Too Scared to Cry: How Trauma Affects Children ... and Ultimately Us All by Lenore Terr

Author:Lenore Terr [LENORE TERR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

School Work and Fantasy Work

I can’t see why you think Jackie is still affected by the kidnapping. I can’t see it. She is getting great grades this year. Her attitude is real good, and she’s made it into the top group of kids, you know, the leaders of Middle School.

Judy Johnson, mother of Johnny and Jackie

AT AGE FIVE, HOLLY HARRISON suffered an unfixable disaster at a kiddie pool. We have already looked at its aftereffects from the points of view of Winifred, Holly’s little sister, and Duane, Holly’s closest friend, confidante, and brother. But it is time now to tell Holly’s story from my own point of view—from the viewpoint of the child psychiatrist.

Holly came into my hands a year after her accident and a year before she died. She was in first grade. She took a little teasing from her six-year-old peers for the jaundice—"Greenie,” they called her. And, once in a while, a kid mistook her fluid-filled belly for chubbiness, and so she got called “Fatty” a couple of times. But Holly Harrison kept on going to school. She liked it. And she got terrific grades. She’d arrive in the morning in Mom’s car, and get picked up when it was over. True, she’d miss a few days for going to the hospital now and then—to open up a blocked intravenous feeding tube or to start an entirely new channel for her feedings. Once they tried to hook up her rectal “stump” to the six inches or so of small intestine that she still had left, but it didn’t work, and Holly had to accept her “ostomy bags” as permanent. Other than that, however, Holly kept going to school.

Holly did a bit of homework, too. It was kind of easy for her. Once in a while Holly would miss an assignment because her nighttime “on line” intravenous feedings had taken too long or because the private-duty nurse had talked too much (she was quite a talker, that one particular nurse—Mildred). But if you looked at the whole of it, you’d have to say that Holly Harrison “creamed” school. She died completely caught up in every subject. Academically she was at least a year ahead of herself.

By the time Holly underwent her final, fatal surgery—that ill-fated gut and liver transplant in Pittsburgh—she could read just about anything on the third-grade shelves. She had read Charlotte’s Web to Duane and Winifred, and I wondered if Charlotte’s fictional death forced Holly to think about her own. I mean, Holly never did speak about death to me, so I don’t know exactly what she thought. But once she said to her mother just before they tried to hook her intestines back together, “Mommy, I don’t want to die.” And as they were wheeling Holly into surgery, Margaret Harrison had run after her promising, “I won’t let you die.” Margaret had meant it. That’s one reason that the Harrison family was so shocked when, despite Margaret’s promise, Holly died five months after the pledge had been made.

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