In talking with the adoption agency, I’ve learned that my son's actual birth date is November 16, 2005. That makes him only 16 months old, but he is still very very small – he is the height of an average 6 month old and the weight of an average 3 month old. Two terms on his medical information sheet were unfamiliar to me: “marasmus” and “frontal bossing”. Marasmus is a protein and calorie deficiency, typical of chronically malnourished children. The heartbreaking pictures of starving kids with stick thin arms and pot bellies are examples of this condition, although from his photos, my boy seems to be in better shape than that (e.g. he can stand on his own).
Frontal bossing was more scary when I looked it up (one of the dangers of Google, I suppose!) as it is characteristic of several very serious conditions such as Russell-Silver dwarfism, Pfeiffer syndrome, basal cell nevus syndrome, Crouzon syndrome, Hurler syndrome, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, and cleidocranial dysostosis. Scary words that got even scarier when I read the effects of each condition! I was hoping to find a site that would tell me frontal bossing was a common result of malnourishment, but couldn’t seem to find any – until I tried searching for “marasmus and frontal bossing”. And there is was - frontal bossing is a common symptom of rickets (resulting from Vitamin D deficiency), as are “widened wrists,” another notation on his medical form. A stressful half-hour for a new mom who’s not even held her child yet!
The agency founder emailed me congratulations yesterday, along with the comment “I was there and saw him on Wednesday. I got a little video of him but it will be two weeks or so before we get the DVD ready for you. He is a cutie!” A video? I’m overjoyed – I had no expectations of that!
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