Hello, my name is John Farrell. My wife Carolyn and I have been married for 37 years now and I thought you and others on your "special children" list would like to hear about our youngest son Ryan Major Farrell.

Ryan was born in October of 1978. Ryan weighed 9 pounds 13 ounces and was 21 inches long. At the time of delivery everything seemed quite normal. However, the morning after Ryan was born there appeared to be a problem. Ryan did not have any reaction when given a needle and that in and by itself led the medical professionals to observe more closely. Ryan was taken to intensive care in the hospital and two weeks after he was born the Doctor gave us the news that Ryan was born with an unbalanced chromosome defiency. It was sometime after that we found out Ryan was in fact born with Trisomy 10Q.

A Doctor who was doing research into chromosome abnormalities at that time had found out through his research that Ryan was only the third child born with this defect. There were two born earlier in the seventies, one in Yugoslavia and one in California. Obviously I do not know this to be true. I do however know that this defect is quite rare.

While reading about some of the others on the Web Site I see a lot of similarities in their problems. I won't go into all of the history related to Ryan but we were told that Ryan probably would not make it to 5 years old and when he became a teenager we were told he would not make it to 18 years old. The people who told us this apparently do not understand the power of love and compassion. Ryan is now 23 years old and is doing quite well. Ryan has no speech and his hearing is not that great. He does have about 50 signs and even when he does not have a sign to relate a particular want or need we as parents know almost instinctively what he wants. The most serious problem Ryan has is his lungs. He has asthma but we manage to keep it in check for the most part with medication.

Carolyn and I have a 36 year old son Allan and he idolizes his brother Ryan. We have also been blessed with an 11 year old granddaughter Dakota.