When Riccardo was born, everything seemed fine, "normal" as they are used to say. A sweet and pleasant child, full of vitality, a marvel. I remember that at the age of one he could walk and say his first words.

Up until about the age of 3 , Riccardo regularly adhered to all the stages of child development. In the first six years of his life he practiced many sports such as swimming, skiing, horse riding, always showing great enthusiasm in everything he did. He liked meeting other children and sharing games with them but he also seemed to love playing alone. It was fun to hear him say some words in English, especially when the same words in Italian were more difficult to pronounce.

However, when he was about 3 years old, I realized that his language was not progressing and that he expressed himself using the "word sentence", meaning that he did not articulate a complete sentence and was hyperactive. The ‘mother instinct’ led me to want to clearly understand so I immediately turned to a child neuropsychiatrist. Tests began: neurological, metabolic, genetic. The first MRI in 2009, at a relatively advanced age (that is, 5), revealed a hypoplasia of the corpus callosum, whose associated symptoms can range from mild to severe and can include delayed motor development, learning difficulties and problems coordinating movements. Riccardo could get the gist of ‘things’, but he did not know how to organize information and there was a big gap between his inputs and outputs.

So, he started with a course of physiotherapy and speech therapy treatments.

We continued the rehabilitation treatments and follow-ups every 3 months with multidisciplinary assessments (neuropsychiatrist, therapists, support teachers, school assistant), until in October 2013, the neuropsychiatrist recommended repeating the MRI, noting poor results obtained despite the rehabilitation process, but rather a regression.

The diagnosis was devastating: supratentorial atrophy and delayed myelination.