It’s a scream like no other. You know something is wrong. You search for the cause. No teeth coming in, no picky fabric irritating her skin, nothing to be afraid of. In fact you say that over and over again. “It’s okay peanut, it’s okay, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Your friends and family comfort you. “He’s probably just colicky. Gassy.” You pat and pat and pat that tiny little back. You coo and bounce, gently. Nothing seems to stop the screaming.
The screams eventually haunt your sleep. They chip away at your sense of self. Your family’s sense of safety dissipates. You question your sanity.
During a presentation at a local school my friend (Blaze) heard these screams again – thanks to all her hard work, those days are long gone for her and her son P. The memories came flooding back. She barely made it to the parking lot in time to vomit.
While out for a run, my friend (Mama Mac) recalls encountering a mom with her screaming baby and shouting “Don’t vaccinate that baby!” as she jogged passed them.
It’s that powerful – that terrifying – for those of us who know what caused it.
“Mrs. Goes, today you will get 4 kicks to the stomach. Looks like just below the ribs to the right. 3 blows to the left cheek. Only 2 bites on your upper arms. 17 slaps in undetermined locations. One bloodied lip. You’ll be fine, but the iPad screen…looks like you’re out another 250.00.”
“Good Morning Mrs. Goes. Today you will receive two upper cuts to your lower right jaw. Four head butts. 9 slaps to your calves and thighs. One glass Pellegrino water bottle hurled at your face. You’ll be fine, but cleaning up the glass will be time consuming. In the meantime, clean folded laundry will be thrown, your youngest will be slapped, and the Epsom salt will be tossed around your bathroom until the tile is no longer visible. Only one direct hit to your stomach. 6 bites.”
I’d accept either daily scenario readily and repeatedly if it meant an end to the screaming.
The screaming puts the burden on me. Is it the mito? The yeast? Did he get some food he’s not supposed to have? His eyes are dilated, he’s tearing at his stomach and ripping off his clothes. Is it the PANDAS? Which one of the many systems that don’t work is presently causing him the most discomfort? It’s up to me to figure it out. It’s up to me to take away the pain. I’m mom.
The hitting, the violence…I’m just the recipient in that deal. No responsibility on my end. Plus, I’ve gotten used to it. I haven’t gotten used to the screaming.
I will never, ever get used to the screaming.
The doctors say, “Ignore that behavior Mrs. Goes. If you pay any attention to him you are just re-enforcing it.” I immediately imagine a child pinned under a car. I can see his body flailing and there’s blood everywhere.
Just ignore it.
“That’s just how it is with some kids. They scream for no reason. The spectrum.” More wisdom from the white coats. They mumble something esoteric and irrelevant that does not apply to my child. It’s hard for them to understand that all kids are not the same. They absolutely positively must believe all kids are the same. This is how current “preventative” medical science works. Someone who weights 5 lbs is the same as someone who weighs 230. Someone raised in the inner city is the same as someone raised in rural Kansas. Someone with a history of allergies, asthma and auto-immune disease is the same as someone without. Same. No testing required. Just shoot ’em up. We’ll find out if there’s going to be a reaction soon enough. And then we’ll pretend it didn’t happen.
I would scream too.
Our kids dwell in cages and the people who caused their imprisonment refuse to acknowledge they still exist. They live in bodies that are rebelling against them every second of the day. My friends and I are running around them with a box full of band-aids. One for the intestinal dysbiois, one for the mitochondrial disease, one for the auto-immune damage, one for the methylation failure, one for the macrophagic myofasciitis sydrome, one for the metabolic dysfunction, one for the central nervous system damage.
We can’t seem to properly apply all the bandages through the bars of the cage, though. Some stick. Some fall off. A lot of our little birds end up bleeding out, innocent little victims of iatrogenic illness. I’ve never heard of a person being burned alive who just silently sat back and allowed it to happen. My son actually has a condition that at times causes his feet to feel like they are burning. He’s deficient in malic acid and B2. No doctor told me. My friends with master’s degrees and sick kids…they told me. Granny Smith apple full of the stuff really helps. But then there’s the cerebral folate deficiency…he can’t handle phenols. Don’t get me started on the damage to his Krebb’s Cycle!
Let me stop you right here and ask…do I sound like an idiot to you? Because, anytime my friends and I are given a platform to speak about our screaming children we are told we are passionate. Emotional. Understandably connected to the issue. This really bothers me because, well, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence indicates our kids have every reason to scream. They are medically ill. Profoundly, medically ill. And their illness was caused by their physicians. Physicians who say we should ignore their screams, like they ignore their pain.
You’ll have to excuse me. Now I have to go scream. Because some days when I put it all together like I did for you here, just now, it’s too much to for me to take. SOMEBODY HAS TO DO SOMETHING TO STOP THE MINDLESS IATROGENIC DESTRUCTION OF CHILDREN NOW!! Do something. If your child is one of the 54% of chronically ill kids that inhabit this country, it is YOUR DUTY to educate yourself. Go to Thinking Moms’ Revolution to learn more.
Much Respect, The Rev (LJ Goes)
They poisoned my son so bad with his preschool shots that he couldn’t even walk short distances with me, I had to carry him or put him in a grocery cart. This video, this scream, haunts me always. This is my poor sweet son suffering.
I feel guilty for feeling comfort to know someone knows my pain! Love your writting girl, Praying for all the Warrior families out there! God help our children and our future!!!
I remember it so well, as if it was yesterday. My first baby had her dtap vaccine and the following day, I was invited over friends for Sunday lunch at their house. My baby cried, and cried, cried… I was breastfeeding and she would pull away, asked for more, then pull away and got sick several times on me. Her screams were piercing. My friends were horrified, there was nothing me or my husband could do to sooth our child. It lasted hours with no end… then she only spoke at the age of 4, today she has learning difficulties and a speech disorder. I will never vaccinate again another child of mine. They call lie as much as they want but will never fool me again. I seen it with my own eyes. Thank you.
Thank you for talking about the scream…I too have heard it..too many nights from 1am-4am usually…never in the doctors office…never in front of anyone who was telling me it was “just colic” or “just a belly ache” or “just allergies”….no what they heard was just a wimper compared to the middle of the night scream fests….
our path (www.babyfoodsteps.com) has meandered this way and that, currently on the “mitochondrial disease path” looking for the next bend in the road… in the meantime “the screams” only visit us periodically now- with fatigue, or if it has been more than 2 hours since our last food, or if there has been an exposure to a common household chemical… but every time the “scream” comes back, it takes me back to the first time I heard her scream…
Pingback: March 11, 2012: Why The Rev Won’t Ignore the Screams… | The Thinking Moms' Revolution Starts Here
A beautiful and heart-breaking piece. Our poor kids are at the canary in the goldmine and its up to us to make it stop!
A beautiful and hear-breaking piece. Our poor kids are at the canary in the goldmine and its up to us to make it stop!
Amen
My kids have been screamers and I had tremendous difficulty dealing with it, and they are not even in the same category you guys are talking about. My heart hurts to think what those poor little beings went through, not to mention their parents and siblings. I pray for healing for all of them.
LJ,
As you may remember me telling you, on November 15, 2002, we celebrated my husband’s birthday. My aunt agreed to watch the kids and we went out for a fun night together. Getting home at 1 am, hubby a little tipsy, my aunt greeted us at the door with a look on her face I will never forget.
“You need to call 9-1-1. I was just about to call 9-1-1,” she told us panicked. She went on to tell us how Eve made a scream, a high pitched, arched back horrific scream like she had never heard before. She thought she was being stabbed. When she raced to her to comfort her, she eventually stopped, but it was more like passing out. She collapsed in her arms, my aunt not even sure if she was breathing. That’s when we walked in.
When we got to her, she looked like she was peacefully sleeping. It was hard to imagine anything was ever wrong, let alone a few minutes before. I paged the pediatrician who told us it was probably ear pain (we were a month away from ear tube surgery after 10 ear infections that year), to monitor the situation, and to go to the ER if we thought it was necessary.
Matt was drunk. It was late. My three year old was sleeping. Eve looked fine. My aunt, however, was shaken to her core. “I’ve raised 2 children,” she said. “I’ve helped raise six nieces and nephews. I am telling you, something is wrong. I have never heard that before.”
We stayed home. The next few weeks went by, and then I noticed something. Eve’s head had changed shape. It was even bigger than when I noticed it a year before. And worst of all, one night getting out of the bath, it dawned on me…when was the last time I saw her smile? Say a word?
We tickled her, wiggled her, made silly faces. Nothing. She looked right through us. Eve was officially gone. Three weeks to the day after her MMR and 3 other shots for her 18 month visit, while on her 9th or 10th round of antibiotics (augmentin, mind you), and my baby’s brain could take no more. A body full of mercury, viruses, other metals, and medicine…and 18 months was all she could take.
I have often thanked God I wasn’t there for that scream. Because I’m not sure I would ever sleep again if I had been.
Julie
We brought my son home from the hospital. The next morning we called my mom (who lived two blocks away). “The baby won’t stop crying”, we told her. We were at wits end. She chuckled and said she’d come right over. The cute new baby cries she expected were instead bone jarring screams. She was visibly shook. She had three kids, so she was no novice….
I hear that scream and my heart hurts. Its another one, another damaged child. If my son is with me, I can’t stop to offer help — he can’t handle distress or conflict or loud talking — the fluorescent lights and noises of the store, along with my voice quietly, calmly telling him what we’re doing next, are as much as he can handle… on a good day. We are blessed in that many of the store employees we see have been around long enough to have witnessed the worst of our store experiences years ago (during a time for us that was chock full of the worst of what autism has to offer) and I can almost feel the warm thoughts and good wishes sometimes now. I still need them. And I know the mom of that screaming child on the other aisle does, too.
I remember the scream. My stomach is in knots reading this. They cry for hours and hours on end, with no outward sign of pain. The only sign is the scream.
I remember changing his diaper, trying to nurse him, burp him, anything to help. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I called my mother-in-law. She told me to put him in the crib and go sit outside. He screamed inside while I sat on the steps outside and cried with him. There were many days like this.
When will people wake up and realize what is happening to these precious children?
I pray they see the truth before it happens to them.
Jan
Thank you for raising my consciousness, Lisa. I have not encountered this situation yet, but when I do, I will understand and reach out. Bless you.
LJ- THAT scream still unearths me to my core. I think I literally am surviving post traumatic stress disorder from THAT scream. It doesn’t matter which one of the 4 do it, it takes me back to the terror of the earliest of times that I have emotionally suppressed to just carry on. I will never forget when my oldest child screamed for 12 HOURS STRAIGHT at 2 weeks old; the pedatrician told me to just give her tylenol…. “it wont hurt her” he assured me after the obvious came back negative. My baby, now 4 and still limited verbally was in the ER with THAT scream and an impacted bowel this past week. And she just happens to have mercury in her small intestine. Not even her own mercury, but the mercury her father and I gave her… This is a sick and demented world. HOW MANY SCREAMING CHILDREN WILL IT TAKE? FOR THE WHITE COATS TO WAKE UP AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY?
I spend hours every day trying to prevent this from happening. It’s what I do. Thank you for being there. You are amazing
O God, I remember that scream….blood curdling, ear piercing, the type of scream that makes you think a life is in danger..and really it is. It has made me highly sensitive to ALL screaming, this fear creeps up on me and this, ANXIETY. It initiates MY flight or fight response…and I have hard time deciding which to do, because many times I want to run away.
I have heard that scream. I know what you’re talking about even though I don’t have a child who is sick with vaccine injuries. I know the scream because I heard it in the grocery store a while back, a piercing, out-of-body, alien wail that is unlike anything I’ve heard in the best of the best sci-fi horror films. The sound came from the other side of the store, but I knew. I knew what it was immediately, because I’ve read so much about it, learned so much from the warrior moms who go through this day in, day out, and talk about it in blogs like this. When it started in the store, the screaming seemed to go on forever, although it actually was only a few minutes while the mom got the stuff she was there to get, and then tried to get out as quickly as she could.
We crossed paths as she pushed her cart, filled with a screeching child about 3 or 4 years old, about four packages of diapers and other stuff I didn’t take time to do inventory on. I moved into the next check-out over from her. The gal behind me said very loudly, “Why doesn’t she just drop everything and get that brat out of here?”
There was a time I probably would have agreed, but I’ve learned a thing or two since I’ve been on Facebook. So instead I turned around and said, “I think maybe he has autism. I’m not sure, but I’ve heard sometimes they act like that.”
The other gal wasn’t satisfied. “Well if you can’t handle them you shouldn’t take them to the store,” she snapped. About that time the mother, who was alternately trying to hold the child down in the cart, while he thrashed around, obviously intent on throwing diaper packages out of the cart as fast as the check-out clerk could put them back in.
The checkout manager ended up calling for carry-out help. They put her stuff in a second cart, and an employee pushed out her purchases while she struggled with her child. By that time I was on my way out, and the gal behind me said loudly, again, “There oughta be a law against letting people like that stay in the store.” I didn’t answer her, but Imdo remember wondering what was the deal with all the diapers– I understand about the diapers now, and Ican guess why it was so important for the mother to make sure she got them before she left the store.
But I also wonder: is there something I could have done, something I could have said — ANYTHING — that could have made it better for that mother as she fought her way through the diaper aisle, to the checkout and out the door? Should I have made a beeline toward the wail, rather than just endure it? Could I have asked her if there was something she needed besides diapers but didn’t get because of the melt-down? Should I have offered to do the rest of her shopping for her? I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know. But I do know she is not alone, and there are going to be many more screeching children in the grocery store, unless this assault on babies comes to an end.
Cindy….This made me cry. Next time, I do believe that you will reach out and offer a hand.
The day my son was doing this in the store, and he was screaming at me in the check-out line…the lady behind me patted me on the shoulder and said “Honey, is there anything I can help with? Let me do something.” I thanked her and said “No, I’m just getting this one thing, but thank you so much.”
When I got outside, kid in truck – still screaming…I waited for her to come out. I thanked her again…this was the first time someone had EVER offered to help us in the seven years I’ve been dealing with it. She hugged me and cried, and let me cry on her shoulder. Turns out she was a special education teacher, she said “Honey, I recognize autism when I see it. I know what this is, I know how hard it is. People need to help moms like you instead of making nasty comments and judging you.” I cried even harder. This woman who did not know me from Adam, this sweet, sweet angel was able to take away so much pain with just a touch.
Next time (and there will be a next time, unfortunately) – I know you will do the same, love. You will make a difference in the life of a mom of a child with a vaccine-injury. Take care.
When this happened I wasn’t sure what to do because I didn’t know if she would be offended. But now I know she most likely would have been grateful, and if it ever happens again, I’ll seek out the scream and try to help.
Cindy…I want to give you a hug right now 🙂 Thank you for sharing your experience. Thank you for your compassion. Thank you for being a beautiful soul <3
Oh Cindy, I was that Momma once, YES offer to help, quietly, without making it seem more than like an everyday event for you….help her. Let her take the child outside while you empty the cart and pay…tell the on lookers to shut up and thank GOD it’s not their child. What I would have given for a minute of kindness and understanding….back when that was my child screaming….
LJ –
I have wanted to tell you how grateful I am that you have a platform to share your writing with your fellow parents that are in this fight. I have been enjoying your pieces for the past couple of weeks (the Keynsian economics ESPECIALLY!!), and look forward to many more. Thank you for putting in to words what so many of us feel.
Sincerely,
Carolyn
non verbal twins w/ severe autism, daughter w/Asperger Syndrome, oldest daughter w/ ADHD/Tourette Syndrome