Bolander, Anne M.

Misdiagnosed as mentally retarded, at age 6 was sent to an institution for retarded and unwanted children, where the children were known only by numbers, not names. There she endured 5 years of physical and mental abuse before finally returning home. At home, the abuse continued, her family denying her deafness and insisting that she was retarded. Outcast at school and lacking social skills to make friends, she found few spots of relief until finally she broke out and forged a new independent life for herself as a deaf person. Went to work for General Motors for over 25 years. Autobiography is I Was #87: A Deaf Woman's Ordeal of Misdiagnosis, Institutionalization, and Abuse (2000).