Wednesday 18 July 2007
This page features people with dwarfism from around the world. Some of the stories are funny, sad or just plain interesting. They all have one common theme. Inspiration!
“She welcomes any opportunity to educate people about the “brittle bone disease” that robs her body of the ability to produce collagen needed to strengthen bone.”
Somehow Rita Erickson of Deer Lodge faxed a total stranger in Big Timber information about her grandson Troy Becker and his battle with a rare disease known as Morquio syndrome.
“Troy’s angel sent me that fax,” maintained Carol Eschenko, a business owner in Big Timber, who has raised $1,500 for the 7-year-old Deer Lodge boy.
Alex Huff, a Yorktown resident, had a rare form of dwarfism called Morquio syndrome. He died July 8 of heart failure at his family’s summer home upstate. He was 24.
“Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center is apparently the first in the world to produce by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) a normal baby to a dwarf mother suffering from the genetic disease achondroplasia”
“Hundreds of people from all over the United States are visiting the Seattle area this week for the Little People of America conference.”
“A slap on the a– was my only fanfare and from a doctor who didn’t know me well enough to justify such immediate familiarity. I imagined my mother shrieking, “My Lord! My son! What have you done with the rest of him?”"
“In what is being called a “wrongful birth” case, a jury awarded more than $21 million to a couple who claimed a doctor misdiagnosed a severe birth defect in their son, leading them to have a second child with similar problems.”
“The family’s three-week visit to the US included Alex’s first appointment with the world’s top dwarf expert Dr Charles Scott, a trip to the Big Apple and attendance at the Annual Convention of Little People of America.”
Like most people born with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, 12-year-old Will and his adopted brother, Max, 11, only rarely get the opportunity to socialize with other little people, particularly those of the opposite sex. So this Friday-night dance just a few days before Halloween at the downtown Avalon Hotel was not to be missed.
“My whole life I’ve been told that I wasn’t able to have children, (and) I would not live through the pregnancy – that with the size of my torso, the baby would grow up underneath my lungs and smother out my lungs and my heart, and we would both die,” Herald said.
Anthropologists have fired another salvo in a feud about diminutive “hobbit” people whose fossilised remains were found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island four years ago.
Almost Famous by Erin Thompson
I was raised by a hippie/intellectual woman who didn’t subscribe to the self-pity that was the norm. She wanted me to think I was just like everybody else. My grandmother would slip newspaper clippings inside my birthday cards about dwarfs who defied society’s expectations and made it as doctors, lawyers, and circus clowns. It was her attempt to bolster my confidence. My mother would throw the clippings away before I saw them.”
Indian girl smallest girl in the world.
Like most teens, Jyoti Amge loves listening to pop music and watching DVDs. She attends high school in her native India and dreams of becoming a Bollywood actress.Yet this fully-grown 15-year-old is dwarfed by her neighbor’s baby – and her own backpack – standing a mere 1 foot, 11 inches tall and weighing 11 pounds.