“Failure to thrive” is what it’s called, and there can be scores of explanations: pituitary disorders, hypothyroidism, genetic defects in metabolism, inflammatorybowel disease, lead poisoning, H.I.V., tapeworm infection. She did not look malnourished, but she didn’t look quite healthy, either. ![]() She stood an acceptable thirty-four inches tall but weighed only twenty-three pounds-less than ninety-eight per cent of girls her age. By the time Annie was three years old, however, she had fallen off the chart. Her sister, Lauryn, four years older, had always been at the bottom end of the pediatrician’s growth chart for girls her age. ![]() For a while, Annie’s fine-boned petiteness seemed to be just a family trait. The detail that finally mattered was Annie’s size. Or that Annie’s mother noticed that her breathing was sometimes a little wheezy, though the pediatrician heard nothing through his stethoscope. ![]() Like the fact that, when she was a baby, her father sometimes called her Little Potato Chip, because her skin tasted salty when he kissed her. Every illness is a story, and Annie Page’s began with the kinds of small, unexceptional details that mean nothing until seen in hindsight.
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