Heroin Addiction: How My Father Saved Me

I was a breech birth ― feet first, my head got stuck in the birth canal. My father brought me to Children’s Hospital in Boston. The doctors diagnosed me with Cerebral Palsy. They told him that the loss of oxygen to my brain had destroyed a portion of the frontal lobe. But my father was a tough Irish Catholic, old-school warrior. He refused to listen to them. No son of his was going to be a cripple. He found a doctor that told him how he could take the place of my injured brain. Every day, he laid me on the floor and exercised my legs. The muscles in my right leg were all shrunken and twisted. His job was to straighten them. Back and forth, up and down, he stretched them until the heels of my feet evenly matched. My mother told me the sound of me screaming was so unbearable that the neighbors called the police. She said he couldn’t look at me. She told me how his tears made wet stains on my little T-shirt. For my 13th birthday, he threw me a party and allowed me to open every present but a large box neatly trimmed in wrapping paper. When everybody left, he marched me into the basement to open the box. A pair of boxing gloves. We put them on, and he beat me unmercifully. Each time I tried to get up, he’d knock me down. I begged him to stop. Instead, he picked a target on my face, never once missing the bull’s eye. When I collapsed, he cradled me and said, “I’d cut off my right arm if that would make you whole.” My father believed that...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news