My brother came to visit last week and told me a most strange and wonderful story of how his daughter met Kirk Douglas.
My niece has a birth defect. She has no tongue and a small lower mandible. This story evolves in a strange way, starting over 25 years ago. when as a teenager, in 1986, my niece saw a speech therapist named Betty McMicken. Betty was amazed to find how well my niece could speak perfectly despite the lack of a tongue and any special speech therapy. Fast forward 24 years.
Betty McMicken has become the associate professor of speech pathology at California State University at Long Beach. On July 9, 2011, an article appears in the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper:
LONG BEACH -- Betty McMicken has worked with hundreds of clients as a nationally-recognized speech therapist, but when a 16-year-old girl with a rare disorder came to her back in 1986, it was McMicken who was speechless. "I had been talking with her for a good 15 minutes, and then I looked in her mouth and realized she had no tongue," said McMicken, an assistant professor of communicative disorders at Cal State Long Beach. "I thought, 'How is she speaking with no tongue?' I was blown away."
For the rest of the story, and a very pleasant set of surprises, dive below the curly Cheeto.
Unfortunately you cannot read the entire article without paying for it, but the article goes on to state that Dr. McMicken had often wondered what ever happened to that 16 year old girl she saw in 1986.
One of my niece's friends read the article, which referred to my niece as "Carol" for patient privacy, contacted Dr. McMicken, and said: "I know who 'Carol' is and where she lives". Fast forward again. My niece and Dr. McMicken meet after a hiatus of 15 years. When they met, my niece worked at The Gap as a merchandising designer, and was studying fashion marketing at a community college near her home. Although I don't know what my niece makes at The Gap, I imagine it that it is fairly close to minimum wage.
My brother told me that since the meeting with Dr. McMicken, my niece has changed her major at college to speech therapy, and that the doctor has arranged a full ride scholarship, and employment for my niece at considerably more than she makes at The Gap. Her new employment will concern helping the doctor with her research in helping people born without a tongue, of which, apparently she is the world's go-to expert on that subject.
Dr. Betty McMicken (Communicative Disorders) is the only person in the world with cineradiographic studies of a person born without a tongue, according to research literature. She began using her research to help speech and language professionals teach tongue-reconstructed and tongue-impaired clients to speak and swallow in a functional manner.
Now, for the icing on the cake, Dr. McMicken has been Kirk Douglas' personal speech therapist since 2007. Kirk Douglas suffered a stroke in 1996 leaving him with speech (and other) problems. My niece accompanied Dr. McMicken to a speech therapy session with Kirk Douglas, I guess to show Kirk than a person with a stroke can work to speak better if a person with no tongue can learn to speak at all. Anyway, Kirk took a definite shine to working with my niece. He looked in her mouth at the missing tongue and then, while trying to hold his tongue between his fingers tried to say to my niece: "You talk better than me and I have a tongue." When it was time to leave, Kirk Douglas turned to Dr. McMicken and said to her to be sure to bring my niece along for all future speech therapy sessions.
Spartacus!