To flex her work muscles, she started writing on the side. That's the puzzling part. Achondroplasia is a complete genetic anomaly. It happens as an accident, much like Down syndrome. I had all sorts of things to come to terms with.
Some parents never do.
Connecticut inn night watchman Bob Heinemann, whom Hedley met when he was hitchhiking, was abandoned by his well-off mother as a child some 40 years ago. That can be hard to come by when you face other adults' stomachs. So one upstate mom, Susan Sullivan of Cambridge, near Albany, encouraged her daughter Emily Sanford to undergo limb-lengthening surgeries. Mom wonders daily if she did the right thing. It's an ordeal.