As a child, Dr. Jan Brunstrom-Hernandez knew she wanted to go into medicine when she grew up, but she had no intention of treating cerebral palsy patients<\/a>.<\/p>\n “I didn’t want to be surrounded by more of me,” she told Fox News. “I didn’t feel good about myself because of my disability.”<\/p>\n In fact, it sometimes embarrassed her, so she avoided glancing at her reflection in windows as she struggled to walk down the street.<\/p>\n But after she and Dr. Mike Noetzel with the St. Louis Children’s Hospital discussed the lack of advancement in cerebral palsy studies since the 1960s, Brunstrom-Hernandez opened the country’s first cerebral palsy-dedicated clinic, United Cerebral Palsy.<\/p>\n Since May 1998, she and her staff have treated nearly 2,000 cerebral palsy patients from around the world. For the last 10 years, Anna Marie Champion and her seventh-grade daughter, Morgan, have traveled to St. Louis from Atlanta.<\/p>\n