About The Book

Imagine being born with an incurable, ultra-rare, spontaneous, metabolic, endocrinological, crippling disorder. Imagine being miss-diagnosed at age 3. Imagine being miss-prognosed with paraplegia by the age of 20. Imagine wearing orthopedic braces, sleeping in leg braces, taking huge daily doses of Vitamin D, 5 lifetimes of doctors’ appoints, procedures, exams, 9 leg surgeries, and relearning how to walk 3 times all before you were 16 years old. Imagine overcoming the Miss-diagnosis and miss-prognosis Running a 15-Kilometer and 10-kilometer road race, earning a spot on a high school and collegiate Men’s tennis team, and earning a doctorate from a major university. Imagine being married for 32 years, 2 daughters, 1 step grandson, 1 grandson, and then acknowledging before accepting your true identity as female. “Miss-Understood” was written with love and over the course of a lifetime of angst, frustration, inner turmoil, depression, anxiety, which has been reimaged and refined into positive energy, self-acceptance, and love. Alana documents her incredible and inspiring journey from “Miss-Diagnosis” to “Miss-Perception” “Miss-Treatment” and
“Miss-Judgment” and shares what she has learned about overcoming adversity, the limits of human potential, heteronormativity, spirituality, gender, acceptance, identity and more.

Included in the “Resources” section are educational and training lessons to generate insight, educate, and inspire licensed under a open-source Creative Commons S/A license.

Her powerful and passionate words serve as a survival guide for anyone and especially for those categorized as the “other”.