They said her son was severely mentally handicapped and he would never talk. She knew they were wrong.
An extraordinary story of a mother's love, a scientist's discovery and the rescue of a young boy from his mental jail.
The third child of Dr Florance, a renowned brain doctor and communication difficulties expert, was a deaf mute, insensitive to pain and indifferent to other people. Whitney's paediatrician diagnosed him as having the severest form of autism. But Dr Florance saw a glimmer of brilliance in Whitney and insisted that if she could only communicate with him he would start to learn.
For the next decade, Dr Florance struggled with her many roles - mother of a handicapped child, rational scientist, mother of two healthy children, unhappy wife, outcast scientist and overstressed single mother - in her battle to rescue her son, as her career, marriage and reputation fell to pieces.
There were crises; on one occasion she woke to find Whitney pressing a knife to his brother's arm, and on another she was told that if she didn't institutionalise Whitney, the courts would take him away. But, little by little, Dr Florance begins to break through.
When Whitney is five, she hears him laugh out loud at a Disney film and realises for the first time that his vocal chords work and when he's six a voice she doesn't recognise shouts out "Dr Florance".
Using the power of a mother's love and a scientist's determination, Dr Florance reached her son and today Whitney is an honours student, a Varsity wrestler and a happy teenager. 'A Boy Beyond Reach' is the inspiring story of a mother's struggle to awaken her child to the world; a struggle which nearly cost her everything, but which won her the son on whom everyone else had given up.
In Cheri Florance's intense search for answers, she not only found her son but discovered something profound about the way the brain works and how we learn. This is a story that will resonate with any parent who has struggled to help a child.
