Stephanie learned and matured through travel and exposure to music and plays,acquiring a knowledge she could not learn from books.

Karin’s love for her daughter guided her to allow Stephanie to fill her life with as many positive experiences as possible. And while Stephanie grew into a lovely young woman, her lack of judgment resulting from her injury led her into situations of great danger that required Karin to rescue her. Unfortunately, Stephanie’s intermittent seizures hung like the proverbial “Sword of Damocles” over their lives. This, in time, led her to regain her speech and some motor skills. Frostig herself took over the “reprogramming” of Stephanie’s brain.

By chance, Karin heard of the Marianne Frostig Center of Educational Therapy, where Dr. Despite the toll on the family-alcoholism, divorce, and estrangement-Karin never gave up hope for Stephanie’s recovery. Little was known about brain injuries during that time, and Karin was forced to improvise, relying on her instincts, to treat Stephanie. In Broken Butterfly, Karin Finell recounts the struggles faced by both her and her daughter, as well as the small victories won over the ensuing years. Doctors saw little hope of recovery for Stephanie and encouraged her parents to place her in an institution, but they refused. Due to the swelling of her brain from encephalitis, she suffered serious brain damage. When she awoke, her world had changed from predictable and comforting to one where the ground was shaking. Following a series of tests at the hospital, doctors concluded she had contracted viral equine encephalitis while in Mexico.Īfter a string of massive seizures-one leading to cardiac arrest-Stephanie fell into a six-week coma. She was completely unprepared when Stephanie went into violent convulsions on a Friday morning. Seven-year-old Stephanie fell ill soon after their return to the United States, but her mother, Karin, thinking it was an intestinal disorder, kept her home from school for a few days.

In November of 1970, the Finell family’s lives were changed forever by a family vacation to Acapulco. Who would ever have thought that our family’s life would become derailed, that its tightly woven fabric would eventually fray and break-all from the bite of a mosquito?” Not just one, but hundreds had punctured her arms and legs with red marks which later swelled to small welts. Yes, with a bite of this pesky, but seemingly so innocuous little insect that had been sucking her blood. “It all began with the bite of a mosquito.

Broken Butterfly by Karin Finell