Shortly after Christmas Sandy tells the doctor about her mother’s observation, but he shows little concern. Lori, he explains, is simply experiencing a “delay in her development.” Demonstrating an eight-week series of exercises the Straits can use to strengthen their daughter’s limbs, the physician says they should see some improvement shortly thereafter. For the next month Sandy and Jerry exercise their daughter’s limbs several times each day, but without results. By seven months Lori still can not roll over or sit up, and they are worried. Sandy calls the doctor’s office and demands an appointment for the next day. Something is wrong with her baby, she says, and she wants to know exactly what it is.
Wrapping Lori in several layers of blankets, Sandy drives through a snowstorm and watches with a mixture of optimism and dread as the pediatrician taps Lori’s limbs with a small rubber hammer. Circling the table on which Lori lies smiling and gurgling, the doctor shakes his head sadly, pats his tiny patient on the head once or twice, and tells Sandy he has some bad news. Her daughter, he says, is suffering from cerebral palsy. It will not shorten her life; however, it will pose special…
Sandy is no longer listening. Like someone who jogs five miles to their physician’s office for a routine checkup, only to be told they will be dead within six months, Sandy sees but does not hear the doctor.
During the following weeks Lori develops seizures, and the Straits admit her to the hospital for further tests. The seizures occur less frequently, then stop altogether when she is given Phenobarbital. After ten days the Straits are told they can take their baby home. But as they walk toward the elevator, they are stopped by a physician who explains that their daughter is suffering from a debilitating nerve disease for which there is no cure. In the final stages of the disease the patient becomes deaf, blind, and then dies. He cannot be certain how long medication will help their daughter, but at least for now the seizures have stopped. The only thing he can recommend for Lori is that they take her home and love her. If the seizures reoccur, they should call him at once.
Two weeks later, Lori has another seizure and is rushed to the emergency ward. Exhausted, frustrated, and angry, the Straits begin to wonder if medical science will ever provide a satisfactory explanation for their daughter’s problems. Does she suffer from cerebral palsy, or is she dying from a disease of the nervous system? Might it be possible, Sandy wonders, waving a small piece of colored cloth in front of her daughter to check her eyesight, that Lori will defy the doctor’s prognosis and grow up to be healthy and intelligent child.
One morning Sandy notices that a small crowd has gathered near her daughter’s door. Surrounded by nurses and interns, Lori’s doctor appears to be giving a lecture. As she approaches Sandy observes that one of the nurses is holding Lori “like a new puppy that all the kids wanted to see.” The neurologist motions for Sandy, the nurse, and an intern to follow him down the hall where he pauses in front of a linen closet. Removing a flashlight from the pocket of his smock, he clicks it on and off several times and, satisfied that it works, orders everyone into the closet. Snapping off the overhead light the doctor presses his flashlight to the right side of Lori’s head and holds it there for a moment before announcing: “This is what healthy brain tissue looks like. The light, as you can see, makes only a faint red glow. That is because it cannot penetrate the brain tissue’s denseness.” Moving the light to the left side of Lori’s tiny head, he continues: “And this is what it looks like when there is not brain tissue. You see the pink glow? Where the light penetrates? Your daughter was born with half of her brain missing.” Turning on the overhead light and pocketing his flashlight, the doctor orders the nurse to return Lori to her room. At the moment, he tells Sandy, he does not have time to discuss her daughter’s prognosis in depth, but he will be glad to clarify matters later. Then he leaves.
Pacing the hospital room with Lori in her arms, Sandy asks herself questions. How common is Lori’s birth defect? Why, when there is no history of birth defects in her own or Jerry’s family, has this happened? And how, providing her daughter lives, will she ever tell her that she was born with the left half of her brain missing? When the neurologist returns he advises Mrs. Strait to stop worrying about how she might tell Lori about her birth defect. He has seen only one case like her daughter’s and that was nine-month-old boy who could not follow light with his eyes and never developed beyond that point. Their daughter, says the neurologist, will never develop physically or mentally. In essence, Lori is a hopeless case.
A few days later, Sandy brings Lori home from the hospital. But Lori does not lose her hearing or eyesight, nor does she lapse into a coma and die. At the Polk County Easter Seals Center, in Des Moines, the Straits talk with a physical therapist who does not agree with their doctor’s pessimistic predictions. Instead, he says, they must take their baby home, remove her clothing, and lay her on the cold floor so she will be uncomfortable enough to want to roll over. If Lori is to develop, they must resist the inclination to make her comfortable; their daughter says the therapist, simply cannot be allowed to be content. For the next twenty-four months the Straits spend hours each day rolling their daughter on a beach ball so her toes and fingers will touch the floor to stimulate crawling, watching her flail about on the kitchen floor and resisting the temptation to help her as she struggles.
After ten months Lori can roll over and she follows her mother about the room this way, rolling from room to room, her mother says, “like a baby seal.” After eighteen months Lori can sit up without support and is able to say “Mama,” and by two years she is walking, though with a sideways gait because her right leg is still weak. By putting peanut butter behind Lori’s teeth and encouraging her to move her tongue toward the treat, a speech therapist teaches Lori how to form sounds, then words. By the age of three she has progressed to the point where she is enrolled in a nursery school for handicapped children; her mother kisses Lori goodbye, pinning a small notebook to her daughter’s collar so the teacher can write down some of the day’s events. Before the year is over, Lori’s memory has so improved that the notebook is no longer necessary. She is now able to recall some of the things that happen during the school day.
While his daughter continues to make miraculous progress, Jerry Strait is beginning to experience symptoms that, like Lori’s birth defect, seem mysterious in origin. Nine years after his return from Vietnam, an irritating rash is spreading across his face and scalp, and there are times when his head aches so badly that he is overcome with nausea. But it does not occur to him that his symptoms or Lori’s birth defect might be related to his tour of duty in Vietnam, all but a few days of which he spent in the bush. The Department of Defense has not advised him that he spent more than three hundred days in the most heavily sprayed region of Vietnam or that the food he ate and water he drank may have been contaminated by dioxin.
One evening Strait is preparing for bed when his mother calls to ask if he has read the newspaper article about “something called Agent Orange.” She also wants to know if he recalls having been exposed to herbicides. As he reads, Strait is surprised not only by the statements some of the veterans are making, but by how much he seems to have forgotten since his return home. Examining a photograph of a C-123 spraying herbicides, Strait wonders why he has given so little thought to the cysts that spread across his body in Vietnam, clinging to his back, legs, and arms like leeches; or the headaches, dizziness, rashes, and stomach cramps that he and others in his platoon had attributed to the heat. Closing his eyes and leaning back on the couch, Strait remembers the A Shau Valley in 1969. The trees are leafless, rotting, and from a distance appear petrified. The ground is littered with decaying jungle birds; on the surface of a slow-moving stream, clusters of dead fish shimmer like giant buttons. A new arrival “in country” remarks that the scene is spooky, but Strait only shrugs. For him, after several months in the bush, the defoliated area is not more spooky than the corner drugstore in his hometown. Leaving the area, the men walk downstream for thirty minutes before pausing to fill their canteens and helmets with cool water. Some of the men drop in purifying tablets, other do not.[5] After satiating their thirst they splash the remaining water over their necks and faces and then move on.
5
Years later Strait will learn that using army-issue purifying tablets to cleanse the water contaminated with dioxin is like trying to neutralize a vat of cyanide with an aspirin.