What It’s Like to Be Possessed: (Part 1 of 2)
The Trauma and Medical Mystery of Seeing the World Through the Eyes of ‘Something Else’
You’re never getting out of here.
That’s what it told me on the second day of my hospitalization — the day I realized I wasn’t going to be going home.
Only, the voice that was beginning its insidious reign of terror inside my brain wasn’t the cinematic growl of some twisted demon.
It was masquerading as my own.
It was the onset of the darkest period I’d ever faced in my thirty-something years.
It was the night that it realized there was strength in numbers; the night that it began to understand that they could collectively hold my body hostage; the night that its tens of millions of minuscule minions reached a level of synchronization that produced its own consciousness… which, in turn, overtook my own.
We like it in this place, it said to me.
Your body is now ours for the taking.
To be true to the roots of any story, one would have to go back to the very beginning. That well-spring was planted all the way back in June of 1980, and after three years of struggling to conceive, my mother brought me into the world on March 12, 1981.
While reminiscing, Mutti (the German word for ‘Mom’) often muses: “You were such a perfect baby from the start. You had those big blue eyes, and you didn’t even cry! You just mewled like a kitten while I held you in my arms.”
I had inherited those blue eyes from my father, a US Army soldier of mixed African-American descent. (They were so striking that it was said to be the first thing the doctor scribbled in my medical file: “Look at those eyes!”) Like many things in my life, those blue eyes would eventually leave me and by the time I was one, their color became amber.
Early on, my parents divorced. Thereafter, my broken-hearted Mutti stole me away and brought me back to her parents in Germany, the place of our birth and our intricately-woven family tree. I would have been about four at the time.
Sometimes, I think back on those early years while pouring water into the tea-kettle. Most likely, it is oolong tea; that’s what seems to stimulate my creative neurons and makes it easier for me to write.
In the beginning, my mother gave up everything. Having fallen hard and fast for my father — whom my grandmother instinctively knew was not the right one — Mutti went against her mother’s advice to sign a marriage agreement (overseen by her father) and became a wife at the age of 17. In order to live with my father in the States, she had to go through the process of becoming a naturalized US citizen, while simultaneously learning the English language.
Realizing that the life she had longed for would never be what it was, Mutti took me way from my father and fled. I will always thank her for that; she did the best she could with what little she had at the time.
And so began my life in Deutschland as a German-born child with American citizenship. I could speak both English and German flawlessly. I inherited my Bavarian roots from Mutti while also gifted with my father’s coarse hair and Mutti’s golden skin — a gift from her own biological father. All that we know of him is that he was a Spanish-Speaking American soldier with Puerto Rican descent. Beyond that, my grandmother never spoke of him, and Mutti and I respectfully followed her lead.
Eventually, my mother would marry again, this time to a man who had graduated from West Point and was an American Army Lieutenant. She would go on to have two daughters with him, and at the age of nine my parents, sisters and I moved to the United States to live permanently.
As we would eventually discover, not all was necessarily well while I was resting in my mother’s womb.
For whatever weird idiopathic reason, my kidneys didn’t develop properly and instead formed a curved ring shape that is sometimes known in the medical jargon as “super-kidney”, “horseshoe kidney”, or renal fusion. I wouldn’t find this out until I was in my mid-twenties and visited a urologist for a common urinary tract infection; the physician pointed out that he’d seen it on my CT scan, but thankfully the kidney hasn’t caused me any real problems.
The more pressing aggressor in my young life wouldn’t show up until I was about eight years old. I was still in Germany at the time, attending an elementary school in Gießen for the children of military families, and one day there was a scoliosis screening program.
The little girls were asked to remove their shirts so they could be examined behind a curtain for privacy. When my turn came, the screener carefully felt my vertebrae and then paused. That much I remember as if it were yesterday. After a moment of non-encouraging silence, she traced my vertebrae again and then wrote something on a clip-board before conferring quietly with a nurse. Once the exam was done we were sent home, and as far as I was concerned my life would continue on as before.
What I didn’t know was that Mutti and my step-father had been told to take me to a medical specialist right away. After some x-rays and yet more examinations, an expert in pediatric orthopedics told my parents that my spinal column was curved to a point beyond most which he had seen in a long, long time. The curvature was measured at a shocking 64 degrees. If this growth were allowed to continue, the specialist explained, then before long my lungs and other internal organs could be crushed as I grew. This would lead to stark medical consequences that no eight-year-old child should ever have to endure.
So a brace was created for me after a plaster cast was made of my mid-section. The device looked handsome, but wedging myself into it every day proved to be something I would hate. I quietly rebelled against its cold stiffness. In theory, the clothes I wore would conceal the brace. This meant wearing my favorite short-sleeved T-shirts was out of the question. And so, being the naughty, spoiled first daughter of Mutti that I was, I became careless with the brace. One day, I stepped on it and it broke into two pieces. Never did I fear that I would lose my life as starkly as I did on that day — not because my curvature might get worse, but because I feared the horrible, silent wrath of my step-father: a horribly oppressive man who ruled with an iron fist and found ways to tear us all down without ever having to lay a finger on any of us.
Thankfully, I didn’t die. Nor was I excoriated. I probably had Mutti to thank for that; she fought for us girls as even an emaciated grizzly would fight for her precious cubs… even though standing up for her children got her into serious trouble with him (and worse).
Instead, we flew to the United States and settled in Ohio, where I was promptly scheduled for surgery at the Dayton Children’s Medical Center in January of 1991.
During an operation which lasted many hours, two strong rods were grafted carefully onto my malformed spine. Additional bone from my right hip region was harvested to compliment the graft, after which I was wheeled to the Children’s ICU and monitored closely on a ventilator.
My in-hospital recovery took seven days and was the most painful, torturous trial I had ever endured. After my discharge, I was homeschooled until I was able to walk again. Then, I rejoined middle school and found myself immersed in crowds of American students — on US soil! — for the first time in my life. Now, I would finally find out what it was like to really become an American, and not just via my born-abroad documentation alone.
And then, as they say, things got better.
For a while.
Elementary and middle school had been strained for me. If I wasn’t the subject of whispered conversation because I was ‘different’, then I was completely ignored. Wherever I went, I kept my eyes downcast and my nose buried in a textbook.
I was too awkward to have any semblance of self-esteem, so I didn’t even try, but because of my studiousness I was often the ‘favorite’ of my teachers. Even my depression couldn’t nullify my stubborn desire to learn and absorb, so my teachers expected the best work from me and were disappointed on the few occasions in which I didn’t deliver (math class, enough said).
Transitioning to high school was better, I think. By that time, even though I struggled with identity issues and an ugly divorce that was going on at home, I had become a bit more secure in who I [thought] I was at the time. My scars seemed to have healed completely, and I didn’t have any side effects or back pain after healing from my operation.
In the meantime, though, being shuttled from one household to the next affected me deeply. Because of my parents sniping back and forth, I didn’t apply myself to my studies at all. A part of me devoured my schoolbooks voraciously, but I was listless and bereft of any hope for my life. I don’t even think I knew — or cared — what career path or college to choose, but in the end I would discover it.
I graduated from high school with honors as part of the class of 1999.
It wouldn’t be until I was around thirty that the strain in my body began to manifest.
Would I live my life over again if I could?
Four children, a husband, and a bustling career later, I believed I’d overcome my stilted beginnings and was living ‘the dream’.
It was 2010, and my youngest daughter was still an endearingly bald-headed little baby.
I worked as a Registered Respiratory Therapist, or RRT, at a Level 1 Trauma center after completing my Associates’ Degree at the local community college. I absolutely loved my job and caring for my patients, most of whom were from the geriatric population and suffered from emphysema, COPD, or pneumonia.
As an RRT, my duties were strenuous at times. I would check patient’s oxygen levels, administer breathing treatments, and examine x-rays. Managing heavy equipment, like BIPAP machines and ventilators, was a must, as was collecting ABG blood samples or performing CPR for patients who were coding.
Over the years, the physical demands of my job took a toll on my hips and lower back. I was frequently out of breath. Standing up for the forty-five or so minutes required to resuscitate a patient rendered my bones on fire. So did traveling with a patient from floor to floor, conferring with doctors while my anxiety swung like a wild monkey, and trying to chart while under the pressure of seeing all of my patients on time.
By 2014, I couldn’t hold a syringe without shaking. Needless to say, no-one wanted me to collect their blood when I couldn’t steady the eye of the needle, and after almost ten years of dedicated, uninterrupted service I abruptly resigned, never to look back.
If asked why I think I’ve suffered from these ailments, I would probably tell you that my experiences were the results of negative deeds I’d done in past lives, forgotten long ago.
Obviously, my scoliosis and renal fusion are medical conditions that have long been described and documented by science. So it is not my ‘fault’ that my spine is malformed, nor was it somehow my mother’s fault for passing on these faulty genes. One could say that, in this life, I am innocent, but that doesn’t address the issue of why these deformities manifested in the first place.
Those without belief in heaven, gods, or reincarnation would say that my suffering is the result of an unlucky roll of the dice at life’s game table, but for me that doesn’t suffice.
Buddhists have believed in transmigration of the life-stream for more than 2500 years. As an upasikha (lay practitioner), I’ve been taught that if I want some insight as to what kind of life I’ve lived before this one, I can observe the way I’m living now. Similarly, if I’m wondering what kind of life I’m heading for in the future, I again look into how I’m living in the present.
For Buddhists, the concept of karma isn’t mere superstition. We very much view cause-and-effect as a natural law, as real and binding as any other law of physics. It’s what reminds us that the consequences of our actions follow us and will catch up, whether we will reap the rewards in this life or even five thousand lives into the future.
In other words, once you’ve put something out there, there isn’t any way to take it back. What good deeds you do will return to you. And if you do something wrong, even something as insignificant as smashing a beetle instead of letting it outside, the unfortunate consequences will come back to haunt you when you expect it the least.
Obviously, I won’t ever know exactly what I did to merit a malformed spine and near-constant pain in this life; only those practitioners who are sincere and highly realized (like buddhas) can look ‘back’ and find the previous causes. But in the teachings, there are some clues.
Individuals who ridicule others’ genuine worship, or who go through the motions themselves but are insincere, may be forced to reckon with broken limbs or twisted torsos if they are lucky enough to be reborn as humans. Still, I can rest assured that it wasn’t only negative karma that shaped the future me. In this life, for example, I was blessed with a good complexion and clear skin, which is often the result of having made many offerings of light to the buddhas in prior lives.
Thanks to the preservation of the historical Buddha’s teachings, I now have the information and free will needed to take responsibility for my past mistakes and pave the way towards a brighter future. If I don’t want to suffer again if I take a human rebirth, all I need to do is make sure that I adhere to the Five Precepts: no killing, stealing, lying, drug use or sexual misconduct.
Though that may still not ensure an altogether perfect future life, at least I can be sure that I’ll keep to well-lit paths along the way, avoiding those that funnel confused individuals into lower rebirths.
Still, after leaving my position I had to be practical. For the next few years I remained quietly at home, caring for the children and supported by my husband’s VA payments. Compared to stressful twelve-hour shifts at a busy hospital, my new life was heaven (I have always felt that my place in life was at home with my kids).
But when the pain became too much, I visited a surgeon and arranged to have an intrathecal device planted in my abdomen. It was supposed to eliminate the need for me to rely on prescription opioids by replacing my Vicodin with a once-monthly injection of morphine by my pain clinician.
The implant was placed on January 31st, 2020.
Unbeknownst to any of us at the time, that would prove to be the beginning of the worst nightmare of our lives.
[Part 2 to come]
