How Medical Trauma Hid In My Body

I didn’t think that I had trauma, at least not the medical kind. I thought my trauma went only as deep as everyone else’s: those slivers of childhood memories we all carry, the small fractures that shape who we become. I had never thought to consider medical trauma. I thought I was just tired. Overwhelmed. Maybe a little broken at times. I never thought to look to the surgeries, the hospital beds, or those memories of lying back and looking up at the doctors as anesthesia gently pulled me into unconsciousness. I never thought to ask what my body might still be holding.

It took me 23 years to realize I had been suffering from medical trauma in silence.

The signs were stitched long before I had the language for them, as soon as I was born, due to the nature of my birth weight being 1lb 8oz. I was thrust into a world of surgeries and survival. I had been touched, operated on, and exposed without ever having the chance to say no, not by cruel hands but by necessary ones. However, my body didn’t know the difference. It only knew that it had been laid bare, marked, and altered. It only knew the helplessness of being seen without permission. And so it carried that helplessness for years.

Some might argue that I consented to this, that signing that consent form to go into surgery made it a choice. But survival isn’t a choice. When you are told that without medical intervention, you might die, you say yes because you have to. And sometimes you’re too young to speak that yes yourself; it is said for you by others who love you and want you to stay alive. It becomes less of a choice and more about the survival of the person you are speaking for.

Consent in a hospital is NOT the same as consent in life. It is survival riddled and stitched with fear. It is a permission signed in desperation. It is trust given under anesthesia to strangers you will never really know. And no matter how necessary it is, it leaves its fingerprints and scars on the body all the same.

I didn’t ask to be born at 1 pound, 8 ounces. I didn’t ask to be hooked to machines or fed through a feeding tube before I ever had the chance to cry on my own. I didn’t ask for the surgeries when I was born, or at 5, or 10, or the one that came when I was 22. The one that reopened old scars and wrote new ones across my body.

These scars are a testament to my survival. And have become a core of who I am, even if I didn’t ask for them to be.

However, despite it all, my body carried everything. It carried the tubes and the stitches, the silent agreements made on my behalf as a child. And most importantly, it carried the helplessness and the pain. It survived. It kept breathing, even when every breath had a price. It held the memories that I was too young to process, too small to remember, and too busy surviving to grieve.

While my mind locked those memories away for protection, my body became the keeper of those stories. Stories that it would spend years trying to tell me, long after my mind had chosen to forget.

It took me years to conclude that my body was never the enemy — that none of the pain I felt was imagined. My body wasn’t broken, or overly sensitive, or dramatic. It was screaming for help. The headaches, the lack of energy, the way I couldn’t drink water without feeling sick, a problem that was only fixed during my most recent surgery, after an oversight by doctors during the operation I had at 10 years old. These weren’t random. They were my body’s way of remembering. Of protecting me. Of begging me to listen.

And now, I’m learning how to listen. Not perfectly, not all at once, I’m learning to ask: what do you need?

And for the first time in my life, I’m starting to hear the answer.

If you reached the end, I implore you to take a moment to ask yourself:

What trauma might be living inside your body?

What stories might your body be trying to tell you, the ones your mind, out of protection, made you forget?

You may be surprised by what answers begin to come.