Excerpt: 'A Different Life'

April 3, 2009 — -- Quinn Bradlee was born to a mother who was a best-selling author, Sally Quinn, and a father that was the longtime executive editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee.

But what set Quinn Bradlee apart was something much smaller than the looming shadows of his parents. He was born with a hole in his heart that required invasive surgery. For him, that was just the start of health and developmental problems.

Visit Quinn's Web site at FriendsOfQuinn.com

From a young age Quinn Bradlee suffered from several illnesses, but it was not until he was 14 that he was accurately diagnosed with Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome, a disorder expressed through a number of physical ailments and learning disabilities.

In his new book, "A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures," he shares his inspirational story of everyday challenges and triumphs.

Read an excerpt of the book below and check out more excerpts in the "GMA" Library.

When I was ?rst born, everyone thought I was totally and completely normal. According to my mom, the nurses called me "Mr. Mellow," because while all the other babies would scream and cry, I would just kind of look around. She also says that when she ?rst had me in her arms, she told me that she loved me and that I could be anything I wanted to be in the world.

But pretty soon after I was born, my doctor detected a heart murmur, and when I was about three months old, I had to have open-heart surgery. (Heart defects are a pretty universal symptom of VCFS, but we didn't even know I had VCFS yet.) I had what's called a ventricular septal defect, where blood leaks from one side of your heart to the other. The doctors put a Dacron patch over the leak. It's a piece of durable plastic that stays there forever, and your heart grows around it.

I think this was a pretty crappy time for my parents. They thought I might die, and I could have died. My dad and the Post were getting sued by some guy, and I think the day I had surgery was the day that he had to go into court and he lost. (He eventually won, so it turned out okay, but that day he lost.) It was not a great time for anybody.

My mom says the night before my heart operation was one of the worst nights of her life. She wasn't allowed to nurse me. She could barely even hold me. When they took me into the operating room the next day, she basically fainted. Apparently my dad turned to her and said, "Just think of it this way. He'll never have to go to war."

My dad says that his favorite image of me is from just after the operation. My mom was on one side of me, and he was on the other, and I was holding their ?ngers. I was out cold, but my dad says that I held on, that I just held on and kept going. I don't know if I came through that surgery with ?ying colors or not, but I came through. I won't give up when it has something to do with my health. I still have a scar from that operation that goes more than halfway down my chest. After the heart surgery, I was always sick with something. I think my parents thought that once they did the surgery I'd be ?ne, but it didn't work out that way. You should see my medical ?les. They're about six inches thick.

One thing that helped me make sense of my illnesses as a kid was that both my mom and my dad had almost died when they were young. It's like it runs in the family. My dad had polio, and he watched his friend die next to him in the ambulance on the way from school to the hospital. When her dad was ?ghting in Korea, my mom had to live for almost a whole year in a hospital in Japan. She was so scared for her dad at the front lines that she couldn't eat, and they had to keep her on an IV for months. At one point her appendix ruptured and she almost died. Her friend in the bed next to her actually passed away. So we've all faced it. And we're all ?ghters.

The ?rst bad thing to come for me, after the heart surgery, were the seizures. A lot of them, starting when I was almost two. This is from a doctor's letter from just one of my many visits to Children's Hospital: