My New Year Ramblings

 

They are very much tied into one another, the flashes I get when I was little and in and out of a hospital for what turned out to be my appendix being inflamed but twisted with the swollen end hidden from imaging. Three hospital visits starting with a rush to an emergency room. It was that last one when the surgeon decided to do an exploratory surgery which found the culprit organ, leaving me with peritonitis, it almost killed me. 

But - 

It was that trek to the er I remember most. The man who carried me down the stairs to my dad warming up a cold engine and brushing snow off the car - our neighbor. The very same one who had been grabbing at me whenever he could. My skin crawled and I couldn't run.

I wonder about those days, had I not been sick so much and home alone would any of that had happened? Would life been different? I was vulnerable as a sick kid, and as a kid who was being molested. All at once at the same time. To remember one without the other is near to impossible. Considering I am going through a lot medical wise now with that Ehler Danlos Syndrome going undiagnosed all my life, well, yeah -I am remembering - both. 

Yes, it is why I did so much on the Midwest Child Exploitation series, my thoughts also played out in the Pigtail Monster saga along with Lior's Eyes and Asha's Beginnings.  I cried like a baby doing those lullabies, especially the ones featuring the winged zebra. 

I think those tears came so easily because of the two sets of trauma colliding so much back when I was a kid, and me lying awake in a hospital bed not understanding any of it. 

With that, this year I do have a goal of collecting zebras and somehow getting wings on them and into the hands of children and other patients who need to be seen. 

I think that is part of it - when I was a kid going through all of that, I really wasn't seen. I was the youngest by many years and it was assumed I was spoiled. All conversations started with that as a basis. Unfortunately, the ones who did see me, the real me, ended up being the ones who did more damage. I wish I could stop CSA but I can't however I can let a kid in a hospital bed going through the ups and downs of being a medical mystery know that they are seen. Maybe giving a kid that will make them less a target for other things to enter and perhaps educate the adults around them at the same time...

I don't know, but that's my thought process on it all. 

It's vile what happened to me and so many others as a kid. I am learning others knew and said nothing, actually withheld information and gaslit me, that -well ..... 

So, yeah - zebras will be getting my attention. Not sure how but somehow it will happen. 

My New Year ramblings...

Free form tonight- there will be typos.