From chapter 4:

(Just a Gnat Bite)--story of Penny who had been damaged by encephalitis, was in a coma for seven months, and 11 years later still couldn't talk, walk, feed herself and she screamed so much that she was isolated in a whole separate building in a ward kept open just for her. Rosie worked with her for four years---she learned to type with facilitation and by the end of the year, she was talking sporadically for the first time in over fourteen years, though her speech was limited and childish compared to her communication via spelling. In 1991, Rosie asked Penny:

"What do you think is the worst problem with your speech now?" Penny answered, "I can't control it. It just comes out." "Can you say everything you want to say?" "No, of course not." "Do people realize that you're thinking more than you can say?" "No. They think I'm dumb." (p.86)

(p.88---still about Penny)

During 1993, she (Penny) started going to a local primary school once a week to help the children with their reading and spelling. It was a useful educative exercise--as one little boy said, "I didn't know people in wheelchairs had any brains.".....

I asked her how the hospital staff had reacted when she started to talk again. "They didn't want to believe it. When I got better it went against their rules--the doctors said I'd be a vegtable all my life and never recover. All the doctors said that."

She remembered things from when she was thought to be in a coma. She told a journalist, "The doctors used to say, "Oh, don't worry about her, she's a vegtable." They thought I couldn't hear or understand them but I understood every word they were saying.

Chapter 6

(How Do I Say I Love You), a chapter about autism from the footnote on p.110.

....The thing that interests people about savants, however, is how people who are so retarded can be so talented. If you believe, as I do, that the simplest explanation is that this is a reflection of problems with out definition of retardation, then the phenomenon is a lot less puzzling and perhaps less fascinating.

footnote from p. 127 regarding the sterotype of the autistic child "rocking in a corner, rejecting human contact, lost in a world of his own".

While there must be some basis for this sterotype of the autistic children with autism that I have met have matched it apart from those living in institutions that provide an abnormal environment. While most of the people with autism that I have met have had difficulty conforming with everyday social demands, and all have had some unusual habits, they have also all had strong relationships with at least one person. Typically, the children who run away from me or burst into tears when I approached didn't run to a corner--they ran to someone else they knew. Indeed, so strong was the attachement of many of the children to their parents that they could only concentrate if their parents left the room.