On a mild, Los Angeles winter evenining, December, 2006, I arrived at our Sycamore Ave. apartment from work to my (now former) wife and three-year old twins, Leba and Moshe. Waiting for me that evening was also an envelope, and inside it, the results of a genetic test from the specialty lab we'd sent a drop of our beautiful 23-month-old Zushy's blood to some weeks prior. I no longer recall what triggered our having his blood sample tested, except for the fact that a close relative had been told she would never, at the tender age of 35, bear children due to completely failed ovaries, what at the time was termed Premature Ovarian Failure. The details really matter little other than to offer context and flavor to what is, without such, a story too point-blank and heart-aching to simply tell. Yes, our beloved youngest had inherited a syndrome called Fragile X. Most of us living with our share of the challenges G-d delivers us, can use more laughter, more light-heartedness. However, as the words, the antiseptic computer type of the genetic test sunk in, it was just that, laughter, which, as I brought my life with Zushy's beautiful soul to mind then, and as I still do this very moment, which was the "behavior" I had become attuned to as he had grown, and which I intuited was not the everyday laughter of the everyday two-year old. The laughter was an overplus, and had some perhaps nervous or quality of excess which had troubled me. Laughter, of all things! May we never complain, and least of all about laughter.
Be that as it may, the diagnosis was confirmed by a Dr. Graham at Cedars Sinai, where we were introduced to the lexicon of the foreign language of genetics, like "genotype" and "phenotype". Thus began what will be a lifelong relationship with a Zushy I met then, once again, one with a definition beyond the altogether heartwarming definition of perfect and wonderful toddler, now revised to perfect and wonderful toddler whose genetic abnormality would impact his development in every area and set him apart, outside the "mainstream", with an inner life and outer perception of the world, and the world, him, not ususal, exceptional, or what the wizards of euphamism have now made the permanently politically correct adjective to describe our and many children with many shapes and sizes of "differentness": special.
Oh, special! I remember little of the rest of that 2006 December. In January, in my third year at the position I'd won a couple of months after my pregnant wife and I moved impulsively from Monsey, N.Y., where I had a career as a physician recruitr, to Los Angeles, purportedly to be near the extra hands of her parents and sisters, whom had all moved to the L.A. vicinity years before
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