Mom Gave Birth To MONSTER, When Dad Saw Him He Was Horrified, What HAPPENED LATER IS MORE SHOCKING
A boy’s parents were horrified after seeing his face when he was born, only to inspire an entire generation years later. He endured years of name-calling and rude stares from other people until one day, a movie changed his life.
As Magda Newman prepared to welcome her firstborn, she labored for almost 17 hours before giving birth. After such a long and tiring labor, she wanted nothing more than to hold her son. To her surprise, doctors held off showing her the newborn, and instead of seeing her son, she saw looks of horror on the medical team’s faces.
“What’s going on here?” Magda asked.
She couldn’t hear her son’s cry, and it was making her worried that something had happened to him. Instead of bringing her son to her for some skin-to-skin contact, they took him to a back room where more and more people began to rush in. Magda was left alone in a room filled with deafening silence. The worst thoughts began to flood Magda’s mind, and at one point, she thought her baby was dead because nobody wanted to tell her what was happening.
“What’s going on? I want to see the baby,” Magda asked the doctors once more.
However, they wouldn’t give her an answer as they continued to examine her son. While Magda was left anxious, the doctors decided to first inform her husband, Russell Newman, about what was going on. Instead of congratulating him on the baby, they brought out a textbook. They showed him a page about Treacher Collins syndrome with an image of a teenager with the condition. It was a rare congenital craniofacial disorder that affected only one in 50,000 people in the United States.
“That’s gonna be my kid?” Russell couldn’t help but ask.
The condition didn’t appear on any of Magda’s prenatal scans, and it took them by absolute surprise. Aside from the baby’s craniofacial disorder, he also wasn’t breathing. The doctors did everything they could to save the little man.
When Magda finally saw her son, she couldn’t believe her eyes. He had no eyelids, cheekbones, or ears, and he had an underdeveloped jaw. The couple named their baby boy Nathaniel, and it took a year before Magda could look at him without flinching. A lot of adjustments needed to be done on their part. The worried parents decided to contact the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery (IRPS), a hospital that worked directly with kids who had Treacher Collins.
After leaving a message, they received a call from a certain Shelly Cohen, who turned out to be a speech and language pathologist. When Russell answered the call, he was taken aback by the first thing Shelly said.
“Congratulations! Hey Mr. Newman, you had a baby boy I heard. That’s wonderful.”
While Shelly was the very first person to congratulate Magda and Russell on their baby boy, Russell wasn’t in a celebratory mood.
“Are you freaking nuts?” he thought.
But before he could say anything else, Shelly assured him their son would live a long, beautiful life. He held on to that statement, and it gave him hope.
After a short while, Nathaniel was transferred to NYU Langone, where he stayed for an entire month. Throughout his stay there, the nurses could tell how devastated his parents were. Magda and Russell needed all of the encouragement they could get. They were devastated, hopeless, and full of fear, until the day they found themselves watching the Grammys at the hospital. On the television screen was Christina Aguilera singing her song, Beautiful. At that moment, the couple believed the singer was singing directly to them. It became their anthem, and the song began to resonate with them.
The parents began to recondition their thinking. Instead of focusing on their child’s appearance, they shifted their perspective, believing Nathaniel will be beautiful because of his personality. After the empowering message from Christina, Russell and Magda headed down to the NICU to see their son. It was then that they held him for the very first time.
“I almost cried every day. Every single time I looked at him, I could not believe it’s my child. I couldn’t believe it,” Magda recalled.
Apart from his disfigurement, Nathaniel also had a difficult time breathing and eating. However, his brain was unaffected by his condition, so he was just like any other child. In his first year, Nathaniel had over 10 surgeries to try and improve his way of living. His parents refused cosmetic surgery on him and instead focused on improving his quality of life.
One of the most difficult things Magda and Russell had to endure was having to hear comments from other people, especially in such a big city like New York. Nobody complimented Nathaniel, and nobody congratulated them, too. His own dad couldn’t help but admit he did not look like a person when he first laid eyes on him.
By the time Nathaniel was a toddler, Magda and Russell wanted to try for another child. However, it was not easy for them to carry on with their plan, fearing their second child would also be born with Treacher Collins. The first time Nathaniel realized his face was different from kids his age was when he was called a monster. The couple did several tests to ensure it wouldn’t happen and even sent their DNA samples to Johns Hopkins. It was then they were convinced that there was a 99% chance their second child would not be born with Treacher Collins. True enough, they welcomed their son Jacob with no complications.
The proud parents likened their second son to a porcelain doll. Nathaniel and Jacob grew up close until Nathaniel started becoming conscious of his own face. He noticed the stares and screams at birthday parties because children were afraid of how he looked. The first time Nathaniel realized his face was different from kids his age was when he was called a monster. For years, he endured all the judgment from other people.
By the age of 11, Nathaniel had undergone 54 surgeries, and he was no longer as bothered by looking different. He was able to explain his condition more effectively. When he was a teenager, he had to move to an entirely different school. He made sure to send letters out to his classmates early so they wouldn’t be so surprised when they saw him for the first time. To make the letter more relatable, he incorporated the best-selling book Wonder into it. The book is about encountering a girl who had a facial defect and how it is to live in a world that had difficulties accepting her looks.
In 2017, Wonder became a film. Nathaniel credits the film, along with his courage and his mother’s dedication, for all the wonderful transformations in his life. Inspired by their challenging journey, Magda wrote a book titled Normal: A Mother and Her Beautiful Son, narrating their story. Likewise, Nathaniel wrote his own book titled Normal: One Kid’s Extraordinary Journey, which also narrates his story but from his perspective.
Through it all, Nathaniel has accepted his life wholeheartedly. Wonder changed the way people saw Nathaniel; it made them more understanding and a lot nicer to him. In school, he’s treated like everybody else. Even Nathaniel’s brother, Jacob, saw the changes that Wonder brought. He used to protect his brother like a bodyguard, but after the film came out, people weren’t as harsh as they used to be.
Nathaniel isn’t jealous of his brother’s normal face and has learned to accept his condition. Likewise, his mother realized that God chose her out of all the people in the world to care for Nathaniel. Through the years, she chose to stay home to care for him while Russell worked at an insurance company. She handled caring for two growing boys while beating cancer twice. The Newmans leaned on each other to get through all of their medical difficulties. Now Nathaniel is proud to say he isn’t normal, but neither is anybody else.
“If we were all normal, we’d all have to be the same,” he concluded.
His parents have remained his backbone through the years, and they’re proud to continue supporting him in his quest for a normal life. With so much support for him and his condition nowadays, it hasn’t been difficult for him to do just that.
