Instead, after medical school, she wanted to help premature infants, like she had been. But a colleague's plea for help and a chance to serve as a role model, plus inexhaustible energy, have turned Brunstrom into a tireless advocate for getting kids with the brain disorder into athletics. In her own life, her parents made her do the same chores as her siblings, making her stand to do dishes to work on her posture. For Brunstrom, who started swimming at 16 to stay thin ''because I wanted a boyfriend,'' enrolling kids afflicted with cerebral palsy makes sense, despite long-standing medical dogma that they won't improve. Her ''Fighters with Courage and Power'' class performed at a Chicago conference May 5, bringing her message to an audience of doctors and physical therapists.
Martial arts are the total opposite of cerebral palsy.
About 30 children belong to her martial arts class. Brunstrom herself only took up the martial arts to learn to defend herself, not to learn how to break boards or deal with her disorder. But after being told at one school that all she could do was watch, she found another that demanded she participate. We're trying to think outside the box now,'' McCune says. Though people with severe cases of cerebral palsy will always require help from caregivers, McCune says, the focus in recent years has been getting patients outside the physical therapy rooms and into the real world.