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Remembering Mary
I’m feeling personal today.
In the church I was raised in there was an adopted girl named Mary. Her birth mother gave her up because she had an encephalocele. I didn’t know the terminology then. I was never told she had a father, so I am assuming her mother was single and possibly young. The cause of Mary’s condition was likely a combination of genetic risk and her mother not getting enough folic acid (take your folic acid if you’re trying to get pregnant, or if you can get pregnant and are engaging in activities that might get you pregnant, and have any thought at all of keeping it).
Mary was profoundly disabled. She may or may not still be alive…we’re the same age, but for somebody with challenges like that. She could not talk, could not walk unaided (if she didn’t have somebody guiding her, she would go around in circles). She had a broad smile.
I have extremely mixed feelings about Mary. She always seemed happy, but how could one really know what was going on in there?
What is an Encephalocele?
It’s a neural tube defect. The bones of the skull don’t close when they are supposed to. The brain then starts to develop outside the skull, forming a sac-like protrusion.
In Mary’s case, the extruded brain did not survive and had to be surgically removed, leaving her with an…