If – instead of having my tonsils
and adenoids removed in 1948 –
I had been given TRT (alias ART).
I might have gained the energy,
stamina, muscles and memory
that other boys had, and which,
in my case, have diminished more
and more with my advancing years...
...might not have had a shut-down
for a decade...might not have been
a slow-on-the-uptake slow thinker...
might not now have brain-fog,
high blood pressure & cholesterol,
a Pacemaker, fatigue, poor balance,
deafness and ringing in my ears.
I have no pain whatever, it must be said.
I'm sometimes just a bit lame.
No way will I die in a hospital bed.
4 comments:
Dear Anthony,
"a shut-down for a decade" does sound worrisome. Was that during your childhood adolescence alone due to the adenoidectomy?
Dear David,
No, probably not. I have a feeling that the 'missing year' of my life might have been at least as influential. The 10 year shut-down was from 8 to 18, when I was sent to a fee-paying school (at great privation to my mother who was a primary schoolteacher). For those 10 years I was enveloped in a 'fog of unknowing'.
But before that, here are 11 months of my first year of life unaccounted for. I was born at a Home for Unmarried Mothers in Wokingham in 1941. Almost a year later I was adopted by my mother, then in the WAAF, and brought to her mother and sister in Belfast.
Although I knew from an early age that I had been adopted, I was 40 before I discovered that I had been adopted by my mother. Neither the identity of my father nor my whereabouts after I was born were ever revealed.
I became A Problem Child, reclusive, with outbursts of rage, and a lot of head-banging, and still have behavioural characteristics which were described by Dr Asperger two years after I was born. Some of them have intensified with 'old age'. (I am now 84.)
Anthony Weir
18 rue de Lifernet
82160 Caylus
France.
Now deaf: whatsapp & SMS: 0033-673-31-95-63
PS An awful lot of people are shut down (by religion, education, maltreatment) for their entire lives.
PS I should also add that as soon as I was sent to the all-boys, bullying-teachers 'preparatory school' called Cabin Hill, I developed a stammer, which took some years to suppress, though it resurfaces in times of stress.
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