take him to a shelter. She even called a county supervisor’s office to make sure Parker would be allowed in.

The deep faith in God and love for their brethren that Morrison and her husband, Guy, have shared for decades led them to take in nine foster children, runaway teens and struggling young adults, along with raising their three children.

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Now, at 59, Morrison steers her concern toward homeless people on the street. With health problems, she is medically retired from her job as a registered nurse.

Parker converses with Morrison for about 10 minutes, but never opens his eyes. She leans in closer.

“I’m really trying to get you some help,” Morrison tells Parker, holding forth the plate of sandwiches for him to take what he wants. “When I crawl into my bed at night, I think of you behind Target.”

The Morrisons leave after Parker declines to go with them. They go back again later, with the same result.

If Parker had opened his eyes to look at Morrison, he’d have seen her striking countenance: kindness in a pair of soft brown eyes looking out from a face disfigured by cancer.

Her looks scare young children. Dogs bark at her. Adults stare.

Some people mistake Morrison for a homeless person, like the man outside a Trader Joe’s who told her he didn’t have any money to give her.

If Parker had looked at her, he’d have seen the pink T-shirt with the red hearts and the telltale words purposely worn to explain herself to strangers.

“Not contagious.” “Cancer recovery.” “Jesus is my joy.”

Morrison must press a finger against the hole in the tube in her throat in order to speak. Her voice comes out raspy and slightly distorted. But her message is clear.

“If in my disfigured state I can still express the heart of God to people, that is what I want to do until I can do it no longer.”

Suffering and gratitude

A little over three years ago, doctors told Morrison she had little chance of survival, even with chemotherapy and radiation.

Her jaw had been torturing her for months. It was so bad, she cried with the pain and needed to take ibuprofen to do her job as a per-diem lactation specialist at Kaiser Permanente’s Anaheim medical center, helping new mothers breastfeed.

She saw 10 dentists, gastroenterologists and ear, nose and throat doctors (none of them Kaiser-affiliated) who variously told Morrison that she needed a root canal, or a mouth guard to stop grinding her teeth, or a test for acid reflux.

The correct diagnosis came in September 2013, just weeks after full health benefits kicked in from a new part-time position at the Kaiser hospital in Irvine: stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma that manifested in a tumor engulfing her palate, sinuses, nose, cheeks, pituitary gland and upper jaw and teeth.

Morrison says she put her life in Jesus’ hands and pursued treatment – surgery to remove the tumor, and radiation and chemotherapy that destroyed her sense of smell and taste and worsened an existing hearing deficiency.

She has had a tracheostomy to assist her breathing and a gastrostomy so she can nourish herself with liquid fed through a tube. Her tear ducts no longer function, so she routinely dabs at her eyes with a tissue.

Morrison also underwent three reconstructive surgeries, 12 to 14 hours each. The first two attempts to refashion her jaw, using a bone from her leg and then a bone from her rib, failed because of infection. The third, engineered with a bone from her hip, has held up after a successfully treated minor infection.

She doesn’t blame any of her dental or medical providers for missing the diagnosis or for the infections that followed her surgeries. She’s gone back to visit them, hoping they’ll learn from her to better serve future patients.

Morrison expresses gratitude to Kaiser for her health care and extended benefits, and to her family, friends, co-workers and members of her church, The Vineyard at The River, in Irvine. She attends two cancer support groups to encourage others.

Still, the onetime vivacious brunette who was homecoming queen in her native Ohio cried over what happened to her. She once told her husband she felt like The Elephant Man, the demeaning freak show title given to Englishman Joseph Merrick because of his severe facial deformities.

“He said to me, ‘Dani, you are so beautiful to me.’ And he wrote me a poem called ‘Delicate Flower.’”

She cried again, but for a different reason: the beauty of his words.

The Morrisons have been married 33 years, living in the same house for all that time. Guy Morrison was born again in the 1990s, before his wife, who found her faith after a depression that followed the birth of her third child.

When she was young, Morrison says, she liked to party and had selfish ways. Today, she exults in what she calls the “deep joy” of just being alive. Morrison says she’s been in remission since 2014 but can no longer work as a pediatric nurse or take in foster children. She hopes other families will open their homes to the children she calls “orphans.”

Finances aren’t a worry: A long-term disability policy she invested in provides 70 percent of her wages; Guy Morrison continues to work as a physical therapist and chiropractor.

Morrison’s work now, she says, is whatever God ordains. She lives by the creed of St. Francis of Assisi.

“Now I believe I have a wonderful job through the Lord – whomever I encounter, just to love them.”

Words and action

Morrision’s outreach to homeless people has mostly involved bringing food, water, blankets and comforting words to those living near her neighborhood.

“I don’t go looking for them,” she says. But if she sees someone in distress, Morrison is compelled to stop and try to help.

One time at a shopping center, a woman who clearly suffered from mental illness had taken off her clothes and climbed on top of a van. Then she started running around in circles. Police came; a crowd gathered.

The woman threw rocks at the police. Morrison asked the officers if she could assist them somehow. They declined her offer. She tried to educate onlookers who watched and laughed. “This is not funny,” she told them. “This is sad.”

Back in October, Morrison attended a forum in Santa Ana that county Supervisor Andrew Do held to discuss the homeless crisis and what action local authorities were taking. Morrison sat in the audience and took notes. Later this week, she plans to meet with one of Do’s assistants for further discussion on what she can do to help.

As for Parker, the homeless man on the bike trail, Morrison has not given up hope. She continues to talk to him about getting off the street.

She became a nurse because she was drawn to take care of others, especially children. “But now that I am …” she pauses to find the right word, “marred and handicapped, I have more compassion for people who are handicapped.”

Morrison passes her hand gently over a photocopy of a picture she took of Parker.

“I have a greater awareness of people. I think I will for as long as I live.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7793 or twalker@ocregister.com or on Twitter @TellTheresa