What rare speech disorder did Ronda Rousey suffer from in her childhood?
Ronda Rousey is not only a trailblazer in women's MMA, but also one of the biggest names of the combat sports world, irrespective of gender. She recently gave birth to her first child with husband Travis Browne, whom they have named La’akea Makalapuaokalanipō Brown.
As a child, Ronda Rousey suffered from a rare type of neurological speech disorder called apraxia. It left her incapable of forming intelligible sentences for the first six years of her life.
Due to the condition being extremely rare and barely-talked-about at the time, Ronda Rousey was not accurately diagnosed with apraxia. However, she did attend intensive speech therapy sessions with Minot State University specialists.
An ABC report from 2015 states that Ronda Rousey was initially tested for deafness, but that was not the problem she was facing at all:
"At first I was tested for deafness. They thought maybe my pronunciation was off because I was hearing things differently. But it was really I had all these words perfectly arranged in my head, it’s just when they tried to come out of my mouth they sounded different. It was kind of like there was a divide between my brain and my mouth," Ronda Rousey said.
Apraxia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to perform learned (familiar) movements on command, even though the command is understood and there is a willingness to perform the movement, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.
Ronda Rousey overcame the obstructions that apraxia caused with the help of speech therapy. She went on to become a successful judoka and mixed martial artist. It was not until 2015 that she discovered what her childhood condition was called.
A Denver speech pathologist helped Ronda Rousey figure out her childhood disorder
Laura Smith, a mother of two and speech pathologist from Denver, Colorado, visited Ronda Rousey at a book signing event for her autobiography My Fight/ Your Fight in May 2015.
Smith read a Rolling Stone life profile on Ronda Rousey that described the symptoms of her condition and attributed it to her being born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She immediately identified the disorder, as her own daughter Ashlynn had suffered from it as well.
At the book signing, Laura Smith told Rousey about apraxia and left a brochure with her with information on the disorder. She later penned down the entire experience for The Mighty, which you can read here.
Ronda Rousey took Laura Smith's words seriously, did her research on apraxia, and posted pictures of the brochure on her Facebook profile.
Rousey later shared with ABC that she did not know the name of the disorder up until that day and thanked Smith for educating her:
"I actually ended up reading through the whole thing that night and was like, ‘Oh my God, this is all exactly it. This is exactly what it was,’” Rousey said. “I didn’t know it was actually apraxia until that moment. She really taught me a lot about myself that day and I can’t thank her enough for it."
Rousey thanked Laura and Ashlynn Smith in a specially taped message as well for raising awareness around apraxia.