Word: reza
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...13th birthday, in June 1987, the Garakanis offered 40-in. Reza his dream gift -- a chance for deliverance from life imprisonment in a three-year- old's body. But, his father warned, "you have to pay for it with perhaps three years of pain." Reza answered, "It can't be worse than the hell I have already gone through...
...would keep the pieces in line and allow them to be pulled apart a millimeter a day. New bone would form and fill in the gap, adding at least 7 in. to the shin, 5 in. to the thigh and 5 in. to the upper-arm bones. Reza would become at least a foot taller...
...ready." The father remembers, "Reza was calm, but dead serious. Like his mother, he's all heart." Reza says, "I was afraid. But they offered me something I had prayed for all my life...
...morning of last April 4, Reza was lying down on his hospital bed, flipping TV channels with the remote-control device while Dr. Frankel and Dr. Wallace Lehman, the chief pediatric orthopedic surgeon, were discussing the procedure. Occasionally, Reza would turn his gaze from the set, which was on a rack near the ceiling, to the window, with its view of drab gray apartment buildings, not sky. The family was looking on. "We'll make a cut here, and one here, if we can," said Dr. Frankel, drawing imaginary lines across the top and the bottom of Reza's right...
...ward the mother yielded to an eleventh-hour anxiety attack. "Am I doing the right thing?" she asked. The father had one answer: "He wants to become a functional human being. We shouldn't deny him the chance to fight for that." Reza gave her the definitive response in the early-morning hours of April 5, during countdown to surgery. "When this is over," he told his mother, "I'm not going to be nice to those who don't deserve it." He ticked off recollections of deep, silently tolerated anguish inflicted by pitying glances, patronizing caresses, crass jokes...