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I've been a chauffeur for the city for 20 years and my salary doesn't go very far, but I think we've done everything we could to help Eddie. We don't feel we've sacrificed ourselves in any way. Sure, we've never gone anywhere without taking Eddie along -- but then we haven't wanted to.

One thing I know and that is that Eddie has drawn us all closer together. Our married children live near us, by their own choice. When the doctors advised us to put Eddie away, my son John was in the Army. We wrote him about it, and I think he would have gone AWOL to stop it if we hadn't promised him we wouldn't.

That time the woman pushed Eddie, his two sisters heard about it and came around with fire in their eyes. But we calmed them down.

Because of this kind of feeling, when Eddie began to show signs of improvement recently it was like Christmas and the Fourth of July rolled into one. We had had to wait a long time, though, for even this glimmer of hope.

WHEN EDDIE WAS only six weeks old we noticed his eyes would stare at the ceiling. Later, he'd stiffen and his eyes would roll back and forth. Naturally we wasted no time getting him to a doctor.

The doctor said it was just lack of calcium. But we were still worried and took him to a baby specialist who sent us to a neurologist. The neurologist said he couldn't tell much. So we were right back where we started from.

Finally, when Eddie was two, we got the verdict: Eddie would get more and more unmanageable and we'd have to put him away about the age of four. That's when I made the remark, "over my dead body."

My wife and I have read a lot on the subject and now we know there are a number of things that can cause a condition like Eddie's. It can be some damage to the brain before, during or after birth. Or it might be German measles during early pregnancy, hard labor or an incompatible Rh blood factor.

Too little oxygen for the baby during delivery has also been blamed, and in early childhood encephalitis or meningitis can do the harm. But it has nothing to do with heredity, and many times, as with us, nobody knows what happened.

We do know that Eddie doesn't come within the more easily recognizable classes of retarded children: mongolism, cretinism, microcephaly or hydrocephaly -- though children in this last group are not necessarily mentally retarded. As I understand it, these types come to about this:

In mongolism, doctors say, the features of the child resemble those of the early fetus. Although the cause is unknown, it is suspected that there has been arrested development during pregnancy.

A gland gone haywire, the thyroid, is responsible for cretinism. If the child's thyroid isn't working right, he may not develop mentally or physically. He sometimes looks like a mongoloid child.

Microcephaly means the child has a small and peculiarly shaped skull; and hydrocephaly is brought on by too much fluid around or inside the brain, causing the head to become abnormally large.

But, like Eddie, most retarded children look pretty much like other kids.

The thing that happened recently, and made all the difference in the world, really goes back about two years. At the post office Anna saw a collection box of the Association for the Help of Retarded Children, the New York affiliate of the National Association for Retarded Children.

Just learning there was such an organization was wonderful news. We got in touch with the Association right away and they told us they had started special classes for children like Eddie. He hadn't been able to get into any of the regular Board of Education classes for retarded children because he wasn't up to it.

Last March he was admitted to the Association class! There are only nine kids in it, so each gets the attention he needs.

In the few months he's been going, Eddie's span of concentration has increased and he can sit a little longer. But I think the years we devoted to him at home have had something to do with that, too.

The other day his teacher came to see us. She said, "Eddie reflects love -- he's a happy child."

If sufficient progress is made, maybe Eddie can graduate into the regular Board of Education retarded classes. But our big goal is for Eddie, when he's seventeen, to get into the Association's "Sheltered Workshop" where they teach kids like him to do simple jobs that can make them partly self-supporting.

That's what we pray for because like all parents of retarded kids, our greatest fear is the future. You get an awful feeling in the pit of your stomach when you think of someone who needs you so much having to get along without you.

For the upkeep of classes like Eddie's, parents pay according to their ability. In many cases that isn't much, and the Association must depend upon public support to keep these classes going, maintain its clinics, its recreation and, training centers and the Sheltered Workshop. There is also a great need for research.

Every year 120,000 retarded children are born in the United States, and today there are more than a million and a half of them. More than a million, like our Eddie, live at home.