Far From Home

While researching the Children’s Research Institute and Hospital, I had no problem finding articles on CARIH that had been published in medical journals. But none of those articles focused on the children as anything other than research subjects, and what interested me most about CARIH was the children, as individuals, not as a faceless group. I was an inpatient at the National Institutes of Health for five and a half months, which felt like a long time, and that was with me having chosen to go there as an adult. Many of the former patients I interviewed were at CARIH for as long as two years and they were all 16 years old or younger when they arrived in Denver.

I started working on this article in September. The six months that passed between my pitching the story and its publication involved research, interviewing former patients, writing, revising, and more revising. There is so much more to the story of CARIH and those of the former patients, who are now adults, than I could include in the article.

The photo is of the CARIH campus, circa 1970.