Heroin Addiction: How My Father Saved Me

I was a breech birth ? feet first, my head got stuck in the birth canal. My father brought me to Children’s Hospital in Boston. The doctors diagnosed me with Cerebral Palsy. They told him that the loss of oxygen to my brain had destroyed a portion of the frontal lobe.
But my father was a tough Irish Catholic, old-school warrior. He refused to listen to them. No son of his was going to be a cripple. He found a doctor that told him how he could take the place of my injured brain.
Every day, he laid me on the floor and exercised my legs. The muscles in my right leg were all shrunken and twisted. His job was to straighten them. Back and forth, up and down, he stretched them until the heels of my feet evenly matched.
My mother told me the sound of me screaming was so unbearable that the…