Swallowing the Red Pill

I have never been like everyone else. I don’t say it proudly; I say it factually. I spent a lot of my life wishing I were “normal”, like the rest of the world. It’s no fun to be different, especially when the difference makes you less “able” than most all of your peers.

I have limited use of my right arm (shown above). I cannot actively turn my right hand over, I can’t straighten it, I can’t lift it over my head, nor can I make half a “T” with my right arm held straight out to my side. It’s also shorter and smaller than my left arm. My right shoulder is less developed than my left shoulder, too. If I showed you a photo, you could see it pretty easily.

I had no less than two surgeries to try to correct what was wrong with my right arm. Both of them were unsuccessful. All I really got out of it was four scars-two short, one medium, and one that’s pretty long.

I am not looking for pity. My troubles are nothing compared to so many. I can remember being on the orthopedic wing of the hospital as a kid waiting for surgery and seeing kids who had real problems. I saw children with unusable extremities confined to wheelchairs and worse. The problems with my arm are irritants by comparison.

As a 56-year old adult, my right arm challenges my golf game (calling it a “game” is a stretch) and some of the exercises when I work out at Orange Theory. It’s not really a big deal anymore. I have a workaround for my golf swing. I use a dumb bell to square up my shoulders for push-ups and planks. I make adjustments.

As a youth, it was a completely different story. I was never very athletic anyway, but having an arm my friends called “gimpy” made it hard for me. Baseball, football, basketball — sports were always a challenge and always required a workaround that allowed me to participate when we played in my neighborhood. When we played pickup games, I would always try to angle to be a captain, mainly to avoid the pain of being picked last. I can remember actual dreams of getting picked first for baseball in the park. Athleticism meant a lot to a little boy in the sixties and seventies (probably still does), and I lived my youth without it.

When I was born, the doctors told my parents that they didn’t know whether my arm would grow. For all the doctors knew, I would have one functional arm and one baby arm. To avoid that result, the doctor prescribed immobilization. My right arm was casted into place for more than a year after I was born. I am not sure why they decided to take the cast off, but they eventually did.

I would have been better off if they had prescribed bloodletting. Casting me for the first year of my life was perhaps the absolute worst thing they could have done. Immobilizing my right arm forced me to use my left arm for EVERYTHING. In my baby brain, I had only one arm and I made do with it … and it alone. Nothing really changed after they removed the cast. I had gotten by this long using only my left arm. Why change it up now?

As an adult, I later realized that the best thing that they could have done was to put my left arm in a cast for six months or a year. If I had been forced to use my right arm only to survive, I absolutely think I would have gained far more use.

My parents are completely without blame. My mom and dad did everything they could think of to repair my arm. Early on, they took me to a orthopedist who recommended a extremely talented ortho in Chicago where we lived. My mom would drive from the southwest side of Chicago to the north side so that I could be seen by him. He did both of the surgeries I mentioned above. He recommended physical therapy for my dad to do at home at night. It was painful therapy, I was a crappy patient, and my dad didn’t enjoy hurting me any more than I enjoyed being hurt. But he slogged through it anyway. Didn’t help.

I don’t have an uplifting story to share. I didn’t rise above my “gimpy” right arm to win the big game or claim a trophy. I struggled, it mostly sucked, and I am grateful that I was blessed with a mind sharp enough that I didn’t have to count on my physical abilities to earn a living. Born 200 years sooner and I fear that my life would have been far worse than the amazing life I have lived already.

My mom and dad always explained to me and to others that I had a birth defect. Always.

I never questioned that diagnosis. And I suffered greatly for it.

I spent a lot of time being mad at God. He made me broken. I hated him for it. Why make me broken when he made all my neighborhood buddies whole? Didn’t God see how hard he made my life?

Those feelings lasted for more than 40 years. Those feelings lasted even after my mom explained how I had come to have this birth defect. After she explained to me that I was a “forceps baby”. After she explained that I was a forceps baby because the doctor had to use a forceps to pull me through the birth canal. I should have been born Caesarean, she said, but the doctor had used forceps.

According to my mom, my head looked like a Kleenex box when I was born. The forceps had crushed nerves on the right side of my head along my neck. Crushing those nerves caused a palsy in my right arm. Her description of my birth had no impact on my understanding of my arm. I still thought of myself as having a birth defect: defective at birth.

You read that right. Forty years. For all of my childhood, I believed not that I was the victim of medical malpractice (as I most obviously was), but I believed and acted on the “truth” that I had a birth defect, that I was made broken. It colored my thoughts and warped my notion of self-worth.

Not until I was 44 years old, did I experience my Matrix moment and take the “red pill”. By this time, I had graduated from college and from law school. By this time, I had enjoyed a successful career both in business and in law. By this time, I was the father of two awesome teenage kids.

The well-educated, business savvy, father of two finally figured out what would have been OBVIOUS to anyone who understood what had happened to me. God didn’t make me broken. God made me normal, just like everyone else; the obstetrician broke me. I didn’t have a birth defect; I was the victim of medical malpractice at birth. My parents shouldn’t have seen an orthopedist, they should have seen a lawyer.

In that moment, I unloaded 44 years of emotional baggage. For the first time, I saw myself as a survivor. Despite dealing with this handicap my entire life, I had survived. Indeed, I had thrived. My mind shifted from shame to pride. I wasn’t mad at God anymore. I wasn’t even mad at the doctor who broke me. He was’t trying to handicap me. He did his best and his best wasn’t good enough. S#!t happens. It remains one of the best moments of my life.

Here’s why I wanted to share this story. In thinking about it, I became fascinated by my inability to see the truth of what had actually happened to me. I blindly accepted this lie about something central to my being. I let this lie hurt me for years and years. I didn’t question it. I didn’t re-examine my belief when I found out plenty of facts that would cause just about anyone else to say “Hey, that’s medical malpractice!” My inability to grasp the truth for 44 years still blows me away to this day.

This experience has changed my thought processes. I have tried to re-examine every important belief I hold dear. Is it still accurate? Was it ever accurate? If I can make such a monumental and painful mistake about my right arm, I have to think that I am capable of doing it in other areas of my life.

So I keep looking.

I encourage you to look as well. Look at your beliefs, particularly those that hurt you or impact your self-worth. Do you hold any belief about yourself or the world that causes you pain? If you do, can you make a conscious effort to examine this belief critically. Can you test it against the rest of your knowledge base that you know to be true and see if this belief remains accurate.

Last, I encourage you to share this painful belief with friends you trust and ask your friends for their opinion. Do they think your belief is accurate? Or do they believe that you have adopted a falsity as a truth? The worst that can happen is you validate a painful fact about yourself; the best that can happen is that, like me, you swallow the red pill and free yourself from a lie that has haunted you for a lifetime.