The past three years have shown us a different side to the medical complex and what it means to us, now we know what they are capable of doing to innocent people. I can tell my story now. Maybe people will finally believe me which will be the first step to healing. I’m not crazy, I was tortured.
I had surgery as an infant at the age of 8 weeks old, on Friday the 13th in July of 1956. I didn’t remember the details but my body and my nervous system did (and still does). I got sick at 13 days old. Doctors didn’t diagnose and operate on me until I was 8 weeks old. I was fed intravenously and given a blood transfusion, both in the veins in my head before surgery. My head was shaved with two big bald circles on either side of my head, as my mother told the story. I had fire engine red hair and what little baby hair I had left now resembled a mohawk. I didn’t remember until one day not to long ago, over six decades later. Then the memories came flooding back.
My integrative cardiologist suggested to help my heart condition known as Left Bundle Branch Block to try meditation. I received a pacemaker in 2015 after I had a sudden cardiac arrest, was shocked with paddles and ultimately diagnosed with heart failure.
During meditation one day a memory came back and the details were there, enough for me to put the pieces together. I recalled a nightmare I had as a baby, while still in the crib. The drapes in my nursery were blowing in the breeze over me. It was a warm late summer day in northern Georgia. We didn’t have air conditioning back then so the windows were always open, unless it rained. In my dream those drapes represented danger. I felt my body stiffen, frozen with the memories that flooded back without warning.
I had a flashback, first to the drapes in my nursery and then I saw the hospital curtains. Those curtains fluttered just like the drapes blowing over my crib in the nursery. Behind the hospital curtains were people coming to hurt me again I thought, in my dream. I felt a scream stuck in my throat. I couldn’t scream. I experienced the trauma as though I was living through it all over again. The fear this memory brought out in me woke me from my relaxed state of my meditation. I was very shaken, confused, and a light sweat had broken out on my chest. I felt like running but I couldn’t. I was helpless. I didn’t know why, until I did some research.
CUTDOWN: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia (video)
My Fears Were Real
Then I met Fred Vanderbom. He was the sanity I needed in this upside down world I now found myself in. These memories…were they real? He had done his research too and confirmed what I suspected. When we were babies, he in 1940’s and I in the 50’s things were different. Babies under the age of 2 years old were operated on without any anesthesia, (not even a local anesthesia) nothing for pain or not enough to deaden the pain. Instead babies were given a paralytic drug so they couldn’t fight back during the surgical procedure and they couldn’t even scream.
The vocal chords didn’t work. This was my nightmare, this was the trauma I had buried deep, deep inside. Now I know why I’m always on edge, hyper vigilant as though the tiger could chase me at any time. I’ve been running from that tiger for over 60 years. Now I want to heal. I plan to write my story and learn to calm my nervous system and undo six decades of tension.
Medical Dogma
The medical establishment came to the erroneous conclusion that babies couldn’t feel pain, and even if they did, they wouldn’t remember. This established dogma was due to a faulty study that was done. This study tested babies after a mother went through labor under the “Twilight Sleep” drug, popular in the 40’s and 50’s. The babies had absorbed the drug via the umbilical chord. They wouldn’t feel the pain of a pin prick on their heel immediately following the birth while under the effects of residual anesthesia. This is blasphemous. OMG how many babies died from the trauma? How many babies have survived and are suffering still?
They knew. But the parents didn’t. One doctor, Dr. Louis Tinnin, spoke up when he realized what the doctors were doing and the implications this practice of medicine would leave from the trauma. He was the one voice for these babies at a time when the medical world was silent.
Pyloric Stenosis pre 1987
The information below was taken from the Help for Trauma Centre, which Dr. Tinnin co-founded;
After moving to West Virginia in 1979, Dr. Tinnin served as the medical director of a community mental health center. In 1984, he joined the faculty of the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at West Virginia University, serving as associate professor and professor. He began learning more about post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an area that interested few people at the time.
Some cases that Dr. Tinnin saw in medical school stayed with him his entire life. He questioned the received wisdom of older doctors who did not comprehend how invasive medical procedures without anesthesia for babies could be traumatic. These doctors assumed the child’s nervous system was too immature to feel pain and, even if the child did feel it, he or she would not remember it. His clinical observations impelled Dr. Tinnin to work out procedures for dealing with early memories that were nonverbal but resulted in long-lasting and disturbing symptoms.
In 1992, Dr. Tinnin developed a Fellowship in Psychotraumatology in conjunction with WVU and the VA Medical Center. It was then that he began doing research on how to process traumatic events without reliving them including those in infancy and childhood.
After retiring from WVU in 1996 with the rank of professor emeritus, Dr. Tinnin established his own clinics, the Trauma Recovery Institute (TRI) (1996-2006) and Intensive Trauma Therapy (ITT) (2006-present), where he refined his ideas about effective, simple, and brief trauma treatment.
Dr. Tinnin wrote a number of professional papers and made over 200 national and international presentations. He and Linda authored The Instinctual Trauma Response and Dual Brain Dynamics (2014). Although Dr. Tinnin knew his health was failing, he continued to work on several projects until two weeks before his death. He was the driving force in making the ITR™ method available in digital form for survivors and therapists alike.
Dr. Tinnin was a strong supporter of the mental health emancipation and recovery movements. He devoted his life to collaborating with other professionals and spreading the good news that trauma can be easily and effectively healed.
TO WANDA
My cousin, Wanda, (Born: February 18, 1956, Died: May 22, 1958) had surgery for a hole in her heart at the tender age of 27 months old. Did she have anesthesia? I hope she did, but I really wonder. She was three months older than I was. It’s in her memory and the memory of all the other babies who died during or after infant surgery that I share her story and mine. Wanda and all you precious babies, you are not forgotten.
The Cutoff for Cutdown?
Remember, the cut off for receiving anesthesia during infant surgery was 2 years old or 24 months until the 1980’s. Did a month or two older matter to them? What were they thinking anyway?
This practice continued until the 1980’s and was completely phased out everywhere by 1987. The torture is unfathomable, at least to me. I have lived with this suspicion throughout my life. My questions to doctors about my infant surgery were met with cold brush offs, and abrupt dismissals of the subject. They would often change the subject and avoid the discussion they didn’t want to have. They knew. The doctors always claimed that my infant surgery for pyloric stenosis had nothing to do with my current health (at the time). But they had no explanation to what caused my current health issues, all labeled “idiopathic” in my charts. They claimed they didn’t know, but they did.
I think I got too close to the truth. This was a secret that they anticipated would never get out. The parents weren’t told, the babies were too young (they thought) to remember.
Can You Process a Trauma That You Don’t Remember? (video below)
How Many Others Are There?
I met another survivor of pyloric stenosis. She was operated on in 1952. Her name is Wendy Patrice Williams and she wrote a book about her experiences with surgery for pyloric stenosis, Autobiography of a Sea Creature and she has a blog, Healing Infant Trauma.
This preverbal trauma from medical procedures includes not only infant surgeries but also circumcisions done without even a local anesthetic. This was why I refrained from having my son go through this procedure in 1988 before we were discharged from the hospital. When I asked if any anesthetic was given, even local, I was told none is used even in the late 80’s. I said no and took my baby home.
Who knows when they started doing this but they were forced to stop doing invasive surgery without anesthesia in the 1980’s because a mother wanted answers. Her premature son died after undergoing heart surgery. She got access to his records. She brought this evil out into the light of day.
Our daughter also had surgery for pyloric stenosis when she was one month old. We met with the anesthesiologist and discussed with him my husband’s issues in the past with ether. However, I witnessed a cutdown they did on her ankle. I heard her screams through the wall next to where I was standing. That wall separated the procedure room and the room where I waited. I was livid. As a mother I felt her pain but as a survivor of this same torture I was gutted. I was helpless to do anything at that time. She needed the surgery, I had to bury the shock I felt.
Crazy?
If I had told someone my story previous to the world waking up, I would have been called crazy! People would look at me like I had three heads and say, “they wouldn’t do that, especially babies!” with an incredulous tone of voice, if I told them. I wish I were wrong. But they did and they still do, in other ways.
Currently there is a law being presented to the legislature which makes it legal to kill babies up to 28 days old, as an extension of abortion laws/rights in the state of California. What about the babies rights? What about adoption? Are you insane?
What has happened to humanity? Even animals are kinder to their young. This MUST stop.
1Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. 2It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. 3So watch yourselves. — Luke 17:103 (NIV)
For Survivors of Preverbal Trauma (video below)
Don’t lose hope. Miracles DO exist. Keep praying. The movie Miracles from Heaven is one such miracle and it’s a true story.