My Birth Defect
Good morning, Friends!
Last week I mentioned where this writing journey has taken me. No - it’s not Tahiti!
Where I will be going has to begin with how it all started. I was surfing Facebook one day and came across a “challenge”. I have journaled in the past, dabbled in short essays, wrote papers for college and business letters, but this sounded like fun. Write 500 words a day for 30 days was the idea. A topic was provided every day which made it much easier for me – the hardest part of writing is coming up with a reason.
I bought a book (or two or three) of more topics to write about after seeing all my essays at the end of 30 days. I read some of these musings to friends and family who encouraged me to write a book. Jeff Goins, who writes “The Ghost” on Substack, the app for authors, has several books on the craft of writing and I jumped on his bandwagon to learn how to become a “writer”. Most of the essays from his 500 words per day challenge, as well as other topics found in several different publications, became the material used in My Prosthetic Life. One of the last chapters written was Chapter Four – the Roles Unchosen. I hadn’t divulged the reason for my birth defect – being born without a left wrist and hand. I hadn’t written this part of my story because I had to do some research first.
A pharmacist, on one of the many cruises my husband and I took, told me what he believed to be the cause of my birth defect. We were having breakfast in the dining room with ten other strangers one morning. As usual, everyone introduced themselves and shared a little about what their lives looked like. My story never includes my arm because I forget I am different. Naturally, someone at the table asked about it. Long story short, the pharmacist offered the name of a drug used for morning sickness in the 1950’s. He wrote it down on a sugar packet – no one had a piece of paper and napkins were cloth - not paper. I managed to lose something so important over the years. It was the best 50th birthday present ever though!
I found an article from the New York Times while researching morning sickness. It was written by Katie Thomas and entitled “The Unseen Survivors Want to be Heard”. A fairly new article published March 23, 2020, included an excerpt that caught my attention immediately: “The man on the bus was staring at her. Carolyn Farmer, 17, noticed him as she closed the Leon Uris novel “Exodus” and gathered her things. It was 1979, and she knew what it was like to have strangers gawk at her.” This was something I also know. The man asked her if she was a thalidomide baby as she was getting off the bus.
My mother had always said I probably wasn’t a thalidomide baby because the drug was used in Europe and was never legalized in the U.S. This statement is partly true. “Thalidomide, a sedative sold by a German drugmaker, was said to relieve everything from anxiety to morning sickness, but it led to perhaps the greatest pharmaceutical scandal of all time. About 10,000 babies, many in Germany, Britain and Australia, were born with severe defects in the 1950’s and 1960’s after their mothers took it. Some babies had no arms or legs. Others had no ears or malformed kidneys.” My sister, born 17 months after me, had internal issues. Malformed kidneys were part of them.
Next week, I will share more on the shocking history of the drug, thalidomide and how it has become such important part of my story.
Hope to see you then!
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