Toward Wanting More

About the Book

With the birth of our fourth child, Heitsch became aware of the words retardation, deafness, aphasia, autism and more. This is the story of “wanting more” … in the way of diagnosis and of the nuts and bolts of how to achieve normal communication skills. The odyssey began in the late fifties, when no doctor or institution agreed on the diagnostics, let alone the how to. A spectrum of choices was offered from “a residential setting and getting on with normal life” to mail order helps for the deaf, to moving across country to access diagnostic teaching.

About the Author

It was 1940 something when a letter from Aunt Edna blessed all this scribbling. I’d written to her about a clear, bubbling spring that flowed from the base of an oak shaded knoll in our West Bloomfield, Michigan woodland. Edna, who experienced seizures, and lived at the State Hospital in Caro, wrote: “reading your letter was like walking in the woods with you.” After than, an encouraging English teacher, Miss Dorothy McCannon, at Roosevelt High School, Keego Harbor, Michigan, blushed and read aloud something I wrote for her. Talk about being pointed in a direction. Six decades later, I am still applying graphite to paper.