BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Keira Cromwell comes in a tiny 10-year-old package, wrapped up in shiny black hair, big dark eyes and a smile that blings. Inside, there’s a dynamo who isn’t impeded much by the braces on her legs, or fingers that don’t work so well sometimes.
“I do OK, but I need a wheelchair for long distances,” she said, sitting across from her mom, Heather, and grandmother, Monica. The three live together in O’Fallon, and as Heather said, “take care of each other.” Keira has polio.
Keira contracted polio in Vietnam, where Heather adopted her when she was 5 months old.
Unable to have children, Heather started thinking about adopting more than a decade ago, when she was 29 and single.
She had to wait until she was 30 to adopt because of an age requirement, she said. With paperwork complete and headed to Vietnam, Heather thought she would be taking home a healthy baby.
“The day we met her, she was super sick. She had a temperature of 104 and she didn’t move the right side of her body,” Heather said. Doctors there thought Keira had suffered a stroke.
It didn’t matter to Heather. “I just knew I wanted her.”
Back in the U.S., Shriners Hospital for Children in St. Louis began caring for Keira at 13 months. She was diagnosed at 19 months with polio, which has mostly been eradicated from the world.
“There are only two places where polio is still around,” Heather said. “Southeast Asia is one of them.”
Keira lives with a weakness on the right side of her body. Her right lung is paralyzed and her right leg has not kept pace with the growth of the left. It is 2 inches shorter, so she wears a shoe with a special lift. Future surgeries may help grow the bone in that leg.
“They said she would never walk,” Heather said.
