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.”
