Ode to my biochemist brother

The story of my soon to be biochemist brother

My mother raised two only children. So to truly say I know my brother would be a half truth. The best way to explain how I know my brother would be to say that I know him through second hand information, my mother. But this isn’t the most important part of this blog; just a necessary contextualization which explains why maybe some information may be not quite so accurate.

Another reason is the bother-sister reason. All you know when you’re young is that your sibling is a constant source of annoyance and frustration, so we avoided each other the best we could. Then he went off to college and I started high-school. Even at adolescence you aren’t “human” yet (as my mother would say), so I still didn’t give a hoot about my brother. And from here on we have lived seperate lives. I went off to college then changed countries.
So due to a fatal combination of being siblings, our four year age difference, and our general mutual childhood / adolescent feeling of “I know he’s part of the family but it’s just a technicality”, I can’t say I truly know my brother.

My brother, what to say first.
Should I say that in my version of the world he was a normal, extremely annoying big brother? Or should I say that in everyone else’s version of the world he was an extremely sick boy?

Up until the age of of about 25 he did so few things “normal” children/adolescents do.
But let’s get the normal out of the way first : tease me, never leave me alone, follow me around the house to see how long he could torture me before I blew up, rat me out to my parents, steal the remote control and change the channel ONLY to annoy me, play video games for hours and days on end, then come back to reality only to serve as a torture toy for him. For those of you who know me, I can say without hesitation that I am a patient person. Is it because I grew up with a brother that was absolutely unfatigue-able? Yes is my answer.

However, Cody was not normal. As my mother tells me, it took years and over a hundred and fifty different doctors to find ONE that knew what was going on.
My brother was autistic. Not so impressive, people knew about autism in the seventies. He basically was autistic because his brain chemicals were being short circuted by his allergies. A bit more impressive. Apparently everything he ate was poison to his brain and to his body. By the time my mother found the orthomolecular biologist who could start to detangle the years of dammage in my brother he was ematiated and malnourished to the point of almost death. Not to mention the schizophrenic mental state he was in. Yes really.

Here is where I start to remember things. He was nine at the time and I was five. I remember it took five or six nurses to hold him down while they gave him horse shots of vitamins. He had scurvy and berri berri from lack of vitamins. I remember once I decided to watch the doctor slowly push down the plunger on the enormous syringe, watch the enourmous bump on my brothers rump form as more and more liquid went in. His screaming was deafening. He became needle phobic.
He was tested for allergies. Slowly and surely the picture came into focus. He was allergic to everything from a cow, every form of wheat and sugar, half the drugs known to man, fruits, every type of anything that could be in the air, and so much other food he was reduced to eating carrots, and only carrots, for so long my mother says he turned orange. And when he could start to vary his diet he could eat a food only once in a one month period, if not he would develop an allergy to it.

So we became a family that ate what no one else ate. We found a special exotic meats broker so we could buy tiger, kangaroo, zebra, boar, rattelsnake, whale (mom says this smelled so bad when she cooked it because of the blubber she threw it out straight away), ostrich and on and on and on. We ate stuff called millet and rice cakes. We went to a goat farm to get goats milk. We drove for a hour each way to pick up special foods from a co-op.

Let me tell you, more than just the blubber stunk. Here was little leila off to school with her tupperware of venison and millet. Other kids had pb&js, ham sandwiches on hostess bread, potato chips, ho-hos, twinkies and other chemically developped tasty food. I already didn’t dress the way they did so the tupperware element was the last nail in the coffin for others to consider me as “someone to make fun of as they wish”. For much of my youth I was made fun of. I have come to appreciate what this has made me. But I’m getting off the track here, back to brother Cody.

The years passed, Cody little by little came out of his autistic and physophreic state and he got physically stronger. However he was still “different” (and still annoying). Well, that’s what seven years of developpmental / emotional arrest can do to a child. His junior high and high-school years were a nightmare. He really was the kid that everyone picked on. He was the scapegoat for hundreds of angst ridden, afraid of not being popular teenagers. No one left him alone to just be smart and get good grades. And if this wasn’t enough he had the pre-requisite “you-need-to-make-fun-of-me” buck teeth.

I remember once he came home and on his backpack was an enormous hocker, gag me with a spoon. Who the hell spits on someone? An afraid of not being popular teenage sub-human, that’s who.
Despite the social hell, he graduated. Then, because that’s what smart students do, he left for University. Keep in mind, he was still having social difficulties, but now he was on his own. On his own to act like a junior high student in a world of almost adults. For people who have social graces and are simply nomal, meaning non-verbal communication is hard wired in their brains, life with others goes along with no notice. However for the people who are beyond the simple problem of not having social graces, for the people who don’t have the person to person “how to” software in their brain, life is miserable. Never really knowing why people insult you, never really knowing why people avoid you, never really knowing why people don’t stay and talk to you.
In all fairness I have to admit my brother at this stage didn’t really take care of himself or his personal hygene either at this time. And nobody likes to sit next to a stinky person on the bus or in class. Apparently he also had a tendency to instigate, as we do when we’re in junior high, and then wonder why it was always falling on his head. Needless to say, problems were aplenty and mom came to the rescue who knows how many times.

Four years later, graduation. Who the hell finishes college in four years nowadays? He did. And of course with fabulous grades. As of course the next course of action for really smart people is grad school, off he went to the University of Virginia. Here is where my knowledge is really lacking because at this point I was off to Northen Ill Univ and was really doin my own thing.
Two years into Univ of Virg he was turned away from the Doctoral program. This is now eleven years ago. His maturity was better but still not ready for the world of ever-subtle university social politicking.
Catastrophe! He moves home, works at a number of absolutely crap jobs for someone who has seven years of University education, and the pain of the adjustment of him living at home again was felt regularly. (I’m still at Univ thank god)

I’m sorry to say I don’t know how much time he spent at the family abode (two years?) After this time he was finally accepted into the doctoral program at the Univ of Ohio. Not his first choice but he’s moving closer to his goal. So off he goes. A bit wiser, a bit less smelly, a bit more socially versed and a bit more determined to succeed, he again abandons the nest.

A bit more socially versed but apparently still not enough. As is the Buchmann trait, the beginning was quite rocky. He does the required doctoral student slave labor, teaching classes, working in the labs of professors doing their grunt work and so on. What isn’t happening is that no professor is deciding to take him on for his doctoral thesis. He gets shifted from one laboratory to another to another to another to another. He writes grants for professors, get them oodles of money for their research, then gets ousted. The frustration, desperation, dissapointment, and pessimism is mounting. And for my brother who has always had a fatalist outlook, his goose is cooked so to speak. Never a biochemist he will be.
All this while his health is touch and go. For Cody serious stress gets him a hospital visit, not just sleepless nights. And for my brother who has such a special health history, a hospital is a lethal place.
I will admit that at this point in his life I’m in France so communication, even secondary, is not à l’ordre du jour.
But in the haze of events to follow: Mom came to the rescue again and Cody was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome (a condition for the most highly functioning autists). All of a sudden, everything is different. Although he was resistant to embrace his “handicap” it has put him on equal footing, and that he surely embraces. Now the professors are more understanding when he says he’s in the hospital, they understand that stress is very dangerous, they can put a name to why his interpersonal skills are rough around the edges. And, because of the anti-discrimination laws he is taken seriously as a future doctoral student. All this eventually lands him in a laboratory with a professor who is willing to go all the way with him. This is all fine and good, but the pannel of professors has the last say so in the matter.

Eleven years, one Aspergers diagnostic, a couple hospital stays, much worry and despair, and one vote yes from the professor’s commitee later, my brother is going to get his doctorate.

Now, I would love for this story to be about my brother’s academic success. But it really is so much more. It is also the story of my mother who decided that over a hundred and fifty doctors were wrong and she was right. It’s a story of a boy who ("should" / might) have been locked up and chalked up as low-functioning autistic for life. It’s a story of continuing on uphill, against the wind, shoeless, sun in your eyes, trudging through four feet of snow. Yes, this victory is for my less-pessimistic-than-before brother, but it is also so much my mother’s.

My mother, who raised two only children. And soon one will be Dr. R. Cody Buchmann in a couple of years.
And still has yet to write the full story of my brother.