CNN, New York, NY.
Cara Reedy says she has learned to stop internalizing her anger and to direct it outward.
From the moment I was born, people around me were saying, “Oh, God.”
The nurse exclaimed it when I finally arrived, a month late (a habit I have kept). That’s how my parents found out that I was a little person, a dwarf, of short stature. They were shocked and upset, knowing that my life would be hard. My maternal grandfather told my mother, “I don’t care how tall she is, she’s my first granddaughter, and she’s pretty. ”
They didn’t find out I had achondroplastic dwarfism until a few months later. “Achondroplasia” is a word that haunted me in my childhood. I never wanted to hear it. It wasn’t who I was. I was not different.
According to a 2009 report by Richard M. Pauli from the Midwest Regional Bone Dysplasia Clinics, achondroplasia happens 1 in every 25,000 births. It doesn’t really matter how often it happens, we happened, and we’re here.