Mind & Brain / Learning

When Cody Cawood was 3 years old, he knew all his colors and proudly boasted that he could count to 20. His grandmother, Mary Beth Staab—“Beth” to her friends—a bright woman with more energy than a Kansas tornado, would hop the few short blocks to her grandson’s house to help him practice his numbers and his letters every single day. Cody delighted in a mischievous game of reciting all the way up to 19 only to announce 20 as “20-teen,” whereupon he would burst into uproarious laughter, even after the joke had been repeated for weeks. Beth would then pretend to protest, Cody would laugh some more, and they would ritualistically start all over from the very beginning. . Born two and a half months premature, and with cerebral palsy, Cody overcame his challenges, according to Beth, “with a little bit of his mom and dad’s stubbornness.” At Kids’ Cove, a local school for children with disabilities, Cody was curious, loved to talk, and made fast friends. “He had an infectious personality,” Beth recalls. . It was shortly after Cody’s fourth birthday, in October 2000, that Sara, his mother, found Cody lying in a pool of his own vomit. First his mother suspected that it was the flu. Without real reason for alarm, Sara simply catered to Cody, as any mother would her sick child. But a week later, when the episode repeated itself, Sara noticed a distinct and troublesome characteristic in his behavior. It was understandable that a sick child would be lethargic, but he also had a glassy, distant look in his eyes, and he was not speaking, just staring and dazed. Sara urged her son to try to go to school, but the only response he could offer was his lazy, hollow gaze falling upon hers. When she called Cody’s new pediatrician and relayed the problems, she was told not to worry. After all, children with cerebral palsy were prone to stomach difficulties, the doctor said. Cody would be fine..This clearly wasn’t the case. Over the next two weeks, Sara and Beth began to notice a change in Cody’s speech. Sentences were now replaced with a single word, a distinct regression

for a chatty 4-year-old. Instead of his usual “I want a Coke,” he would just say “drink”; “want to go outside and play” was replaced with “bye,” and “I want to go to sleep” was now one single word: “nightie.”

The third week of Cody’s strange illness brought them more mornings of sickness, sweating, and lethargy. Suddenly now, there was an added feature, frightening and horrific. When asked what was wrong, Cody would turn and bang his head against a wall. If asked a question, he would stop, cry, and start beating himself with force. By December of that same year, Cody didn’t utter a single word. His only modes of expression were violence, confusion, and tears.

Auspiciously, Beth worked for a pediatric neurologist, Samira el-Zind, who performed an EEG, an MRI, and a series of other tests on Cody. The MRI showed no changes; the EEG showed the same abnormal electrical impulses in the left occipital region that had been there ever since he’d suffered a stroke in utero. The doctor did notice some abnormal right and left central spike wave activity, and in addition to Cody’s prescribed anticonvulsant medication Depakote, she put him on Tegretol. But nothing seemed to work. Cody’s behavior worsened quickly. The hitting became more rageful, and now no one could get close to Cody without being punched or even bitten. That January and February saw a desperate course of trial and error as Cody visited a round of doctors and specialists who prescribed a number of different medications, none of which brought Cody closer to his old self. Schooling was now becoming a serious obstacle, as teachers didn’t know how to handle him, and he had to wear a helmet at all times to protect himself from his own furious, beating fists. By March, Cody seemed to have no memory of language and meaning and would only occasionally parrot a random word he’d heard in the conversations around him. His family took advantage of their quiet time with Cody and would try to ease him into the same conversations he’d had just six months earlier: “What’s your favorite color? Do you want to count to 20?” But Cody seemed incapable of ever responding verbally. A look of confusion would fall over his sad face, followed by the inevitable hitting, screaming, and biting.

There was no such thing as an ordinary day for those who cared for Cody. Once when Sara was driving him to school, he beat himself so badly that blood ran down his face. Sara pulled the car over, got into the backseat, and held his hands to try to calm him down. Meanwhile, some onlookers were watching, suspicious of her actions, as though she’d harmed her own child. Within minutes, a police officer arrived. “My son hits himself,” she told the officer. But he didn’t believe her and ordered Sara to let go of Cody. When she did so, Cody exploded in a fit of fury. Even so, the officer wasn’t convinced. Sara urged him to follow her to Kids’ Cove, where the officer interrogated the principal about Cody and his mother and, after being assured of Cody’s condition, told Sara he would “let it go.”