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A Cinderella prom night for teen with special needs

BY CAROL POLSKY | carol.polsky@newsday.com

7:20 PM EDT, June 25, 2008

Sara Neuman, 19, looks over her senior prom dress with her mom, Judy. Sara will be attending the Plainview-Old Bethpage High School prom. (Newsday Photo / David L. Pokress)

It would be easy to feel a little sentimental when thinking about Sara Neuman and her prom. Prom nights are special, but for Sara and others like her, maybe a little more so.

"Mommy, I feel like Cinderella," she'd said, her mom recalled Wednesday, as a seamstress had snipped at the hem of the tiny girl's coral prom dress singing "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes."

Sara, 19, is a 4-foot-9, 75-pound, medically fragile special education student at Plainview-Old Bethpage High School, and Thursday night she and Andrew Siebenberg, 18, her classmate and boyfriend since eighth grade, will attend the prom at the RexCorp (formerly EAB) Plaza in Uniondale.

"He asked me in third period typing class," the Plainview teen said. "I was like, 'Oh my God. Thank God.'

"He's sensitive. When I was sick, he called to see how I was. He's going to get me a flower."

Sentimentality about the prom can be forgiven, perhaps, given the unforgiving details of Sara's medical situation.

It stands out in a life where most social invitations must be turned down, where nights are spent on a ventilator and prom transportation isn't a limo full of reveling couples, but a car driven by anxious parents with a wheelchair and ventilator in the trunk, "just in case."

Her parents will insist on pushing her in the wheelchair almost to the prom doors, where she intends to stand and walk through arm in arm with Andrew, in tux and silver vest.

At the prom table with Sara and Andrew will be her school aide and a private duty nurse (prom ticket courtesy of Sara's parents).

Her parents, Judy, 54, and Jan, 55, will sit somewhere nearby. The prom caterer will provide soft food, so she doesn't choke. The nurse and aide have their instructions: Andrew mustn't spin her on the dance floor, so she doesn't fall, and she must rest each time she dances.

"When she was asked to the prom I was nervous," said Judy Neuman, who is on leave from her job as a teaching assistant. "But her neurologist said you have to let her go. She has to have things to make her excited and to look forward to."

Sara was born with physical and cognitive delays, and her condition worsened after she turned 12. Surgeons closed holes in her heart. Spinal surgery (two metal rods and six months in a body cast) followed to correct a quickly progressing curvature of the spine.

Digestive problems developed, as did a respiratory condition, still undiagnosed, that landed her in the hospital last September.

Since then, her parents have taken turns sleeping in her room each night as a powerful ventilator forces air through a face mask into and out of her lungs to clear her body of carbon dioxide. She no longer needs extra oxygen from tanks, but goes on the ventilator for two two-hour periods each day.

"She tires out too much, the effort she makes to breathe," said her mother, who said Sara uses a wheelchair when she has to walk any distance.

The Neumans have two healthy children, ages 25 and 22. And they're frustrated that after years of expert consultations and batteries of tests, the underlying cause of their daughter's symptoms is unknown.

Dr. Ingrid Taff, a Great Neck neurologist who has treated Sara since she was 4, said, "It's not uncommon, unfortunately, not to have a real diagnosis or name for what a person is disabled with."

What she does know is that her disabled patients, like everyone else, need to have good times to look forward to. The prom is "often the highlight of their graduating experience, like any kid."

Despite it all, Sara's spirits remain high. She loves movies on DVD and sings along to CD soundtracks of Disney films and musicals.

Framed photos with personalized autographs, even letters, from teen actor Seth Adkins, and Drew Carey and John Travolta, too, crowd the bureau in her pink and lavender room.

On Thursday, a hairdresser will come to the Neumans' home to sweep Sara's hair into an updo (so she'll appear taller next to the 5-foot-11 Andrew, who had a tough start himself as a tiny, premature baby, according to his mother, Marta Siebenberg).

She'll take a respirator break, and then her family will help her put on makeup, her child-sized silver shoes, her sparkly jewelry and corsage. The families will snap photos.

And then Sara and her "prince" Andrew will get whisked away, in a car that may well feel like a carriage.

Check back later Thursday night for a video of Sara and Andrew at the prom.