The Tribune

By DR KENNETH D KEMP

MOST human beings suffer from childhood amnesia. We don’t remember being born or learning to walk or speak.

The milestones that matter to our mothers – our first word, our first tooth, our first step, are parts of our early lives that we are completely oblivious to except through conversations of others and the occasional photo.

It’s easy to understand why. Without vocabulary to describe or define what’s happening to us, how do we create a memory? That’s why it’s challenging to recollect what our life was like before the age of seven and virtually impossible to remember anything before ages three or four. We easily recall how to walk but can’t remember learning to walk.

My earliest memories are of me playing with my cousins but I struggle to think of what age I was at the time.

My patient, who’s chosen the alias Bruce, was just four years old when he faced a life-threatening injury but he only knows about it because his parents shared the story with him in his teens. Today, I share his story with you.

Bruce is the eldest of two children and when his younger brother was born, he loved to help his mother take care of him. While she was at home on maternity leave with her two boys, Bruce was instructed by his father to be a good boy and not cause any trouble for his mom.

Bruce’s father had good reason to be concerned. Just a few weeks earlier, his wife, the mother of his new son, nearly died during childbirth. Bruce’s father was concerned about leaving them alone while she was still recovering but he had to return to work.

The following day started off as just another Tuesday. Bruce’s mother, Martha, got up and made breakfast. She recalls the early part of the morning and afternoon being very quiet.

So, after she put her boys down for a nap, she also tried to sleep but with no one else at home, and despite her complete exhaustion, she couldn’t sleep soundly in case one of her kids awoke. She jolted with every turn her baby made. She got up frequently to check on Bruce. Within two hours, they were all up again.

According to what he later learned; Bruce watched as his mother struggled to make a bottle for his brother while gently calming him from crying.

At the same time and on schedule, his father was calling to check on them. Bruce raced to get the phone from the living room but it was on a dresser he couldn’t reach. Wanting to help and without thinking, he scrambled on to a nearby glass table to reach it. Grabbing the phone, he turned around and the glass cracked beneath his feet.

Bruce fell through, his small fragile four-year-old body contorting backwards then forwards and landing barefoot on shattered glass. Embarrassed and still in shock, he yanked his left leg out from under the table and ran to his mother, phone in hand, without saying a word.

When he got to Martha, it was the panicked scream that she made that caused him to cry. It was only then that he looked down and saw that his entire leg was painted with blood. Eager to determine what happened, she followed the incredible trail of blood and found the broken table with shards of glass everywhere littered with fragments of her son’s flesh.

Frantic, Martha put Bruce in the tub and tried to wash the blood off but it kept pumping faster than she could clear it. He had painfully deep lacerations from his thigh to his ankle. She wrapped two large towels around his leg and called her husband before placing her two sons in the car and racing to the hospital.

During the car ride, Martha kept talking to Bruce, quietly crying and looking back to check his leg. She began to pray when she saw blood saturating the towel that now functioned as his make-shift life support.

Her husband met her at the hospital and took Bruce while she took care of their youngest son. Doctors were immediately concerned. For reasons still unknown to his parents, they also opted not to give Bruce any anesthesia, preferring instead to suture him immediately.

Martha left her husband with Bruce because it literally broke her to watch her son be held down, screaming in pain, as a needle was used to tear through his skin and pull it back together. It was one of the most grueling hours of her life and she felt more fear then than she did when her blood pressure became critically low and she flat-lined during labour.

Bruce’s entire leg was bandaged and his parents were told to monitor him over the next few days for a fever. He was prescribed a children’s pain killer and antibiotics. He was brought back to the outpatient clinic every two days for a dressing change. By the end of the second week, his fevers had subsided and his sutures were removed. Fortunately, he recovered entirely without any lingering deficits in his limb function or gait.

While Bruce was blessed by youthful amnesia, his mother was not so fortunate. She recalls returning home the evening of the accident to what looked like a murder scene. This happened over fifteen years ago and to this day she refuses to have a glass table in her home.

Martha takes nothing for granted because what starts off as just another Tuesday, can quickly descend into a rip in the heart that’s harder to heal than the injury itself because it reminds us how fragile life is. The bandages may be off but the scar of knowing that no day and no hour is promised, remains.

They say we are fortunate because we can remember that we had pain, but we can never re-live it exactly as it was. A woman remembers the hours of labour. She can say it was the worst pain ever, but she cannot recreate the feeling of that pain.

It is the same with a scrape in the eyeball, intense, almost unbearable pain, but once it’s over, you have only the memory of the experience.

Youthful amnesia is a blessing in disguise. The multiple scars along Bruce’s thigh and leg are echoes of his past trauma and serve as a daily reminder of his mortality but he counters that by living with purpose.

He’s a straight-A student in college, is incredibly funny and he still loves to help others. Maybe that’s why he chose the name Bruce for his alias in this column. His personal hero is Bruce Wayne, The Batman. A billionaire with absolutely no powers who could have lived a luxurious life anywhere in the world. But, because of his own personal tragedy, turning his pain into purpose he pushed himself through an unbelievably tortuous training regimen as a child and then risked his life everyday so that he could fight injustice and corruption for strangers.

Witnessing the murder of his parents as a child is something Batman wished he could have forgotten but instead it was the catalyst for who he’d eventually become.

That one moment in time cemented his moral compass and altered the trajectory of his life. Never wanting to be like the criminals he fought against, he refused to kill.

The prevailing lesson therein is that you don’t have to be perfect to be great. You just have to be honourable, disciplined and brave, all traits within the grasp of every one of us.

The most paradoxical component of childhood amnesia is that although we can’t recall our early childhood, events from that time significantly impact our behaviour, thoughts and habits forging many of the characteristics that we express as adults.

Psychologists all over the world differ on why this occurs, but one thing they do agree upon is that children watch better than they listen and, no matter the age, the one thing they won’t forget is feeling appreciated and being loved.

This is The KDK Report.