WHO IS THE CHILD?

A little girl in the dream is laying on an operating table, her head is bound with bandages and she is picking cherries in a bowl. A nurse hovers over her. A clock with a light and a dark side is above them. A man with pinch nose spectacles points his finger in the air. He appears to be joking. Two small boys sit on a bench. A young girl looks away from the scene, but places her hand on a plate on the table. A tree is in the background.

I never knew who these people were when I had this dream and made a painting of it. Only many years later, drawing at a surgical procedure to open up the skull of an infant, did the memory of my own five operations come into my awareness. I had double mastoids as a three and a half year old. It was at a time in medical history, before penicillin and before we knew how much ether to give a child and we did not give very much. A child who is very, very ill does not have the stamina to cry, even in severe pain. I realized that these people are my family and that is I on the table and again as an older girl, not remembering.

I wonder if a magnet had pulled me back to this primary trauma. I had audited medical school, followed a residency and now was making an art book about an entire medical center. I had attached to the surgery department which has characteristics similar to print making, from general surgery, to gravitate to plastic and then to pediatric neurosurgery and plastic cranial/facial reconstruction surgery. The first procedure was a Cruzon’s disease and then the second procedure was to enlarge the space for the skull of an infant, who was legally blind and damaged mentally. The bones had closed too soon, causing pressure n the brain and stopping the brain from growing. They were sawed apart, and struts made of chiseled bone from the back of the skull, and then the skull cap was replaced.

The jostling, the very large surgeon leaning way back with his hammer and banging the chisel made a terrible impact on the baby. I muttered, "One could do studies on the damage to the brain with such a force." I was answered with, "We are already doing that." I put down my pen. Surgery has the feeling of a dream for me. The cloistered medical world, with the ramp into the building from the parking garage, the elevator to the level of the operating rooms in the hospital, the buzzed entrance door to the changing room, the taking off of worldly garments, the covering of oneself with special coverings, hair net and paper shoe covers careful attention to sterility, not touching the field. Then only those in the operating room who offer special usefulness to the procedure are allowed there. Likewise there are no extra people in the dream. We have to go to sleep to have a dream and we never really know what we will find in either case, in the dream and in the opened body on the table. The high drama of this audacity, of doing things on another human being that we would not have permission to do outside of the operating room , cutting, or like in a bed, going inside another’s body, all happen in this inner sanctum.

Anyhow, a few minutes later, something seemed to pop inside of me. A few days later, I realized that I had witnessed as an adult a procedure that I had sustained as a child. It was noise that revived the memories. Much bone was taken out of my skull behind my two ears, as was in this infant on the table in the procedure to make struts. I had been in this same hospital for six months and was supposed to die. (My older brother was very disappointed that I did not!) Then I trembled, I wondered if it was as though over all these years, all my travels had brought me as an adult to witness this scene, for which I had had no feeling memory.

I was told that I had dug my fingers into my Mother’s palm, the pain was so great. The traces of the trauma are seen with my attitude today. "After almost dying, is any worldly failure important, as important as living?" The illness came at a time when a child naturally would become independent and because of it, I had regressed. Now sometimes it is hard for me to feel rejection and I bounce from staying with a project long enough to finish it, to other projects which are "more important" traditionally or dutifully, but less to my heart. When I started graduate school, the professor asked me simply, "What would you like to do?" I knew he meant well, but no body had ever asked me that before.