
Silly. Ornery. A joy. These are some of the words that Honey Torretti uses to describe her son CJ (Christopher Joseph), who turns six in May. By most accounts, he’s a typical kid. He enjoys bowling, watching sports, playing with cars, and goofing around with his big sister Faith. His best friend is his cat, which he named Meatball. “To say he’s unbelievable…it’s totally true,” Torretti says as she explains that CJ, who has cerebral palsy, was diagnosed at 38 days of life with having had a “moderate to massive” stroke. After physicians had diagnosed CJ’s stroke, they also learned that he had suffered a “large heart attack, which attributed to his hypoxic and emergent birth,” Toretti says, and likely caused the left-sided intercerebral stroke. “He was on life support for the first two-and-a-half weeks of his life, and we almost lost him about three times. He’s recovered insanely well.”