Chancer: How One Good Boy Saved Another

by Donnie Kanter Winokur

Without the physical characteristics associated with the exposure, people with the invisible injury become more and more challenged as the expectations of our culture, educational system, and justice system impose an impossibly complicated world.

A few years later when Iyal was around eleven, we noticed how he literally couldn’t stop talking. This is sometimes called “pressured speech.” It can be symptomatic of several different disorders.

Everyone loved my dad—I mean everyone loved my dad. It was actually pretty unbelievable and made me proud. So what did it mean then if I didn’t like something my dad said or I felt frustrated by his behavior? What kind of person did that make me? An ungrateful daughter?

He didn’t have an ability to modulate his voice and had never distinguished an “inside voice” from an “outside voice,” which most children learn in kindergarten.

Among individuals who experience FASDs, a decline in IQ can occur yet may level off by the mid to late twenties.

The truth is that the primary disabilities produced by FASDs include difficulties with the brain’s executive function, sort of like a computer crashing because the CPU went on permanent vacation. Without strong executive function, the CPU is disabled, so a person can’t hold more than one thought at a time. As a result, he can’t judge these thoughts, one against the other, or set goals and make a plan. And if he does achieve the goals, he probably won’t be able to measure the results and know if he hit a foul ball or a home run.