[Source: Brandeis Magazine]
In 1994, Liane Kupferberg Carter ’76 and her husband found themselves watching as a team of unsmiling experts at a New York teaching hospital poked, prodded and measured their toddler son, Mickey. Carter, a professional writer, recalled in her blog that, after Mickey had undergone two hours of testing, she “perched forward” to catch the doctor’s words more fully, hoping to hear how adorable her child was, how promising his future. Instead, the doctor told her matter-of-factly, “Don’t expect higher education for your son.”
That bombshell still reverberating in her head, Carter gathered up Mickey, his diaper bag and his stroller and headed for the elevator. A social worker they had met that day waved goodbye. No one seemed to notice that the family had just received life-altering news. The formal diagnosis of autism wouldn’t come until much later, when Mickey was 6, but Carter wrote, “It felt as if we were looking down a dark and endless tunnel.”
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