- Brooke Greenberg has celebrated 12 birthdays according
to the calendar and her family photo albums. In terms of growing up, however,
she has yet to reach her first.
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- To the mystification of the medical world, Brooke is
frozen in time, a real-life, female Peter Pan. She weighs 13lb and measures
27 inches, and looks and acts as if she were a six-month-old baby, not
a girl about to become a teenager.
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- Brooke lives with her parents Howard and Melanie Greenberg
and her three sisters in Reisterstown, a Baltimore suburb, and doctors
credit her survival to their love and support.
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- "She hasn't changed in 12 years," Mr Greenberg,
48, told The Sunday Telegraph. He does not see his beloved daughter as
an object of pity. "Why is it sad?" he asks. "We love her
the way she is."
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- For 12 years the family has changed her nappies, rocked
her to sleep and taken turns to give her cuddles. On school days, she is
carried gently into a yellow bus and taken to a special school for handicapped
children. Her condition has no name and doctors are unaware of any other
child in her situation.
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- Brooke has learned to pull herself up in her cot, crawl
across the floor and scoot along in a specially adapted baby-walker. She
smiles at people she recognises, but has never been able to say a single
word. She does finger paintings when presented with a pot of paint and
sheet of paper.
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- She recognises her family, and giggles when tickled.
She has no language skills but has a "sense of self" in that
she suffers from healthy sibling rivalry. When her younger sister Carly,
now nine, was born, Brooke would cry with jealousy until Mrs Greenberg,
44, picked her up along with the new baby.
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- That, however, is about as far as she has developed.
She simply does not age. "There is no diagnosis. We don't know what
is going on," said the family's doctor, Lawrence Pakula, "There
is no one else like her in the world."
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- He describes her as being the equivalent of between six
months to 12 months old in terms of height and weight, and says that most
doctors who see her compare her to "maybe a handicapped two-year-old".
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- Brooke was born after a 36-week pregnancy on January
8 1993 in the Sinai Hospital, Baltimore, weighing 4lb 1oz. As an unborn
baby, her spasmodic development puzzled doctors. In her first year, she
was treated with human growth hormone, but it had no effect.
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- Until she was five, she suffered a succession of life-threatening
health problems, including strokes, seizures, ulcers and breathing difficulties
- almost as if she was growing old despite not growing up. Four times,
it seemed that she might die. At one point she was diagnosed with a brain
tumour the size of a lemon, but it shrank away of its own accord, and Brooke
simply woke up.
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- Brooke now has to be fed through a tube, but her health
seems to have stabilised. There is no expectation that she will develop,
but, equally, no one can predict how long she can survive.
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- "People wonder how we have managed to look after
her because she has been a baby for such a long time," Mrs Greenberg
said. "We just keep going because she is our daughter."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?x
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