Blog, Heal, Teach–Feedback and Photos

Just want to share some feedback from  two of the participants in my workshop Blog, Heal, Teach at the Carver College of Medicine in Iowa and some photos. This response is from Dr. David G. Thoele: I really enjoyed this presentation and am now filled with ideas for starting my own blog in the future. Wendy [...]

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Normal!

Yesterday, I had a mud bath at a spa in Calistoga, California. I lay in the clay, peat moss, and 104 degree mineral water for ten minutes, rinsed, and lay wrapped in a warm blanket in a dark room–a cocoon of sorts–for a half hour. As I relaxed, I realized it was a good time [...]

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Pinched, Twisted, Stitched

After meditation today, these questions came to me:  Who were those nurses who took care of me during my health crisis as an infant? What were their thoughts and prayers as they cared for me?  What could they tell me now about my infant self that would help me understand my challenges?  Had they seen me [...]

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On the Right Track for Meditation

Each morning before meditation, I read inspirational material to set my mind on the right track. Lately, I’ve been re-reading Marianne Williamson’s book A Return to Love. Because of old somatic patterns linked to my infant surgery and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I have a lot of resistance to sitting still in peace, allowing my soul to [...]

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Thank you, Surviving Infant Surgery blog (SIS)

I am extremely grateful to Fred Vanderbom, blogger at http://survivinginfantsurgery.wordpress.com. He continues to offer top notch information to those of us whose lives have been impacted by infant surgery. By researching medical articles on this topic in the US, Europe, Canada and around the world and interpreting this material for the lay person, he offers [...]

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A Great Article about Infant Surgery!

Just want to give a shout out about Terry T. Monell’s article “Living Out the Past: Infant Surgery Prior to 1987,” which discusses the history of infant surgery without anesthesia and details the trauma that many of us still live with. Even though Ms. Monell’s article contains many medical terms, I found it easy to [...]

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2 poems

Post PTS Me Will the real me please stand up! No, not that hypervigilant rabbit. The real Wendy No, not that self-effacing nobody. The real Wendy Not the one who reaches out to others in learned helplessness. Where is Wendy free of trauma? Is there such a one? Can I ever truly know me, sans [...]

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The Mystery of the Missing Information

I feel my heart rate increasing, like a detective getting closer to the whereabouts of the culprit—the current way in which the chemistry of my brain works due to the trauma of infant surgery without anesthesia. I just read a paper entitled, “Working with the Neurobiological Legacy of Early Trauma” by Dr. Janina Fisher, a [...]

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To Form a Question

Sometimes, in order to ask a question one needs vocabulary–amygdala, neurobiology, the biochemistry of trauma–phrases that position tongue in mouth. Sometimes, exposure to an idea must be repeated before one can edge to the lip of the platform and sail off into the water below. Again and again, we step to the ledge, pause, wait, [...]

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Understanding Infant Surgery: Explaining Ourselves to Ourselves

I’ve been listening to an Audio Course “Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality” in which Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a scientist from Stanford University, discusses some of the latest discoveries in neurobiology. In the lecture about two nuerons (brain cells) communicating, he said that Curare (the drug that was typically used in the [...]

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