Free Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love by Diane Lierow, Bernie Lierow, Kay West

forehead, hold her hand, and whisper reassurances in her ear.
     
    She certainly needed them. “Aggressive, self-mutilating and repetitive behaviors were noted by staff.” She had reduced eye contact. She was not potty-trained, although she was six years and nine months old. Her lungs, heart, hands, feet, and nails were normal. There was no scoliosis. There were bruises and insect bites on her extremities. The doctor noted subtle dysmorphia, as well as macrocephaly with a broad forehead and apparent hypertolorism. I wasn’t sure how to pronounce those terms, much less what they meant.
     
    But Garet had done her homework and had made notes on her copy of the Child Study. I did the same on mine, though I intended to look the terms up on the Internet when we were back home.
     
    Dysmorphia is an unrealistic body image, like when thin girls truly see themselves as fat and starve themselves over it. We didn’t know how Danielle could express anything like that to a doctor, but Garet thought maybe it meant that Danielle perceived herself to be smaller than she was.
     
    Macrocephaly occurs when the head is abnormally large, and hypertolorism is an abnormal distance between two organs or body parts, frequently the eyes. Maybe I hadn’t been looking closely enough at Danielle’s head when we were with her, but it didn’t seem very big to me, and although her eyes were wide set, they did not seem abnormally so. On our way to meet Garet at the restaurant, Bernie and I talked about how pretty Danielle was, much more than we anticipated from the original picture we had seen through the Heart Gallery.
     
    The doctor requested more testing—chromosomal, fragile X DNA, and genetic. He noted that although Danielle’s developmental and behavioral difficulties appeared to have some familial basis, he believed that much of her delay was based on environmental neglect. Developmental pediatricians also assessed Danielle and felt that her development on a physical level—gross and fine motor skills—as well as her speech and socialization, was delayed to approximately the four- to six-month level.
     
    That was a blow. I tried to remember what a four-month-old does, but it had been years since I’d had one, and a child’s first year goes so fast, you barely have time to write one milestone in the Baby’s First Year book before another one happens. There had been few milestones to mark in Danielle’s life, and I’m sure no one would find a Baby’s First Year journal in her house.
     
    The mother was also questioned by the same team. She told them that Danielle had never talked, could not feed herself, and had never been to see a doctor. Never? I couldn’t fathom it. I had always been so compulsive about checkups and immunizations. I kept all of the boys’ medical reports in folders, along with notes on sick visits and the occasional trip to the ER that is as much a part of raising kids as coloring on the walls and juice stains on the sofa.
     
    Our boys were healthy and reached developmental markers at the appropriate ages. How could this woman not take her daughter to a doctor when she wasn’t speaking at two years old? Didn’t Danielle ever once get sick? Have a sore throat, an ear infection, or an upset stomach? Yet the mother told the examiner that she had no concerns about her daughter’s health.
     
    The mother admitted that she kept the child inside because she was afraid that she—the mother—would get in trouble because the child was not ready for school. She said that Danielle walked at one and a half years and could say three to four words, including mom , love , and bro.
     
    Garet looked at us and shook her head. It seemed to me that if Danielle had been speaking, she would have spoken to Garet, Mr. O’Keefe, or Ms. Perez, and so far, she had not.
     
    The mother later contradicted her earlier statements and said that Danielle could feed herself, although her diet consisted mainly of finger foods, canned pasta