Introduction
Welcome!
This is the next post in my ongoing series of autobiographical stories. TW: this post deals with the physical abuse of minors and descriptions of medical trauma. Reader discretion is advised.
Readers Are Leaders
Growing up, my dad read to me often and even made up his own stories. As a result, I’m a lifelong reader and bibliophile. However, today I’m going to talk about a time when the library became a source of pain and horror for me. I’d just turned six years old, and my class went to our school’s library for the first time.
For legal reasons, I’ll refer to the librarian involved in this story as Mr. M.
I’d taken my seat when the boy next to me kicked me. I kicked him back and Mr. M told us to knock it off. A few minutes passed when the boy kicked me again. I kicked him back and the next thing I knew, Mr. M pulled me out of my seat and threw me headfirst into a bookshelf. I remember him pulling me from my seat and throwing me, then being pulled backward, but the impact is a blank.
Then he made me stand with my arms out like Jesus on the cross for the rest of the hour. In the days after he assaulted me, I didn’t remember anything of it, but luckily a neighbor girl who lived up the street from us saw the whole thing and told my parents.
The school started an investigation but allowed Mr. M to continue working.
The next week, while my class went to the library, I stayed behind and had my first seizure. My parents took me to the hospital and after running tests, they diagnosed me with epilepsy and after an MRI they found a cystic mass above my right temporal lobe at the site of the impact.
They started me on antiseizure meds and scheduled surgery to remove the mass, but a week before surgery I caught strep throat and the doctors prescribed me penicillin, even though my parents told them penicillin allergies ran on both sides of the family.
This was back in the early ‘90s when the only insurance we had was Medicaid, so they forced us to go to the doctors they assigned us. Said doctors told my parents not to worry, and they listened to them.
They shouldn’t have.
A Year-And-A-Half of Hell
The combination of antiseizure meds and penicillin triggered the first and most severe allergic reaction of my life: Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN, NSFW pictures in link). Initially, I developed a red blotchy rash and flu-like symptoms. My parents took me back to the doctors, who said there was nothing wrong with me.
But I only got worse as the days passed.
Week after week, my dad kept taking me to them, only to be told I was fine while I got weaker, and my fever soared.
Two months into this, I ran a fever of 103-104F and not even an ice bath could break it, so at my Uncle Stanley’s suggestion, my parents took me to Children’s Hospital in Detroit.
Within five minutes, they’d diagnosed me with Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS, a less severe form of TEN). The next thing the ER docs did was cover me in icepacks to break my fever. It worked, but the sudden change in body temperature caused me to go into shock and I flatlined.
What I remember most from the time I was clinically dead is the absolute silence and darkness I found myself in, the utter nothingness. I later learned it took them over forty-five minutes to get a stable pulse, but to me, it seemed like only seconds had passed.
When you get defibrillated, it feels like being slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. And when your heart doesn’t restart, you gain momentary consciousness until the charge dissipates.
Then it’s back to nothingness.
Once they stabilized me and took me to the ICU, they started me on a new antiseizure med that made me hallucinate a giant spider was trying to eat me. I tore my bedding to shreds trying to get away from it and that sparked a lifelong aversion to spiders.
False Hope
I spent the next three months in the ICU and appeared to get better, so they moved me to a regular room, then released me the week before Christmas.
Everyone at my dad’s job pitched in to buy me presents, including the brand-new Game Boy, all of which my roommate stole while I was at a magic show the hospital put on.
A week after being released, I started having breathing problems and my parents rushed me back to the ER.
Over the coming weeks my breathing got worse and my skin began to peal, until I’d eventually lost over eighty percent of my epidermis and had damage to my lungs and windpipe. I had to be put on a vent and slipped into a coma for six months.
Rude Awakenings
I came to a few days before my seventh birthday, which we celebrated in the ICU with an Oreo ice cream cake. But the vent tube was the only thing holding things in place, so when they removed it, my air way collapsed, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy.
When I regained consciousness three weeks later, I now had a breathing tube and I couldn’t talk well, as my vocal cords had accidentally been severed, rendering me effectively mute.
Because of the length of my coma, I had to relearn how to walk and how to communicate. I spent months in rehab and months more waiting for my parents to complete training how to take care of me.
Those first months were the hardest as I was full of displaced anger and lashed out at everyone, blaming them for what happened to me. Then I turned that anger inward, viewing what happened to me as divine retribution for my deviant sexuality (a tale for another time).
A New Beginning
When I finally went home for good, they homeschooled me for a while; a private tutor came to our house once a week and spent most of her time grading my work and didn’t teach me much of anything.
After a few months of this, I started third grade at a school for kids with disabilities like mine. Being the new kid and not being able to talk well made school a living hell. I kept to myself as the other kids didn’t want to work with me, and they would glare daggers at me whenever our teacher made them work with me.
And so my life settled into a pattern: I’d get sick and go into the hospital for a few months at a time, come out, have surgeries on my airway only for them to fail, rinse, repeat. I had anger issues for years and acted out by destroying things and getting into fights with my younger siblings.
Again, it being the ‘90s, my parents didn’t put me into therapy and instead beat my ass with a thick brown leather belt. And when that ceased to make me behave, they’d threatened to relinquish to the state, which gave me abandonment and intimacy issues that I’m still working through today.
As for Mr. M? My parents sued him, and it came to light he’d abused two other students, breaking one’s arm and the other’s leg. They fired him from his job and he lost his limo business.
And the doctors responsible for my allergic reaction? When I was 12 my parents settled a malpractice lawsuit with them out of court for an undisclosed amount.
I’ve led quite the life for one not even forty. I still have my breathing tube, and while there have been talks of trying to reverse it, right now I’m content with the status quo. Medical technology has advanced a lot since my initial reaction. Who knows?
Maybe I’ll get rid of it yet.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading and let me know if you want more of these stories.
What early childhood events have shaped you? How did you react?
Let me know in the comments.
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