Trauma for a tween

The Haunted look in my eyes said it all...

I remember back to my childhood with fondness at times but as I turn the camera angle around in my memory and focus on myself that fondness slips away because I see all the hurt and damage in that little girl's eyes and I see the very reason for it is evident on her face.

Her features too small to have such a 'stand-out' abnormality, her personality not big enough to withstand the attacks against her, she isn't strong enough to cope, not really; but she has no choice; so she carries on regardless of the emotional agony that ignites inside of her, burning her from the inside out, leaving scar tissue, invisible to everyone else but it is there under the surface and it will never heal.

Before the illness took over she was a normal little girl; I was a normal little girl, I didn't have the weight of the world on my shoulders for a start. I would run with pure delight towards the playground with my sister, make up games with my friends in the street where we lived; I had an amazing imagination.

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."

Graham Greene

I loved playing with my baby dolls, playing with flower fairies, toy cars and my garage, I loved to climb trees, throw sticks as far into the branches as possible in an attempt to dislodge conkers and have them raining down onto the grass at our feet, I loved watching Saturday morning television, having bedtime stories read to me by my dad from my big green fairy-tale book. I was an ordinary child, living an ordinary life. Yes I was poorly quite often, I had childhood asthma and was in and out of hospital for one reason or another but I was 'normal' and then I wasn't.

After I turned seven - when it started

It was nothing at first, I wasn't a particularly vain kid, I loved rough and tumble not makeup and nail varnish. Some sores and swelling on my face and mouth didn't mean the end of the world to me; little did I realize that is exactly what it signified, well the end of the world as I knew it anyway.

When your life hits a curve in the road and you kind of swing around to follow said curve without flying off road and crashing headlong into a tree or a lamp-post, well you skid and slide and go wildly out of control. Panicking, gripping the wheel trying desperately to get some traction, to feel like you are are going to be okay, that if you just go with the flow the road will straighten out again and you'll be alright, I'm still waiting for that straight stretch of road, my head still spins with the speed and uncertainty, I just want to stop still, I want it to end.  

The day my mouth leaked...

Yes I m sure that subheading sounds ominous, confusing, rather disgusting lol, and yes the actual event I am referring to was all of those things in itself. I was only young but my mouth had been troublesome for some time now and the swelling was there as a permanent fixture. I had become quite withdrawn, not the bubbly personality I once was.

I'd been feeling very unwell and was upstairs in my room as I recall, lolling about on my bed as my mum would say. My bottom lip had become painfully swollen to the extreme on one side, it was very red and angry looking. I went downstairs complaining that it was hurting and a sort of small hole had appeared in the side of my lip; green looking thick liquid was oozing out.

Dad grabbed tissues and started trying to clean me up but no matter how much he mopped at it more of the vile stuff would appear, it was a never ending stream of what looked like infection. It was disgusting and was turning my poor little stomach. Not to mention that I was feverish and felt very unwell, then there was the pain, the leaking fluid... I was certainly not having a good time of it at all.

It refused to subside, in fact it started coming thicker, literally, and faster, we now had piles of tissue filled grotesquely with the stuff and I was freaking out. Mum and Dad decided enough was enough and they called my doctor at the hospital. I had been referred by this stage, as I have stated in a previous post, but as of yet had no diagnosis. 

We were told to go into clinic straight away, the doctor advised us that it was indeed infection that was leaking out and that they needed to remove it urgently. What he did next was horrific to a child sat in a an over-sized 'dentist type' chair, gripping the hand-rests, terrified; he grabbed a syringe with a needle that was at least a few inches long and told me to be brave...

To a child the sight of a needle is a terrifying thing...

There was no time to numb my mouth, the needle would hurt anyway just to do that, I had to grit my teeth and put up with the fear and the pain as he syringed the infection out of my lip, inserting the needle numerous times across my mouth. I was sitting in that chair with silent tears streaming down my face but I didn't cry out, and I didn't ask him to stop; I knew I had no option but to go through the trauma.

Take a second now and just gently bite on your lower lip; if you were daring/daft enough to partake in that little experiment you will realize how sensitive your lips are, now imagine a syringe being injected into your lips, deep under the skin of them, right into the flesh and withdrawing infection. It was a horrific and painful experience. I am 34-years-old now and I still have not forgotten it.

When I look back and see that little girl sitting there having that procedure carried out my heart goes out to her; she went through so much and that wasn't even the half of it!