What's Wrong With Conner?

His parents were exhausted and frustrated. Conner’s life, and theirs, had been upended by a medical riddle

- Amitha Kalaichandran

The lightning hit on a stormy June afternoon in 2016. It thrashed through the chimney of the two-storey home, before setting off a gas explosion in the basement that shook the walls.

Jeff Beish was in the living room with his three-year-old son Conner watching television. He grabbed Conner, ran outside and called 911. While they stood in the yard, fire surged through the living room floor.

Jeff ’s wife, Hollie, and the Beishes’ other son, seven-year-old Jaxon, had been out running errands. By the time they got home, firefighters had extinguished the flames. The Beishes spent the next month at a nearby hotel while the house underwent repairs.

Which would have been fine, except that Conner was sick and got worse at the hotel. The Beishes hoped that the elusive condition wasn’t serious. Certainly, they reassured themselves, it was nothing catastrophic. After all, lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Born in August 2012, Conner had been a healthy infant. By the time he turned one, he had a full head of wavy blonde hair and a wide, mischievous smile. He started walking at 13 months.

Words came slowly to Conner. By his second birthday, he’d mastered about 10 of them; the number should have been at least 50. “I assumed it was because Jaxon would always speak for him,” Hollie said, something big brothers often do. The Beishes’ paediatrician said not to worry, that some children gain words in bursts.

Months passed and Conner’s progress was still glacial. The Beishes took him to a speech pathologist.