2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,900 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people. Click here to [...]

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I Have to Keep Pinching Myself

I don’t know for sure whether I was given anesthesia for my pyloric stenosis surgery at 26 days old. I don’t know for sure that I was, instead, given  a form of curare, a drug that paralyzed my muscles so I wouldn’t fight. My hospital records are gone, kaput. I just know that: –I wake [...]

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Doctor Starts Blog about Infant Surgery Without Anesthesia

Anyone now 23 years or older who had major surgery as a baby is at risk for chronic posttraumatic illness . . . When I saw Dr. Louis Tinnin’s new blog, I literally wept. He and a team of psychologists who run Intensive Trauma Therapy, Inc. (ITT), a program in Morgantown, West Virginia, are acknowledging [...]

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Quotes I Like

“The solution to the destructiveness in this world is not more technical knowledge. Repairing the world may require us to find a deep connection to the life around us, to substitute the capacity to befriend life for our relentless pursuit of greater and greater expertise.” –  Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings “A radical new [...]

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What Turquoise Knows

Recently, I leaned a water color that I painted in 1978 against a stack of books. I had no idea what the image in the picture meant but was open to finding out. Over a few days’ time, the meaning unfolded. Yellow is fear; breathing is frightening. The lungs are on alert. My scar—the horizontal lines [...]

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I am safe, I am worthy

These are the two affirmations that are helping me lately.  I am safe (my body will not explode; it will not hurt me). I am worthy (I was worth being saved;  I am welcome in this world).   The other day as I left the gym, I noticed the tape on my car holding the fender [...]

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Visiting Humanities 13A

Today I had the privilege of delivering a short talk about my memoir manuscript, The Autobiography of a Sea Creature, to Professor Dylan Eret’s Humanities 13A: Myth, Symbols and Folklore class at the College of Alameda in Alameda, California. As homework, the class had read my memoir manuscript excerpts on this blog and posted some [...]

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A small price

Here’s the latest–a quick note–on my ongoing journey in accepting, embracing, cherishing, and celebrating this female body I was given. Today, standing in my shower and leaning over so the hot water could blast onto my back, I noticed my scar. It was scrunched into the length of an inch instead of three. A small [...]

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Too Scared to Cry

by Dr. Lenore Terr is this amazing book about childhood trauma. I heard about it at the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop summer 2008 at Sarah Lawrence College. It’s the story of these school children from Chowchilla, California who were kidnapped and then forced to climb down into the hull of a bus buried in [...]

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another solution?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that surgery for pyloric stenosis seems to be the most viable option for infants afflicted with this problem. Certainly, surgery saved my life. I weighed four pounds at the time of the operation; in fact, the doctors couldn’t wait for my mother to arrive the next [...]

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