The Loss of a Child: The Start of a Journey with PTSD and Gender Dysphoria

If someone were to call this minute and ask what I was up to, I’d have to bluntly say “I’m writing about being raped when I was 7.”

There that helped, it’s said and done. You don’t need to read on, but some of these details led to a lot of the problems…

I’ve been asked by several of my past psychotherapists to try to write down the life changing event that led to my going down the rabbit hole.  I’ve never tried, nor wanted to really.

Partly because reliving the experience is mentally painful as hell.  Partly because I believe that I cannot use this as an excuse for my life being a struggle.  Not an excuse, since it has shaped me as a person – my decision making process skewed from thereon after.

The year was 1964, and you have to imagine a time without cell phones and computers and all the modern medical advancements that we enjoy today.

My recollection was always clouded, partially due to the event itself, and by the fact that I was seven years old at the time.  But with the use of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy), done in 1996, I’ve managed to remember most of the assault.  Bits and pieces joined together into one painful memory. 

That summer of ’64 I began gaining weight at a rapid pace, and started peeing blood.  The first sign of a kidney issue that has only grown more complicated with age.  And for a 7 year old to gain 20 pounds in 2 months, something wasn’t right.  Even though I was a head taller than my classmates, the weight gain was serious. 

My father was a career military man, and at the time we were living the good life in post-war Germany.  The US Army was everywhere.  We were stationed at two different bases over two years, built in or just outside beautiful cities.  Heidelberg with its castle, and Heilbronn, more quaint I’m told.

There weren’t facilities for potential serious medical problems in children, no pediatric specialists. So we traveled to a major army hospital an hour away as it had the only capabilities to examine the problem correctly,  a look into the urinary tract and kidneys to try to see where the blood was coming from.

I remember sitting on a chair between my mom and dad as the doctor explained everything, none of the words of course as I had no idea what they meant, just the situation.

They were going to put me under and use a ureteroscope to go up through the bladder, ureters and kidneys to see if they could see the cause of the bleeding.  Of course I didn’t remember or understand any of this, my mother and I had long conversations about the incident when she finally learned the whole traumatic truth of what had actually happened.

The procedure would be conducted later in the day, and as such my parents left me in the hospital to spend the night.  A child was left in a hospital designed for treating hurt or injured soldiers.  A big scary place for a young boy.  The halls and lights, the scents and sounds would be remembered in nightmares.

I would probably sleep through the night and would be perfectly safe.  That’s what they had told my mother, perfectly safe.  I don’t remember them leaving,  saying goodbye, whether I was crying or being “a good little soldier”.

But I remember waking up though, obviously I hadn’t slept through the night.   I was in a small hospital bed, not real fancy, in a dimly lit ward with 10 -12 other beds down either side. I could tell from the shapes some were occupied and others not.  I was in a pair of my favorite pajamas, the ones all kids have, blue with little sailboats.  I do remember that for some odd reason. 

And I remember a round clock with big black numbers and hands that read five ‘til two.  

My bed was next to a metal desk, with a chair and a gooseneck lamp turned on and bent downward to reduce the light.  No one there though, the little nurses desk.

But I had to pee, and pee badly, and it hurt where it shouldn’t be hurting.

That’s when one of the other patients, in a blue bathrobe and slippers, must have seen my discomfort and asked if I needed help.

He escorted me down a hallway and into the mens washroom, with stalls on one side, sinks on the other and urinals on the back wall.  

I remember having to take down my pj bottoms and underwear, which had a bloody pad that had been stuffed inside.  I had to stand on my toes to reach the rim, and trying to pee at all was painful.

Too painful for me to pee actually, or from the procedure blocked where I couldn’t go

I’m going to gloss over the next part, because simply writing this now is making me physically ill.

He was going to help me, and lifted me up to make it easier.  But not easier for me.

I remember the hands under each of my armpits, the four fingers across the front of my blue pajamas. 

I cannot forget that, those two hands under my arm and across my chest. 

And then the real pain started.   I remembering crying “it hurts…it hurts…it hurts”  as the man raped me in front of a damn urinal. In my mind he went from man to monster, like all men. 

And then nothing, blank, like I wasn’t even there anymore.  The last I remember was looking at the tile right in front of me.  Just above the urinal…the crack…and that’s where my mind went.  Right into the crack of the tile.  

Part of it is still there I believe.  My mind, that is.  Part of me now wishes he had simply killed me and left me stuffed in a stall…instead of living with this damn nightmare.

I do remember him pulling the pajamas back on straight, washing my face,  and leading me down the hallway back to my bed.  The lights on either side, dim but enough to see in the middle of the night. Tears, but no crying or sobbing.  That always meant more punishment in my house..

Who knows when I fell asleep or how I managed to do so.  Must have finally, because the next thing I remember was a nurse in uniform waking me, my folks were coming.  

And I realized I had wet the bed.

I don’t remember my parents picking me up, or leaving or going home.  It was the following year when I can really remember anything, on a ship leaving Europe out of Portugal.  A ship full of soldiers heading back to the United States.

I told no one for years. Because by doing something wrong, gaining weight and peeing blood, I had been left by my parents to be punished.  I did something terribly bad, my body did, it was my fault this happened.

With my father the more you cried out, the more severe the punishment.  The belt, standard issue for service men, officers.  With a brass buckle and brass tip on the other end.

It was 1991 when I first relayed this to a psychotherapist.  And only after months of counseling to deal with gender dysphoria, depression, alcohol abuse and a life gone completely off the tracks.  Pretending to be someone I wasn’t, while part of me was still hiding in the crack in the tile. 

One damn little event. 

One damn little event. One small hour which changed every single hour, day, month and year for the rest of my life.

Not an excuse for the Queer man I have become, but the controlling factor nonetheless.