Learning from pain: In our baby's illness, a life lesson.

Video: TED – Ideas Worth Spreading
Translation: Tânia Piorino. Revision by Gustavo Rocha

Roberto D'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli are two IT professionals living in Milan, Italy. Married since 2002, they welcomed their son Mario in 2011. Although seemingly born healthy, the boy was diagnosed at 10 days old as having suffered a perinatal stroke on the right side of his brain. The stroke left him unable to move the left side of his body.

The D'Angelo family used a technique called mirror neuron rehabilitation to help Mario regain his movements. The results were remarkable. Today, at 2 years old, the boy has greatly improved his motor functions. In this account, they explain the experience they gained, which may help many other people who are experiencing similar situations. Roberto and Francesca created the non-profit organization FightTheStroke.org with the goal of stimulating dialogue about the devastating effects of perinatal, neonatal, and pediatric stroke.

Videographer:

Full translation of the lecture by Roberto d'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli:

"Francesca Fideli: Ciao."

Well, this is Mario. He's our son. He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a rather difficult pregnancy because I had to be on bed rest for about eight months. But in the end, everything seemed to be under control. He had the right weight at birth. He got the correct Apgar score. That made us feel quite safe. But in the end, 10 days after he was born, we found out he had had a stroke.

As you know, a stroke is damage to the brain. A perinatal stroke could be something that happens during the nine months of gestation or shortly after birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right side of his brain is gone.

Thus, the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be that he might not be able to control the left side of his body. Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, send a document to print, but the printer doesn't have the correct drivers, it's the same for Mario. It's as if he wanted to move the left side of his body, but wasn't able to transmit the correct commands to move his left arm and leg.

Therefore, our lives had to change. We needed to change our routine. We needed to change the impact that his birth had on our lives.

Roberto D'Angelo: As you can imagine, unfortunately, we weren't prepared. Nobody taught us how to deal with such disabilities, and as many questions as possible started coming to our minds. This was a very difficult time. Questions, some basic, like, do you know why this happened to us? What went wrong? Some harder, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? I mean, in the end, will he be able to work? Will he be able to be normal? And, you know, as a father, especially for the first time, why won't he be better than us? And this, actually, is really hard to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. I mean, the only true product of our life, in the end, was a failure. You know, it wasn't a failure for ourselves per se, but a failure that will have an impact on his life.

Honestly, we were depressed. I mean, we were really depressed, but in the end, we started looking at it, and we said, we have to react.

So, immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our lives. We started physiotherapy, we started rehabilitation, and one of the paths we were following in terms of rehabilitation is mirror neuron piloting. Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. You have an object, and we showed him how to grasp the object. Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brain, right now, while you watch me do this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you were doing those actions. It seems that this is cutting-edge treatment in terms of rehabilitation.

But one day we discovered that Mario wasn't looking at our hands. He was looking at us. We were his mirror. And the problem, as you can imagine, was that we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. That day really changed our perspective. We understood that we had to become a better mirror for Mario.

We started over from our own strengths, and at the same time, we started over from his strengths. We stopped looking at him as a problem and began to see him as an opportunity for improvement. That was truly the change, and from our side, we said, "What are our strengths that we could bring to Mario?" We started with our passions. I mean, in the end, my wife and I are quite different, but we have many things in common. We love to travel, we love music, we love being in places like this, and we started bringing Mario with us just to show him the best things we can show him.

This short video is from last week.

I'm not saying --
(Applause)
I'm not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we're only at the beginning of the journey. But we want to share that this is the key to learning. The key to learning that Mario brought us is to consider what you have as a gift and not just what you lack, and to consider what you lack as an opportunity. And this is the message we want to share with you. And that's why we're here.

Mario!

And that's why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. And we thank you all very much.
FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye.