After gaining four (count 'em four) babies in the extended family in the past four days, let's take inventory.
Lil Bit (my 22-year-old niece's surviving twin) is hanging in there. My niece is devastated at the loss of the other twin. There are no words.
My brother brought his twins (Tiny Boy and Tiny Girl) home from the hospital yesterday after finding out that Tiny Girl has nothing connecting the two halves of her brain. Yup, total Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum.The prognosis ranges from barely noticeable differences, right up through seizures, mental retardation, and a long laundry list of delays, disorders, and deficits. She seems fine for now, except for being really cranky, and so it's (you guessed it) a waiting game. One of our websites says that she may develop seizures around three months old. Either way, there's nothing to be done. It won't get any better or worse. There are very few ways that the brain can rebuild the pathways -- the structure just isn't there.
A little background here, while I'm venting. All my life, I have been told how bright my little brother is. "Oh, your brother is SO bright!" I always supposed that this meant I was chopped liver and merely average. Somehow, it didn't keep me from getting my master's degree. Meanwhile, my brother joined the Nuclear Navy out of high school and was quickly busted to electrician's mate for the rest of his tour. After he got out, he narrowly avoided graduating from college, moved in with my dad, and was three months away from becoming a certified union electrician when he quit his apprenticeship. With great precision, he has narrowly avoided success all his life. He's now a 42-year-old house husband with a total nut-crusher for a wife. She works for the Federal Government, and yet he's still opposed to big government. (He has health insurance, so we must not need health care reform. Heh?) He did not inherit the tidy gene, not that that end of my family's gene pool is all that deep. So, you can imagine what the house looks like. His wife is a total drama queen, especially when she's breeding and feels entitled to be a total slug in the societal garden.
So, let's take inventory in my brother's house, shall we? First, we have a non-toilet-trained four-year old VACTERL/VATER girl who has the V (vertebrae), C (cardiac), R (renal), and L (limb) deformities. They lost a baby a year ago to Trisomy-18. The newborn girl has agenesis of the corpus callosum. The newborn boy is just mellow and easygoing. (Did I mention that many people with autistic children mention how preternaturally mellow their children were when they were tiny babies?)
Oy. The only funny thing to come out of this entire train wreck this week is the mental image of my dear, 72-year-old mother (the only real adult currently in their house) toilet training a four year old. You have to understand that she was a career gal in the 60's and 70's, and the maid/nanny pretty much toilet trained us. She learned her prodigious toilet training skills from me and my kids! Strip 'em to t-shirt and Barbie underpants, put the potty in the middle of the dining room, and limit them to the general vicinity. Voila. Neither of us can even comprehend that my brother didn't toilet train her before the twins were born.
So, let the games begin!
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