How to survive to twenty-five: Ian B. has finally arrived.

Happy Birthday, Ian!

Ian was born a few weeks early by an emergency C-section at Stanford Hospital in 1985. He was found to have an alpha strep infection that he contracted in utero, a very unusual occurrence. A medical student made a little project out of this and found only 30 mentions in the medical literature of this happening.

Ian started his life deathly ill with a six-week stay in the neonatal intensive care unit at Stanford. After the strep infection subsided, he was left with severe brain damage. A CT-scan showed a large cyst at the back of his brain that should have left him blind. As it turned out, he does see, although his vision is not normal, but it is useful to him and for this we can be grateful.

Ian has severe cerebral palsy, severe mental retardation, and is unable to communicate in any specific way. He is, however, a charming young man with many fans. One teacher at his school told me once that Ian is the nicest person she has ever met. The effect he has on people is pretty amazing considering that he has no specific way of telling them what he thinks of them or any way of doing things for them except to cheer them up.

From the very beginning, Ian had high expectations that the world is a happy and kind place. When it disappointed him, everyone in his sphere of influence seemed to know that it was his or her job to fix things for him, to restore his faith in the world as it should be. Life for Ian has not always been easy, but he retains an innate cheerfulness when things are going well.

About the only thing that Ian can actively do is move his left hand so that he can bang on a toy piano. The piano in this picture was a piano/xylophone that had an octave and a half worth of keys. For Ian's twenty-first birthday, John took it apart to give it a really good cleaning and discovered that our daughter, at a very young age, had stuffed gummy bears and other debris into the innards of the piano. Sadly, the piano disintegrated about a year later and was replaced with another that is perfectly adequate, but just not the same. But Ian keeps plunking along.