Why does this sound like a bad children’s book?
Trauma?
Yes. Trauma!
I recently read two books about trauma: The Body Keeps the Score and What Happened to You. Oprah Winfrey actually plays a huge part in What Happened to You, so that’s kind of cool. Anyways, reading those books convinced me that more people have experienced trauma than most of us realize. My attempt to summarize the definition of trauma is this: Trauma is the after effects from a person experiencing a very distressing event that the person did not have the power to control or stop.
Trauma is obviously not just experiencing a stressful event!
It sort of is though. If a baby is hungry, it cries to get the attention of someone with the power to do something. If the parents are instead neglectful, they will not come to the baby’s aide very often. This will likely cause the baby to grow up traumatized. The baby had no power to stop the stress of being hungry on their own. The people that are supposed to love the child and help them the most (the parents) simply did not.
To the baby, no one will ever help them, so the world and people in it must be cruel. Self-reliance becomes the key to survival. The baby will grow up acting out and not trusting anybody that tries to help them. To this child, people will only hurt them like their parents did. And no, babies and children do not forget. In fact, the things that happen at a young age, when their brain development and learning experiences are exponentially growing, are the most impactful.
People always think that humans can get through traumatic events unscathed. It won’t have any long term impacts, right? We just move along with our lives, don’t we? Wrong. Everything that happens to a person, child or not, has an impact on that person. The bigger the event, the bigger the impact.
Okay sure I get it. Get back to the cancer stuff though.
Alright I will. Trauma comes into play in my life in a lot of different ways. When I was 6 years old in kindergarten, I was diagnosed with ALL or Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. It is a cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow. I have the most random vivid pockets of memory during this time, but I largely do not remember most of it.
Were you traumatized?
Yeah probably. I was a 6 year old that lost his hair, missed a ton of school, felt like shit, and received chemotherapy. In a 6 year old’s brain, they definitely notice that they are the only one of their classmates going through this experience. It is a stressful and painful situation that the child (me) can’t control and no one can stop it or even explain why it is happening. What do I think I learned from this trauma?
Answer: Bad stuff happens, and it happens specifically to me. That’s probably not the right lesson to learn, but that was the only way 6 year-old-me could explain it. Also, I learned that to survive a stressful ongoing situation, I must dissociate rather than be present in the moment. It explains why I don’t remember much of the experience. This dissociation that I learned during my own cancer experiences has given me a pretty constant inner monologue.
My treatment spanned from the end of kindergarten through the summer and into the beginning of first grade. I was then homeschooled about the first two months of first grade because I was still too sick. After the main treatment ended, I went into the oncology clinic three times a week for more chemotherapy shots and frequent spinal taps. Over the next three years my clinic visits became less frequent, I got healthier, and I had decided that I wanted to play on my school’s football team the next year!
I also spent those three years acting out at school. Teachers had a really hard time getting me to pay attention or follow directions. Focus was a huge issue for me, and teachers worked with my parents and me to help get my act together. I got into fights at school and never sat still during class. Safe to say, I was a difficult kid and a trouble maker after my treatment. My guess at explaining my behavior is that I had a lot of pent up anger and frustration at the world, and I had issues with focus thanks to my cancer survival strategy of dissociating. In other words, I was traumatized. It turns out that the trauma survival tactics that people learn (dissociating, not trusting other people, etc.) stick with them as learned behaviors throughout their life.
Damn that sucks.
The suck doesn’t stop there unfortunately. At the end of third grade, things weren’t going quite right with me. I was getting sick very frequently and weird injuries kept popping up. During a baseball game when I was at bat, I swung at a ball and made contact. The reverberation from the bat shot up my arm and gave me horrible nerve pain for weeks. My parents obviously assumed I was having normal sicknesses and injuries of a third grader.
Around that time, I had my very last appointment at the oncology clinic. The doctors were going to do the final tests and give me a clean bill of health, and I would not have to go back ever again! For a child that also lived a double life as a cancer survivor, it was a very big deal for me, and I was elated.
As part of their protocol for sending little ALL survivors on their way, they had to do a bone marrow biopsy on me. The bone marrow biopsy felt like a slightly more intense spinal tap, nothing I hadn’t experienced before. As my mom and I are in the clinic room waiting for the results to tell us all clear so we can skedaddle, the oncologist came in to break the news that I relapsed. The cancer was back.
This kind of feels like a weird spot to stop for now, but I want to pick this up again on my next blog post. I’m still so early in this blogging journey but thanks for reading!