A bad start

In this first post I will share with you the pretty bad start I got in life.

Being a 40-year old today means I was born in the early 80’s. A time when it was still relatively normal to smoke, even in schools, hospitals and while pregnant, simply because from what I understand, they did not know back then what they knew now. My parents had gotten together under questionable circumstances. My father was hiding his true sexual preference and my mother fled into this relationship to escape a violent relationship. They married and kept up appearances for the outside world I am guessing. My mom was told she would not be able to conceive, due to endometriosis, so when she thought she got the flu, she did not expect to discover that she was expecting (me).

I think that when your marriage is not based on a solid foundation, which would be less than ideal to start a family, bringing a child into the equation does not make things easier. But I was on my way and so they prepared to welcome a baby. But when her pregnancy had progressed about past halfway, she got early contractions and she was admitted. They gave her medications via an IV-drip that stopped the contractions and kept me inside for as long as possible. The machines were too noisy so she could not sleep and so they gave my mother Flunitrazepam every night before bed. For reference: this drug, alsno known as Rohypnol, is now considered an opiate and is often used as a date-rape drug. And I as a small fetus was being exposed to this daily, for a good few weeks at the very least.

It will come to no-one’s surprise that when I was born, I was addicted and after that, I had serious withdrawal. I was dysmature (due to the smoking too no doubt): about a kilo underweight, I had trouble drinking and keeping my milk down, cried a lot and all of my muscles were over-tensed. This was later diagnosed as Hypertonia and they fought the symptoms by putting me in a hammock, so my body could not tense up like a board. But they of course never acknowledged the fact that all those heavy drugs that had gone through my tiny body had no doubt resulted in me being born addicted and that the constant crying and feeding issues were no doubt because I had to endure withdrawal.

To this day and age the intense stress I can sometimes experience, causes the hypertonia to act up again, especially in my neck and shoulders, resulting in a terrible pain and heaviness. So I can confirm that the hypertonia was never actually cured or properly resolved. They just fought the symptoms until I relaxed my infant body.

This of course raised a question within me: what are the possible long-term effects on a human-being that was exposed to these amounts of drugs even before they were born? So I collected the courage a few years ago and contacted various University Hospitals with my story and asked them if they had any data on the effect on an unborn child in the event that the expecting mother used Flunitrazepam for a longer period of time. But sadly, they had a disappointing answer: they did not have any data on this (or they did not want to share it with me).

I am fresh out of options to figure out what the long-term effects could be, so it seems that I may be stuck having to accept that there is something wrong (or different) with me, but that I will not be able to find out what that is. But it is very frustrating to know that there is something wrong and you just cannot seem to put your finger on it.

You now have an idea of what my bad start looked like, not just as an infant, but even before I was born. I welcome anyone, who has any ideas about where to learn more about the (long-term) effect of Flunitrazepam on (unborn) children and maybe even into adulthood, to drop a comment or to contact me through the Contact page.

Until my next post!

Love
From a Healing Mom