![]() ![]() 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. For reasons still unknown to his parents, they also opted not to give Bruce any anesthesia, preferring instead to suture him immediately. Her husband met her at the hospital and took Bruce while she took care of their youngest son. She began to pray when she saw blood saturating the towel that now functioned as his make-shift life support. 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.ĭuring the car ride, Martha kept talking to Bruce, quietly crying and looking back to check his leg. He had painfully deep lacerations from his thigh to his ankle. 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.įrantic, Martha put Bruce in the tub and tried to wash the blood off but it kept pumping faster than she could clear it. It was only then that he looked down and saw that his entire leg was painted with blood. When he got to Martha, it was the panicked scream that she made that caused him to cry. ![]() 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. Grabbing the phone, he turned around and the glass cracked beneath his feet.īruce fell through, his small fragile four-year-old body contorting backwards then forwards and landing barefoot on shattered glass. Wanting to help and without thinking, he scrambled on to a nearby glass table to reach it. Bruce raced to get the phone from the living room but it was on a dresser he couldn’t reach. Within two hours, they were all up again.Īccording to what he later learned Bruce watched as his mother struggled to make a bottle for his brother while gently calming him from crying.Īt the same time and on schedule, his father was calling to check on them. She jolted with every turn her baby made. ![]() 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 recalls the early part of the morning and afternoon being very quiet. Bruce’s mother, Martha, got up and made breakfast. The following day started off as just another Tuesday. Bruce’s father was concerned about leaving them alone while she was still recovering but he had to return to work. Just a few weeks earlier, his wife, the mother of his new son, nearly died during childbirth. 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.īruce’s father had good reason to be concerned. Today, I share his story with you.īruce is the eldest of two children and when his younger brother was born, he loved to help his mother take care of him. 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. My earliest memories are of me playing with my cousins but I struggle to think of what age I was at the time. We easily recall how to walk but can’t remember learning to walk. 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. 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. We don’t remember being born or learning to walk or speak. MOST human beings suffer from childhood amnesia. ![]()
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