– Barbara Fischer is a single mother to 14 children. Ten of them were adopted with significant disabilities.

Yet it was her youngest daughter and probably her last adopted child, Arianna, who asked the most wondrous questions. Soon after bringing her home, the then 7-year-old scanned the night sky and asked, "What's that?"

It was the moon. She had never seen it before.

Arianna had spent the past five years of her young life in a San Diego hospital ward, largely isolated from most childhood experiences. Her birth mom had given her up, unable to care for a child with such intensive medical needs. Arianna suffers from a neuromuscular disease similar to childhood amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. She is fed through a tube and uses a ventilator much of the day to help her breathe.

And no family wanted to adopt her, until Barbara Fischer came along.

Fischer wasn't bringing Arianna to an empty home. She was bringing her to meet her new brother, Alexander James, AJ for short. AJ is 9 and the ninth of Fischer's adopted children. Like Arianna, he suffers from a terminal disorder. AJ has recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a disease that prevents his skin from properly anchoring to his body. Angry red welts cover AJ's body.

It's hard to imagine how one mother could care for one such medically involved child, much less two. But Fischer believed adopting Arianna and pairing her with AJ would lessen the isolation of both. As well, she believed they could gain strength from each other, socially and psychologically.

It worked out better than she could have imagined.

"You can't know when you add a child to your home, who's going to click," Fischer said. "But it's been the best match of all my kids."

When Fischer was a child, her dream was to have her own orphanage. And for much of her adult life, Fischer has taken in children nobody else wanted.

Before AJ and Arianna, many of Fischer's adopted children were kids whose lives had been scarred by prenatal substance abuse, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental health issues. They were kids who repeatedly cycled through the foster care system.

Some had been rejected by earlier adoptive parents because raising them, they discovered, was too hard.

"I have been called a saint many times," Fischer added. "And I tell people in reality I'm a little bit insane to do what I've done. It is my passion. That's all I can say."

Yet raising such children taught Fischer some hard lessons. A loving parent and stable home is no guarantee of breaking the chains of dysfunction that can run through generations of families.

"It doesn't fix it," Fischer said. "Does it help? I sure hope so, because otherwise I wasted a lot of years. They at least know that they have somebody in their lives and they're not alone."