124 | May• 2019
swelling from the surgery. He began
to cry. Finally, they got a needle
into the port. TPP1 began to f low
through an IV drip. Conner settled
down, intermittently napping and
watching movies during the four-
hour procedure.
Two weeks later he did it again.
And again two weeks after that.
Nothing about Conner’s health
seemed to improve. “It was frustrat-
ing and hard,” Hollie said. “I had to
tell myself to keep going.” Dr de los
Reyes explained that the enzyme
could take a while to have an effect.
Or it might not work at all.
At every infusion Conner watched
The Lorax, the movie based on the
beloved Dr Seuss story of the same
name. “Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,” the main
character says at one point, “noth-
ing is going to get better. It’s not.”
In Dr de los Reyes’s clinic, it was a
familiar mantra.
Around his fifth birthday, in
August 2017, Hollie was reading Con-
ner a story. She pointed at various
objects on the pages, naming them
slowly. The method was supposed
to help Conner gain words, but that
hadn’t happened in almost two years.
Hollie placed her finger on a star
and named it. She was about to move
on when Conner raised his right
hand and placed his index finger on
the page. There was a long pause.
Then Conner spoke.
“Star,” he repeated.I
N OCTOBER 2017I visited the
Beishes’ home in a quiet residen-
tial neighbourhood. Hollie and I
had met once before, at an infusion
appointment in Columbus, right after
Conner started saying words again.
We settled onto a sofa in the living
room. Joy, the yellow labrador, lay
across my lap. Conner was on the
f loor playing. At one point, he hoist-
ed himself up to stroke Joy, making
eye contact with me. He was more
responsive, more interactive, and
more deliberate than I remembered.
In the coming weeks, ConnerConner, with Jaxon, in
September 2018. He wasn’t able
to stand the year before