On the day of my birth, my mother had already decided that she wanted to give me away. She had made this decision even though she had not yet known the extent of the problems that would confront me. As it turned out, there were many, including the fact that I was not born a beautiful baby.Actually, I was considered to be quite ugly, disfigured by a cleft lip and palate that left a gaping hole in the middle of my face. In addition, I was born deaf, covered with bruises, and showed signs of haemophilia, an ancient life-threatening hereditary bleeding disorder.I longed to be hugged, kissed, and cuddled in my mother's arms, but that was not about to happen. Instead, I spent months in a hospital crib, as I recovered from complicated facial surgery. Following the surgery, I was placed in a dark room of a foster home, and left to languish in loneliness for several months.On a dark snowy night, shortly before Christmas, a man and woman arrived at the home of my foster parents. They had driven five hundred miles through a blizzard, and requested to see me... see me! No one had ever before asked to see me! My only previous visits away from the foster home were trips to the hospital for painful medical procedures.

Elaine DePrince, a former special education teacher, was the mother of eleven - two biological sons and nine adopted children. After losing her three youngest sons with hemophilia to AIDS transmitted by blood products, DePrince wrote Cry Bloody Murder: A Tale of Tainted Blood (Random House, 1997), an adult non-fiction/memoir written at the request of the U.S. Senate. Cry Bloody Murder had a profound effect on the passage of laws that made blood transfusions safer in our country. She now focuses on young adult memoirs and novels and has written several of them.