Life Is Short (No Pun Intended): Love, Laughter, and Learning to Enjoy Every Moment - Hardcover

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Jennifer Arnold, MD, graduated from the University of Miami with dual degrees in Biology and Psychology before going on to complete her medical degree at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD in 2000. She is currently an attending neonatologist at Baylor College of Medicine and Medical Director of the Simulation Center at Texas Children’s Hospital. Dr. Arnold is married to her best friend Bill Klein. They live in Houston, TX and have adopted two wonderful children. Jennifer and Bill are the stars of TLC’s The Little Couple.

Bill Klein grew up on Long Island, NY. After earning a degree in Biology from NYU, Bill became an entrepreneur and inventor. Today, he plays an active role in every business he owns, including Candu Enterprises, where he and his wife Jennifer provide a variety of media-related services, including making appearances at schools and other institutions to aid in the campaign to stop bullying. Most recently, Bill created Rocky & Maggie’s, a pet supply business named after the family dogs. Bill Klein is married to his best friend Jennifer Arnold. They live in Houston, TX and have adopted two fantastic children. Bill and Jennifer are the stars of TLC’s The Little Couple.

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Life Is Short (No Pun Intended)

CHAPTER ONE

Jen

My Arrival!

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, just beginning to be “me,” I had a theory about why I was smaller than everybody else. In my theory, my mother had purposely put contact lenses in my eyes so that I would see the world from a different perspective, that of a Little Person. I believed that one day, my mother would remove the lenses, and when she did, I would actually be average sized. I thought it was actually some part of a bigger plan she had for me, almost as if she was doing it to teach me a lesson. Since then, I have come to find out that many persons with significant physical and/or mental challenges often rationalize their difference as the result of a greater plan for themselves or the world.

I wasn’t unhappy being a Little Person. Being a Little Person has always been and will always be normal to me. Even at a young age, I was used to the challenge of being a Little Person in an average-size world. For me, it wasn’t like an accident occurred where my physical or mental capabilities changed. I was used to step stools, and always having my clothes altered, used to being observed and pointed at by strangers, and I was used to trips to the doctor in the hospital that would make other people keel over in exhaustion. But I didn’t have time to feel that way. My parents always reminded me to count my blessings and be grateful for the things that were good in my life and that it could always be worse. I was raised not to focus on the negative, but be thankful for the positive. My parents embraced me to the degree that I thought other people might even be jealous of me.

My birth, my big arrival, happened on March 12, 1974, at St. Anthony’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, and was nothing short of harrowing. My mother was expecting a completely healthy baby, as she had had an uneventful pregnancy. My parents, David and Judy Arnold, were young, just twenty-one, and completely overjoyed to be having their first child. However, the difficulties started immediately in the delivery room. Not only did I come out feet first, which is very risky for a vaginal delivery, but my mother was in labor for more than twenty-four hours before that. By the time I finally emerged, she was hemorrhaging, I wasn’t breathing, and both of us almost died.

At least I weighed seven pounds, eleven ounces, a good, healthy size. But my respiratory distress was definitely life threatening, and I had two large hematomas under my scalp, which, with my disproportionally large head, made the situation even more dire. Although doctors knew something was terribly wrong with me right away, nobody knew exactly what it was. My parents were told I had “water on the brain” or hydrocephalus, which had all sorts of terrifying neurological implications. Doctors went as far as to say it would likely cause me to be mentally challenged to some degree, if I lived at all. It turns out that it wasn’t hydrocephalus at all, but rather hydrops. Hydrops is a condition in which fluid or edema accumulates in multiple body parts of a newborn. This is a rare condition, but a known complication for babies born with dwarfism.

I was only at St. Anthony’s Hospital long enough for an intensive care neonatal transport vehicle to race there, sirens blaring, snatch me out of the delivery room, and rush me to All Children’s Hospital several miles away. Here was the best neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in St. Petersburg—in fact, one of the best NICUs in all of southwest Florida. My mother didn’t even have a chance to lay eyes on me before they took me away. She was still so out of it from all the anesthesia and pain medications they had given her that she didn’t even know what was happening. She had lost so much blood that she needed two transfusions and a week in the hospital to recover. I recall my mom telling me that although she didn’t get to see me for some time, her parents, my grandmother and Papa, had seen me and kept telling her not to listen to the doctors. They were certain that I was perfectly perfect and was going to be fine.

I was seven days old when she finally got to come to the NICU to meet me. Before she got there, she had heard so many terrifying terms to describe my condition, she had no idea what to expect. No matter how many issues the doctors enumerated and described, she didn’t fear bonding with me. She totally loved me and only loved me that much more when she finally saw me.

My mom had a strong faith that God would take care of her small family, as He had never presented her with an impossible situation or guided her wrong before. In fact, to this day, she credits her faith with getting her through my birth, which undercut the happiest day of her life with extraordinary, terrifying unknowns. Her motherly instincts kicked in with a vengeance, and she instantly became my protector, advocate, and supporter with everything she had.

My mother was not shy about expressing that at first glance she and my father were not the ideal parents for me. They were young, practically broke, and very naïve. But, they got through it all with strength and perseverance.

I had two traumatic weeks in the NICU. Even after my respiratory distress became less life-threatening, I still had many problems. The doctors were throwing out all kinds of diagnoses, but, through no fault of their own, they didn’t hit on skeletal dysplasia. It was not a well-known diagnosis and often it can be difficult to see the physical features of skeletal dysplasia soon after birth. For the moment, the doctors and my parents were just happy I no longer needed assistance breathing. The neonatologists were still concerned about the hydrops, though they hoped it would resolve on its own.

 • • •

MY PARENTS HAD been married for about a year when I was born. They had met at a Winn-Dixie supermarket in St. Petersburg, where my mother was a part-time cashier and my father was a manager. My father had a crush on my mother from the moment he saw her, but the feeling wasn’t, at least at first, mutual. When he learned she loved horses enough to save all her paychecks to buy one, he capitalized on their common interest. He loved horses, too, having been raised around them. When he heard about my mother’s purchase, he knew the perfect gift—a bridle. She was so impressed that he had tuned in to her interest that the romance budded immediately.

When my mother became pregnant, my parents moved into a little apartment in my maternal grandparents’ house in St. Petersburg. My grandfather, aka Papa, had converted the two-car garage of the house into a cozy apartment for them. My grandparents wanted my mother nearby, and with the baby coming, there was the added benefit of a houseful of people who could help them out—besides my grandmother, my mother’s two younger sisters, my aunts Barbara and Chrissy, still lived at home. Barbara was sixteen, five years younger than Mom, and Chrissy was eleven. I grew up very close to both my aunts. My uncle Wayne, who was just finishing high school at the time, also lived there.

My mother set up a beautiful nursery for me in the corner of the apartment, with the nicest crib she could buy and a wardrobe full of pink onesies and bonnets. She was half terrified, then thrilled when I was finally released from the NICU. She did her absolute best not to be too consumed with the state of my future health.

My trips to the pediatrician were far more frequent than those of newborns without issues. As the months went by and my pediatrician kept...