The Correction

The Correction

When I was aged 6½ I was scheduled for a Sternotomy, also known as open heart surgery. Since the odds of me not making it through were high, and the doctors didn’t want to cause my mother to have
a repeat miscarriage, the surgery was scheduled after the birth of my youngest brother. I must have known enough to be scared because when it came time, I had a cold. My mother believed that it was a fake cough to get out of the surgery. Whichever it was, the surgery was rescheduled and then when an earlier opening became available, she scheduled it without telling me so that I would not have time to create another cold. We just went to a regular appointment and I was admitted.

Being young, I only have a few memories of that time. I remember being alone a lot. Having five children at home, life had to go on without me. I remember being in a crib. Over the end of the crib hung a net bag that held all the toys that had been provided by my mom. My only memory of the kinds of toys was an Etch-A-Sketch. Then I had the surgery.

I remember an out-of-body experience in the operating room. I was floating up high, looking down at myself and the doctors as they worked. My next memory is of me waking up in the Recovery Room and lying naked, except for a tea towel over my body, and being cold because there was a window open. I woke up with an oxygen mask on my face and was terrified and tried to pull the mask off. As I passed in and out of consciousness, I recall my mother and Dolores talking about a thirteen year old boy who had had the same surgery but had died in the bed next to mine. As I grew older, I realized that the trauma of the experience had caused me to forget much of my early childhood memories.

I just remember being alone. I sat alone on the porch while my siblings and neighborhood friends played and rode their bicycles. After a neighborhood kid hit me and caused my incision to bleed, I was relegated to watching through a window. Even when I was healed, I was still alone. The fact that I didn’t start school until the second grade, left me unprepared to enter the social situations of school. The most embarrassing classroom incident was my falling asleep and peeing my pants.

I was alone at home too. I had been such a terror when I was younger, my siblings turned the table and did the same to me. Being left alone while mom worked opened up opportunities for them to terrorize me. One trick was for the older two to tell the youngest child to kick me and when I hit him back, they
had their opportunity to protect him by beating me up. They had learned that from my step-father who used the trick on my mom.

I had already learned mistrust. My father would let me cuddle up to him and when I was comfortable and secure he would bite me on the arm. After a while I learned that no one but my mother could be trusted and she was never home. The lack of social skills and mistrust caused me to sit in the corner, keep quiet, listen, and never put myself forward to be hurt. As a teenager, the pain of loneliness overwhelmed me and I couldn’t believe that there was a purpose for my life. At the age of thirteen, I tried to commit suicide.

The Beginning

The Beginning

My mother states that my beginning came about by Acquaintance Rape. (It is interesting how she ended up having two other children with him.)

My mother has also stated that my birth defects were the doing of the same man who threw her down a flight of stairs while she was pregnant. There were no other facts shared by my mother regarding the pregnancy, except to say that at birth I was so weak that the doctors had to break the water bag and pull me out with forceps.

Everything seemed to go along as usual until at about five months old, I turned blue while I was crying and then my eyes rolled up into my head and I lost consciousness. I have to say that although I had much deserved anger regarding my mother and the way she had, or had not, raised me and the events that followed, I have to honestly give her props for the care that she and my godmother, Dolores, took care of me.

I was my mother’s third child and I realize it could not have been easy, regardless of how we all came to this situation. At that time, my mother shared an apartment in San Francisco with her best friend Dolores and Dolores’s mother Nellie.

Six months before I was born, Dolores had had a baby boy that only lived five days. My mother, Dolores, and Nellie took constant care of me. I was not allowed to cry. The three of them would take turns holding me. I would be rocked to sleep and held until I awoke. They were so worried that I would wake up and cry that they would just lie still while I slept, instead of putting me in my bed. When I had a spell, turned blue, my mother would stimulate my heart by rubbing whiskey on my gums. This was the extent of cardiac wisdom of the fifties. To say I was spoiled would be an understatement. I was adored by Dolores and Nellie, perfunctorily cared for by my mother, and disliked by my siblings because of the things I was able to get away with that they couldn’t. I couldn’t be spanked.  

My mother tells the story of a time when she was taking the younger kids to Tiny Tots, run by the park and recreation people, which was the extent of preschool in the sixties. She would walk us down a steep hill to the park. That was no harder than controlling four children, a stroller, and gravity at the same time. Coming up the hill was much harder when she had to wheel me up the hill in the stroller while the younger children had to walk. My mom got many a sharp look from passersby. Not only was dragging children around difficult, she had to do it on the San Francisco bus system to get me to my cardiology appointments across town.

I was eighteen months when I had my first surgery. It was called a Blaylock-Tausig Shunt. That worked well until my body grew too big for my weak heart to provide the normal functions of a child. I would go out to play with my siblings and a neighbor would run home with me, being unconscious and blue, to my mother. I was able to go to Kindergarten for a while when my mother had a car. When the car was no longer available, neither was school. So, I sat home with my younger siblings and my mom. I couldn’t play so I stayed by my mother’s side and listened to all the conversations of her coffee klatch. The good girl, whose life was spent vying for the love of her Mommy.

My Story

My name is Dolores and I live life with a different point of view.

I am a fifty-four year old woman who is sitting in the hospital, waiting for a heart. How did this happen? I was born with a congenital heart disease called Tetrology of Fallot. I had two surgeries in my childhood and lived what was considered a normal life which included marriage and children. The only remnant was a murmur due to stenosis in the Pulmonic Valve. In 2006, I came down with Tachycardia. After the tests done by the Cardiac Interventionist, it was discovered that my heart was damaged with what is called a Dilated Cardiomyopathy and that it had been caused by the Pulmonic Stenosis. Over the years, my heart had to work harder than normal to keep my body running. At this point, I would need an Implantable Cardioverter Device. The device was implanted and I went on with my life. Slowly, my heart deteriorated and each time I consulted the Cardiologist who did more tests and prescribed different heart drugs. In 2012, I had deteriorated so badly that I could no longer work. When the Cardiologist put me off work, he referred me to the Heart Transplant Team. I saw them the next month and it was decided that it was time to get a new heart.