Something About Leah

She entered the room like a sudden flash of sunlight, glowing with the innate enthusiasm 12-year-olds seem to automatically possess. Even the retainers on her teeth glittered.

I said to myself when I first met Leah that there was something special about this pretty girl with long brown hair, a quality beyond the natural ebullience of youth that leaves a mark on those she meets. I was right.

She was born with all kinds of strikes against her and at one point everyone thought she was fading out of a world she had barely entered, a small, new life hooked to wires and tubes, fluttering on the edge of darkness.

I suspect that the struggle at the edge is where Leah’s spirit was born, a soaring, spinning, dazzling burst of energy that feeds the quality of her singularity today.

I met her in cyberspace. I wrote once about my own gifted granddaughter, Nicole, and received an e-mail message from Leah’s mother, Valerie Shertzman.

She envied Nicole because her own daughter, she said, was slow and would probably never achieve what Nicole would achieve. That was a few years ago. Today, Nicole is still soaring like a bird that knows no limits, but I’ve got news for you. So is Leah.

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I heard from Shertzman a month ago after a long silence, and the tone was decidedly different. She talked about Leah’s “special acts of courage” against great odds and ended her message with, “Do I sound like a proud parent or what?”

Leah was born with a collapsed lung and unable to breathe on her own. She spent the first eight days of her existence in intensive care hooked to machines that maintained the tiny, fragile spark of her life.

“She was on IVs and monitors and all kinds of lights and whistles,” her mother said as we sat in the living room of their Canyon Country home. “It was like ‘Star Trek.’ ”

Probably because of the needles and monitors, Leah developed a form of “tactile defensiveness.” She couldn’t bear to be touched or have anything touch her. Even food that contained a texture was unbearable. Speaking was impossible. The touch of her tongue on her palate was painful.

“We worked on getting her to touch textures from fur to sandpaper,” Shertzman says. “Finally, she began becoming desensitized.”

Both parents, Valerie and Howard, and their other daughter, Ruth, three years older than Leah, worked with her. Therapy and special classes followed. Leah didn’t speak or walk until she was 3.”

By the time she entered first grade, her speech was impaired but understandable. She could walk all right. But some sensitivity to touch remained. Things hurt Leah more than they hurt others.

But what hurt even more in some ways was the ridicule of her peers. Leah was different and they taunted her.

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Many of us, given Leah’s burden at the beginning of life, would fold under the weight of it. Our failures would be linked to our beginnings, like prisoners chained to a wall of despair from which there is no freedom.

Not Leah. She tried out for sports and when she didn’t make it at first, she tried again. She competed for student body secretary at Valley View School and gave the first speech of her life before an audience. Someone else won, but winning is judged by many measures. The very effort was a triumph.

She joined the Girl Scouts and won badges other girls won, her mother says, despite bursts of derision from them. Ultimately, the derision turned to admiration and the jeers to cheers.

Those were the acts of courage Shertzman was talking about, the stuff it took to overcome that “slowness” of speech and movement that some feared would dog this exuberant child all her life. Leah proved by her efforts that the speed of one’s will can compensate for the hesitancy of one’s movement.

At graduation from the sixth grade, she was chosen to address the school again, speaking of events that brightened her memories; not of needles and pain, but of mountain hikes and flowers and the trees that shade our lives.

At the end, Leah was voted Student of the Year. In awarding her the honor, special education teacher Sharon Littleford said, “Courage doesn’t exist without fear. There were times I watched Leah tremble as she traveled from one opportunity to the next. In each endeavor, she has faced fear head-on and whether she achieved the attempted task or not, she was victorious.”

Look out, world. Here comes Leah.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com