Above It All
Alana Renaud is probably the tallest woman you'll ever meet, but she's more than a medical marvel.
By PAIGE WILLIAMS

Once upon a time in the land of the average lived a young woman named Alana Renaud. When she walked into a bar in Buckhead or a party in Midtown, or down a sidewalk in Candler Park, people could not help staring. Alana had beautiful eyes and a lovely smile. And she had long—long, long—legs. Alana was taller than all women in Atlanta and taller than most men—taller, in fact, than almost everyone in the whole entire world. She was taller than the standard doorway, taller than her refrigerator, taller than her truck, taller than her horse, taller than all but two of the Atlanta Hawks. She was taller by 18 inches than the typical American woman, taller by more than a foot than the typical American man, taller by eight inches than her fiance.

“How tall are you?” people would say.

“About 6-10,” Alana would answer, knowing that when she woke up in the morning or after she visited the chiropractor she was closer to 6-foot-11.

“Are you a model?” they asked.

“Well, I have done some modeling.”

“What basketball team do you play for?”

Alana always steeled herself for this, the most common question of all, and said, “I don’t play basketball.”

One Friday evening she went for cocktails with friends at The Tavern at Phipps. She wore black pants and flat shoes and a tank top and a long, dangly necklace and a little bit of lip gloss. Happy-hour drinkers crowded the tables and fogged the air with their cigarette smoke. Colorful cocktails and bottled beers passed on waiters’ trays. As Alana made her way toward the patio, the crowd parted, heads turned, eyes bulged, jaws dropped. Holy shit. Look at that woman. Now that’s a big girl. Alana acted as if she felt none of their stares, heard none of their comments. At the patio, instead of sighing with relief as if she’d just run a gauntlet, she ordered a Cosmopolitan.

Her friend Suzie ordered one, too. “I could be walking next to Alana naked and no one would notice,” she said. Suzie was 5-3. She liked to wear platform shoes yet still stood only breast high to Alana. “No matter what, men see her first,” Suzie said. “There’s no competing with her.”

For the next couple of hours not a person walked by who did not openly stare or at least check Alana out. One man said to his buddy, “I thought she was standing on something.” Behind Alana’s back, another recoiled in mock horror, like an extra in a Godzilla movie. Over by the doorway, a couple of women nudged one another. These were women of a certain age and they had the shiny shirts, the short skirts, the flat-ironed hair, the fake-bake tan, and the faux boobs, and they looked Alana up and down, and laughed.

Two middle-aged men stood gazing across the patio at the unblemished expanse of Alana’s back. When they finally got up the nerve to approach her, one said, “Where are you from?” as though she had found her way to Peachtree Road from some exotic, faraway place.

“Originally? St. Petersburg, Florida,” Alana said.

“What are you doing here?” the guy said.

“I live here.”

The men were as short as Suzie in her platforms. One asked what Alana did for a living. Alana said she owned a pizza parlor called Graffiti’s, in Stockbridge. She held her Cosmo in her left hand, her engagement ring eye level with the men. She worked the word “fiance” into the conversation, as she always did in these situations. When one of the men handed her a business card, Alana said, “So, what do we have here?” and accepted it, not wanting to be rude. The card indicated that the man worked for a railroad. He then mentioned the attractiveness of Alana’s necklace, and Alana dropped the word “fiance” again, and it all went well enough for something that would never go anywhere. As the men left, Alana felt they had been among the better ones—respectful, not overly intrusive. But then the railroad man returned, unable to help himself. He looked up at Alana and said, “You have the sexiest back I’ve ever seen in my life,” which, to be honest, kind of skeeved Alana out. “Oh,” she said. “Well, thanks.”

 ***

Alana, 27, has been 6-foot-10 for more than a decade. Eighty-two inches tall. Even as a teenager, she could reach the high cabinets, library shelves, and grocery items. She could stand flat-footed and put the angel on the Christmas tree.

The taller she got the more public her life became. Every inch of new height drew that many more pairs of eyes. For a while she dated a 7-foot-2 guy[1] whom she met at Guitar Center. At that time in her life she thought she needed to date a man that tall, that she preferred to, but the longer she dated the 7-foot-2 man the more she knew this to be untrue. He seemed miserable, and ashamed. When they went out to a restaurant he would hurry Alana to their seat with, “Sit down, people are looking.” Alana wanted to say, “You’re tall. Get over it.”

Despite the attention she got from men, her dating life overall had been less than satisfying. “A 6-foot-11 scientist girl for most guys is pretty intimidating,” said her fiance, Quentin Hagewood, an Oregon native who plays guitar for the local band Overwhelmed and installs fiber-optic cable for BellSouth. “She’s smarter than them and taller than them. But it never bothered me. I just felt like Alana was someone I could care for and encourage, and protect if necessary.” Alana and Quentin met in 2002, through the 7-foot-2 guy, as it happened. Quentin never mentioned Alana’s height. “It really just didn’t interest me,” he said. “Maybe that’s why she liked me.”

One evening, Alana and Quentin had dinner at a swank restaurant in Buckhead. The maitre d’ brought over a tuna appetizer. “Compliments of the chef,” he said. To Alana he said, “You went to Western Georgia University, didn’t you?”

“Ah, why yes,” Alana said. “How’d you know?”

The maitre d’ said some Emory volleyball players had dined there recently and were talking about her.

“That’s B.S.,” Alana told Quentin when they were alone. “He recognized me from the Internet.” Alana attended the University of West Georgia on a volleyball scholarship, but a website that posted her photo and body measurements mistakenly listed the college as Western Georgia University. “I left it alone so that when the next freakazoid says, ‘Didn’t you go to Western Georgia?’ I’ll know.”

She was talking about a site called tallwomen.org, or Tallest Known Living Women, which lists Alana as the 13th-tallest woman in the world, behind women from Brazil, Poland, Ghana, Pakistan, China, Latvia, Ukraine, India, Serbia, Detroit, Colorado, and Shelbyville, Indiana. The woman from Indiana is Sandy Allen[2], who, until she started to slump and ail, held the Guinness record for world’s tallest woman at 7-foot-7¼. The tallest man in medical history was also an American: Robert Wadlow[3] of Illinois, 8-foot-11. A woman named De-Fen Yao, of China, is believed to have passed Sandy Allen for the unofficial record of 7-foot-8½. All of this information and more can be found on the web. Google “tall women” and more than 10 million results come up, including online shopping options for specialized clothing and sites where fetishists can pay $14.95 a month to look at photos of women who have given themselves nicknames such as Amazon Annie and turned their height into their livelihood, like a cyber circus tent.[4] On one site, someone pointed out that if this were the Stone Age, extraordinarily tall women would be considered heroes. Alana, however, lives in the Communication Age, where websites about Sandy Allen and other tall women carry commentary such as, “Her vagina must be immense—you could probably park a tiny Japanese truck in there.” A reasonable person inevitably responds (in this case: “Be nice. Karma’s a bitch”). Still, the sentiment is out there.

Alana also lives in the Barbie Age, when the average person wants desperately to be physically un-average. Americans spend an estimated $15 billion a year altering their bodies through cosmetic surgery. Television shows such as Nip/Tuck draw millions of viewers, and books such as Beauty Junkies, 10 Years Younger, Venus Envy, and The Wrinkle Cure[5] crowd sales shelves. It is the breast of times and the stupidest of times—an age of ballooning bosoms, collagen-plumped lips, lifted eyes, tucked tummies, sucked-out thighs, pinned-back ears, and puffed-up butts. Beauty pageant contestants can have a rib surgically removed in order to create a slimmer silhouette. Women (and not a few men) go for laser resurfacing as casually as they go to the grocery. In China, where poor De-Fen Yao lies confined to a bed 20 hours per day, fighting for her life[6], women have paid to have their leg bones broken and stretched, just to be a few inches taller.[7] 

Not long ago, Alana’s endocrinologist, Dr. Carol Greenlee of Piedmont Endocrinology Consultants, had a patient who could talk about nothing except the tip of her nose, which was, in the patient’s opinion, “too square.” The tip of the woman’s nose wasn’t any more square than the next person’s nose, yet the patient complained that her diabetes was out of control because she was so depressed about the tip of her nose, and despite financial problems she was considering paying $22,000 for cosmetic surgery to change it. Dr. Greenlee felt disgusted. She felt like walking out of the room. “I honestly can’t have this conversation,” she told the patient. “The world is such a wonderful place, with so much more to think about. There are people who’ve had horrible, horrible things happen to them and who’ve been through so much, yet they go through life with joy, making the world a better place. And you’re obsessed with the tip of your nose?”

At birth Alana weighed an unremarkable 7 pounds and 2 ounces and measured 19½ inches. There was nothing atypical about her younger sister Amanda’s birth, either. The Renauds lived in a two-story 1920s house with high ceilings and open windows one block from Bear Creek Elementary School, among the palm trees and gulf breezes of south-central St. Petersburg. The girls grew up with birthday parties, dance recitals, field trips, Christmases with grandparents and aunts. Alana played the saxophone. She took jazz, tap, and ballet. Her father, Leo, worked as a self-employed accountant, and Linda, her mother, was a stay-at-home mom.

Alana’s life began to change in fifth grade. Between age 9 and 10, she grew four inches, to 5-foot-5—as tall as her mother and sharing her shoes. The next year, she grew an inch. Then, at 12, she grew two inches within three months, to 5-foot-8. Around this time, she developed an interest in horses.

Her parents rented a little Appaloosa named Flash and let Alana show him in competitions. Alana sat taller and taller in the saddle. At age 13 she grew from 6 feet to 6-2, passing her dad. By 14 she hit 6-foot-4. The Renauds went looking for a bigger horse.

Alana tried a young chestnut quarter horse named Dudley, who measured 16.2 hands, or 66 inches, or 5-foot-6 at the height of his withers. Dudley put Alana in the dirt the first time she rode him and then kicked her in her bony butt. Alana got up, brushed away the hoof print, and said, “He’s the one.”

She outgrew the accoutrements of equestrianism the way she had outgrown tap shoes. Her saddle, stirrups, and boots had to be custom made. Linda, not an expert seamstress but a determined mom, sewed the jackets herself.

And still Alana grew. By her freshman year of high school, she stood 6-foot-5. “What’s up? Oops, I mean what’s way, way, way up?” one boy wrote in her yearbook. “I hope I grow some over the summer so we can see eye to neck. P.S. Don’t give up hope; someone might invent a machine that shrinks people . . . ” Another wrote, “How’s the weather up there? . . . Pretty soon I’ll be level with your kneecaps.” Another wrote, “I only have one thing to say to you. DON’T GROW ANY TALLER!!! If you get any taller you’re going to have your own weather system!” At that point, though, Alana still had five more inches to grow.

Her mother expressed concerns to the family pediatrician. The pediatrician had never been wrong about the Renaud girls, so when he said Alana was healthy and proportionate, and that she was simply going to be tall, they let it go. Leo, after all, had tall women in his family.

By her sophomore year Alana had to duck to walk through a standard 6-foot-8 doorway. She had given in to the high school basketball coach, who won the family over with the words “college scholarship.” Volleyball coaches came running, too. Alana disliked basketball with all its hustle and grind but learned to enjoy volleyball. As she grew to 6-foot-9¾, local newspapers wrote celebratory stories about her despite the fact that she had less natural ability and had to work so much harder than the other girls to make up for her physical awkwardness and relative slowness and weakness. Much as the world wanted Alana to love sports, Alana loved science, music, and Dudley.

By fall of her senior year she reached 6-foot-10 and had long passed the point of being able to buy regular clothes and shoes at the mall. She couldn’t run to Nordstrom and grab a pair of size 14 pumps. Her mother had been taking her to a big-and-tall women’s shop in Tampa, but even those clothes no longer fit well. They’d never looked like something a young girl might wear, anyway. Capri pants weren’t yet in. Midriff shirts weren’t, either. Alana wore men’s jeans and Converse low tops.

A nice boy three inches shorter had invited Alana to the homecoming dance her freshman year, but she had not had a date since. Her friends were her volleyball teammates and her sister and her horse. If her height hurt her, if she hated the quotidian comments and staring, and the occasional jeering from the bleachers during volleyball games, Alana never said a word. “She had so many interests instead of just wallowing in the ‘why me,’” her mother said. “She never went down that path. Or if she did, she went down it alone.”

Even to the Renauds it would seem incredible, years later, that they never discussed Alana’s extreme growth. Even as she ducked through doorways and started sleeping diagonally across her childhood bed, even as other parents demanded to know what was wrong with Alana, the Renauds simply did not discuss it. “Because, you know, you hope nothing’s wrong,” Leo said. “You cling to the old statement the pediatrician made—‘Don’t worry about it, she’s just going to be tall’—and you get on with life. A month clicks by and then half a year and a year and a couple of years, and even when doubt develops, it’s difficult to talk about.”

When Alana had not started menstruating by age 17, Linda took her to a gynecologist, who right away referred them to an endocrinologist. The endocrinologist diagnosed a tumor in Alana’s pituitary, the acorn-sized gland that dangles from the hypothalamus at the base of the brain and controls everything from growth and metabolism to blood pressure, skin pigment, and reproduction. Noncancerous but active, the tumor had been causing the pituitary to pump out too much of the hormone that makes the body grow.

The condition is rare. In childhood it is called gigantism; in adulthood, acromegaly. Although tall people generally are healthier and can be expected to live longer than the average person, gigantism left untreated can result in potentially deadly conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, with attendant maladies such as arthritis, infertility, and a marked change in appearance. Untreated patients begin to look nothing like themselves. Their nose, jaw, and brow widen and begin to protrude. They can develop thick, coarse, oily skin. Their lips and tongue expand, and the voice deepens as the sinuses and vocal chords enlarge. This had begun to happen to Alana. Her senior portrait showed a broadening nose and chin. But behind her nose, deep within her cranium, the tumor wasn’t just making her taller, making her different—it was threatening her life. “A lot of people, when they look at her, in their ignorance, don’t understand,” her mother said. “It’s not like she’s got something with a label that people understand, like cancer—that if you’ve gone through it you’ve got their respect and admiration. They don’t have a clue what she’s gone through.”

[1] Also not a basketball player. 

Surgeons once removed pituitary tumors by opening a patient’s head and cutting down through the brain, or by entering through an incision above the upper teeth, beneath the nostrils. Then they developed an endonasal alternative. Alana’s surgeon in Florida went in through the left nostril, past the sinuses, to the pituitary. The risks were the same as in any major surgery—heavy bleeding, an adverse reaction to anesthesia—but the procedure also could have caused leakage of cerebrospinal fluid, blindness, meningitis, infection, or death.

During the surgery, blood flooded the field. The surgeon got out of there, patched Alana up, and sent her home for a month with instructions not to ride Dudley or exert herself in any way. “It was like denying me my whole little life,” Alana said. “Because that’s all I did: I went to practice, I rode my horse, I studied.” A second surgery removed all but feathery remnants of the tumor wrapped around Alana’s interior carotid. The surgeon plugged the hole in her sinus cavity with abdominal fat. The surgical team taped a gauze pad beneath her nose to absorb the draining blood and mucus. Then, after all that was over—after she had survived the anesthesia, two rounds of invasive tools in her head, the packing, the draining, the ICU, the blood-clot exercises, the pressurized socks, the bed rigged with a plain plank leg extender, and the hospital food—she needed a third operation.

For the gamma knife radiation treatment they told her she would feel something like a “mosquito bite.” Then they fitted her with a metal halo by screwing bolts into her skull. Alana could hear the bone crunch. And she could feel it. Boy could she feel it. For the first time, her parents saw her cry. “It hurts,” she told them. “They lied.”

Patients with this type of tumor often aren’t permanently cured, but Alana was. After a few weeks she got back on Dudley. She celebrated signing with the University of West Georgia. Like time-lapsed photography in reverse, her nose and jaw slenderized back to normal. She did not have a date to senior prom but she went anyway, alone, in the long green dress her mother made her.

 ***

A couple of months ago, Alana attended Park Tavern’s annual oyster and crawfish fest, where a jovial and somewhat intoxicated guy threw a white potato to get her attention. The encounter turned out to be positive—so much so that Alana took his number with the intention of setting him up with one of her girlfriends. On the other hand, reactions to her presence included guffaws and comments such as, “Dude, that’s extreme.” One guy walked up and without preface or any nicety at all asked the unoriginal, the inevitable.

“About 6-10,” Alana answered wearily.

“Bullshit,” the guy said. “I’m 6-2.”

How was Alana supposed to respond to that? Congratulations?

“You’re not 6-10,” he went on. “You can’t be.” He refused to let it go. Alana finally said, “Okay, well, nice talking to you,” and turned to her friends. The guy backed up to her and had his cheeseball buddy take a photo of him with his cell phone.

Does a day go by in which someone fails to comment on Alana’s height? “Yes,” she said. “If I don’t leave my house.”

At Publix, a woman once said, “At least you’re not ugly.” In Wal-Mart a teenage boy said, “Yo, I bet I could dunk on you.” In San Francisco, a transvestite said, “Ooh-wee girl, are you for real?” and Quentin, a big solid guy with dark eyes and floppy black hair, said, “A hundred percent, baby.”

Back in high school, girls who didn’t know Alana would giggle and stare. These were Cinderella’s stepsisters, rising members of the Future Shiny Shirts and Faux Boobs of America. They were “typical little mall rats that wore the size 1 and 3 and that all the boys adored and pursued,” said Alana’s mother, who is not the kind of woman who speaks harshly about other people’s children but who worried for her tall and different daughter, and hurt for her. “I would give them my worst mother stare-glare,” she said. “Alana would just roll her eyes and say, ‘They’re just ignorant, Mom.’”

On nights out with the girls, if people snicker and whisper, Alana’s friends Sarah and Kristin might head things off by saying: “This is Alana. She’s 6-foot-10, she lives in Atlanta, her boyfriend’s in a band, she loves animals, she’s got a horse named Dudley, she used to be a scientist, she’s the world’s biggest fan of the band Lit—there’s a lot more to Alana than her height.” Quentin said, “A lot of people care about Alana. She’s got a whole network of support. She got a lot of love from her parents, a lot of sincere love. So she has a lot of trust in mankind. Maybe a little more than she should.”

The other day, during breakfast at The Flying Biscuit on McLendon Avenue, one of the workers came up to her and said, “You don’t pay taxes, do you?”

Alana begged her pardon.

“You don’t pay taxes, do you?” the woman said, then turned around and hollered to a cook in the kitchen, “I told you! She so tall she don’t pay taxes!” then slapped Alana on the back and cackled. When the woman left Alana said, “A lot of people’s comments could be interpreted as unkind, but I don’t think their intention is often unkind. Even if I don’t like what they say, I kind of have to think about it like that.”

The comments often bother the people who love Alana more than they bother her. Quentin sometimes wants to ask the average interloper: How important is it to you to make that comment? Does it make you sleep better? Does it make you feel better knowing exactly how tall she is? Is it so important that you have to be rude enough to say something? “It’s not like she can chop off her legs and sew her feet back on,” he said. “Like the color of your skin, there’s nothing you can do about it. You learn to deal with it in the best way possible and hang out in circles that appreciate you rather than make you out to be some circus freak.”

From her father Alana inherited an instinct for keeping things light, for maintaining control particularly by using humor to deflect certain emotional peril. One night last winter, when yet another man approached her at a party and asked, “How tall are you?” Alana looked down at him and without blinking said, “5-2.” If someone brings out that old chestnut “How’s the weather up there?” she may say, “Same as your weather down there, buddy." [8] Her way with people calls to mind big Robert Wadlow’s self-possessed style. On Ripley’s Believe It or Not an interviewer once asked, “Do you mind people staring at you when you’re walking out on the street?” Wadlow said, “Oh, no. I just overlook them.”

[8] Re: the question, “How’s the weather up there?” Sandy Allen once told ABC News: “Sometimes you want to spit on those people and say, ‘It’s raining.’”

 ***

After college, Alana took a job as a cellular biologist with the contact lens company CIBA Vision, near Alpharetta. She worked in a lab, analyzing tissue. The company special-ordered Alana’s workspace equipment, chair, lab coat, and safety shoes. But nobody could do anything about the painful commute. Alana always folded herself into whatever car she drove—Volvo, Jeep, Ford Taurus—with the seat pushed all the way back for leg length and the backrest reclined for head room. Her knees bracketed the steering wheel.

The pressure on her lower spine added to the physical stress of everyday movements the average person takes for granted: entering a doorway, unlocking a door, bending over to brush one’s teeth. The ducking, stooping, and scrunching strain Alana’s back. From the standard height of kitchen counters to airplane seats to beds to cars to toilets, concepts of human scale and design revolve around mass production costs and the statistical average, which in this country has evolved to 5-foot-4 for women, 5-foot-9½ for men. As Alana’s former CIBA boss and mentor Dr. Amy Wright puts it, “The world is not made for people like her.”

Americans are getting taller[9], and even as areas of design move toward flexible workspaces[10] and modular living, Alana makes do with what she’s got. Quentin installed track lighting and retracted ceiling fans in their two-story home so Alana wouldn’t bump her head. He raised the showerheads and custom-built the bathroom sinks so she wouldn’t have to stoop.

When Alana partnered up with a friend and bought Graffiti’s, she cut her commute to a few quick miles and enjoyed the challenge and autonomy of owning her own business, but she could not change the common workspaces. “Other people have to reach up to use the pizza oven,” said her chiropractor, Rejina Hendricksen. “Alana is always bending down. There’s no easy area for her.” Alana wears the consequences as burn scars on her knuckles and wrists. “I’m sizzled,” she said.

One day, in the lull between the lunch rush and the supper crowd, Alana was rolling out lengths of pretzel dough. Two men and a woman sat drinking draft beer at the bar. The girl said something about Frederick’s of Hollywood and bras, which she pronounced “braws,” and how she could not stand thongs. Alana had on navy men’s cargo shorts and a T-shirt and had her hair in dog-ears with lavender ponytail holders. The TV was tuned to a program about Romanian folklore and blood-sucking vampires.

A man came in off his chopper for a beer. He wore camouflage pants, a camouflage cell phone holder, and a SoulFly Prophet T-shirt. “You get a house, you want a bigger house,” he was heard saying after a while. “You get a bike, you want a faster bike. You get a girlfriend, you want a prettier girlfriend. We’re never happy, when we all should just thank God that we’re where we’re at.”

From that same counter a customer had recently taken one look at Alana in the kitchen and said, “You missed your calling—you ought to be playing basketball.”

“This is my restaurant, sir,” she answered. “This is what I do for a living. This is what I enjoy.”

“You can’t tell me you like this more than you’d like making millions playing basketball,” he said.

Alana assured him that she could in fact tell him just that. What she really wanted to say was, “You know what? Leave me alone! I’m cooking your pizza here!”

Yoga makes Alana feel better emotionally and physically. And once a week, she sees Hendricksen, the chiropractor. To ease the pressure on her lower back, she bought a navy blue 2006 Scion xB, which was affordable and had front-seat headroom of 46.1 inches (her head grazes the roof). She and Quentin sleep on a California King bed 84 inches long. At least once a year Alana visits Dr. Greenlee, the endocrinologist, for a routine check of her pituitary. Tumors sometimes recur, but Alana’s has not. “It’s very exciting to see someone so healthy after what she’s been through,” Greenlee said.

Not long after Alana and Quentin met, Dr. Greenlee did discover a nodule on Alana’s thyroid. Surgeons removed half the gland and sent the cells for testing. Even the country’s top experts on thyroid cancer could not tell whether the cells would become trouble. In medicine this happens sometimes. They simply do not know.

In early spring, Alana shopped for a wedding dress in Candler Park, at Kelly’s Closet, where a sign bans conversations involving negative body terminology such as fat, huge, chunky, and enormous (“We focus on what we like about ourselves”). Alana had decided she might like a drop-waist dress, to cut the “intense length” between her waist and the floor, but as she fingered the chic dresses she realized her wedding gown, like so much else, would have to be custom made. “I’m a little hard to fit,” she told the sales clerk, who looked her up and down and said, “Lucky lady,” something Alana hardly ever hears.

 [9] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans were roughly an inch taller in 2004 than they were in 1960. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found that the average height of a man aged 20 to 74 increased from just over 5-8 to 5-foot-9½, and the average height of a woman of the same age range increased from just over 5-3 to 5-foot-4.

[10] Dr. Abir Mullick, director of the Industrial Design Program at Georgia Tech and an expert in the burgeoning field of universal design, is creating flexible bathrooms and kitchens where surfaces can be raised and lowered. “If it’s done within the mass production system, it will be affordable,” Mullick said. “Design is changing . . .  It has to be as diverse as people are.”

***

There is one other thing to know. Between Alana’s birth and Amanda’s, Linda and Leo Renaud had a son. He was born three months early and weighed 1 pound, 6 ounces. He lived less than 24 hours. The Catholic funeral home that took care of the cremation kept his ashes; the Renauds could not bear to pick them up. Linda thinks of her son all the time, especially on his birthday, October 28. He would have been called Richard Leo Renaud and today he would be 25, two years younger than Alana.

Linda and Leo struggle to deal with the past. “We spent a long time beating ourselves up for not recognizing this,” Linda said, meaning Alana’s tumor. She and Leo were sitting in the den of the house where Alana grew up, with the windows open to spring, birds calling in the trees. “But I didn’t know there was such a thing. Family members, close friends—a lot of people were angry with our pediatrician and said weren’t we gonna sue. I wish that he had been more familiar, but it’s not his fault.”

“You can get tied up in the woulda, shoulda, coulda,” Leo said, “and it really blows to live that way. We’ve had our moments through the years, and some of those moments seemed to last a lifetime, but we’ve tried to remain optimistic no matter what. It’s still difficult to accept our failure, if you will, to have done something sooner. As parents, it’s difficult not to blame yourself for the things that aren’t perfect with your kids.”

Alana’s parents have not lived with her since she was 18 and under their roof, so it is hard for them to see, on an everyday basis, the full measure of the woman she has become. Alana’s kindness and poise astonish those who know her. “There are jerky people in the world who just don’t get it,” said her friend Sarah. “They look at her like, ‘Oh you big freak.’ But I’ve never seen her upset about being made fun of or called out, which is such grace. She has more confidence than anyone I’ve ever met. Spend one hour with Alana and you forget she’s 6-foot-10.”

Here is a person who could let half a lifetime’s worth of visibility and negativity make her unapproachable or reclusive; a person who could have stuck with a career hidden away in a laboratory but instead chose to serve pizza to the public. She chooses to go to parties, and sky dive, and attend concerts, and enter horse shows with Dudley, and to let a good man love her. Instead of complaining about having to wear riding britches that are too short, she says, “Tall boots are a good excuse to wear cute argyles.” To think of Alana only as the little girl who grew too much is to overlook how fully she lives her life—that she is good at her life, and happy.