Quinn’s Great Expectations

What does it feel like to be different from other people? When he was 14, after years of unexplained health problems and severe learning disabilities, Quinn Bradlee was diagnosed with VCFS, a random genetic mutation that afflicts one in 2,000 people. Now 26, Quinn examines the unique circumstances of his life. The son of the writer Sally Quinn and the former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Quinn has lived with both privilege and limitations. This is his story.

When I was first born, everyone thought I was totally and completely normal. According to my mom, the nurses called me "Mr. Mellow," because while all the other babies would scream and cry I would just kind of look around. She also says that when she first had me in her arms, she told me that she loved me and that I could be anything I wanted to be in the world. I hope that is still true. But pretty soon after I was born, my doctor detected a heart murmur, and when I was about three months old, I had to have open-heart surgery. I think this was a pretty crappy time for my parents. They thought I might die, and I could have died. My mom says the night before my heart operation was one of the worst nights of her life. She wasn't allowed to nurse me. She could barely even hold me. When they took me into the operating room the next day, she basically fainted. Apparently my dad turned to her and said, "Just think of it this way. He'll never have to go to war."

After the heart surgery, I was always sick with something. I think my parents thought that once they did the surgery I'd be fine, but it didn't work out that way.

First, there were the seizures—a lot of them, starting when I was almost two. My parents put me into a regular nursery school but within a week the teachers told my mom that I couldn't hack it. They gave me my own tutor and everything but it still didn't work. I started with speech therapy. The doctors did some testing on me for various known genetic conditions, but I didn't have anything anybody recognized.

When I was eight or nine, my school, which was called the Lab School and is for learning disabled kids, sent me out to a psychiatrist or psychologist to have a look at me. I have no memory of the experience, but my parents sure do. After about six months the woman called my parents in and basically told them that I was retarded. She'd done some tests, and she had determined that I was never going to be able to function as an adult in any meaningful way. Never graduate from high school, never even go to high school, never work or have a job or be married or have kids or any of the things you dream about. She told my parents they needed to put me in an institution in Maryland, where she had already reserved a spot for me.

I can't really imagine what my mom and dad felt like.

I hope they didn't believe it. I don't think they did. Either way, they didn't tell me about it, and luckily the Lab School didn't agree with this woman's assessment. They told my mom that the psychologist was wrong. I stayed there.