Wendy Williams

As a survivor of infant surgery without anesthesia or pain control in 1952, I often feared growing up that I was crazy or retarded, words that were used back then. These fears dissolved when I realized that I had been given a paralytic instead of anesthesia and pain control as a one-month-old baby undergoing surgery to repair pyloric stenosis, or a stomach blockage. I had been tortured as a newborn and this deep wound, or trauma, was never treated. Moreover, my parents had not been told that anesthesia and pain control had been withheld; we were all in the dark.

 

Growing up, I experienced many symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress or PTS, but as a child and teen, I could not identify the cause of the feelings and behaviors that plagued me, nor could my parents, teachers, or medical professionals. But I was neither crazy nor retarded. There was a real reason for my difficulties.

 

In the film Cutdown: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, produced and directed by Roey Shmool, Jolene Philo, writer and parent of a survivor of infant surgery without anesthesia, presents an analogy to help us better understand pre-verbal trauma. “Once we realize that a lot of these mental illnesses are physiological in nature . . . they actually can be seen as just like a cut in your hand, you know, a cut or wound to your brain . . . it takes a lot of the stigma of the mental illness away and it’s a lot easier for parents and young adults who experienced it. This is an injury, just like a broken leg [is] an injury and who wouldn’t go in and get treatment for a broken leg?” Jolene’s son finally got help in his mid-twenties as did I. That’s a long time though walking around with an untreated broken leg.

 

Had I been I mentally ill?  I had certainly been suffering, experiencing symptoms for two decades that I didn’t understand. However, when I finally learned that I had been tortured as an infant, elation was prominent among the many strong feelings I felt. I had finally discovered the missing puzzle piece to understanding my cycles of delinquency, depression, suicidal ideation, and learned helplessness. I now think of myself as having received a mental wound from the medical profession that was never identified or repaired. What resulted from this lack of treatment was PTSD, or Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, which is classified as a mental illness.

 

To further help us understand how to view these early wounds, Dr. Linda Gantt, co-developer of the Instinctual Trauma Response or ITR, “a holistic, evidence-based supported approach to full trauma resolution and recovery,” (HelpforTrauma.com), states, “Our model is that the pain is between your ears; it’s in your brain, but [this] doesn’t make that pain any less important or any less real” (Cutdown.com). There’s an injury or wound in the brain that needs healing.

 

Recently, I realized that preverbal trauma from infant surgery without anesthesia and pain control is an iatrogenic illness, a disorder which arises when “. . . the deleterious effects of the therapeutic or diagnostic regimen cause pathology independent of the condition for which the regimen is advised” (NIH, National Library of Medicine). This way of thinking about the cause of my wound is empowering and, to my mind, more accurate. It helps soothe the stigma of mental illness. Having lived over two decades with what I think of as an unrepaired injury inflicted by others softens the way I view myself and takes away some of the blame that I heaped onto myself over the years. My behaviors and feelings are finally understandable, given the circumstances.

 

Knowing the truth about what happened to me set me free. Was I crazy?  No. What was crazy was what was done to me. This way of thinking about what happened to me and to thousands of other innocent babies and families feels right.