They Covered My Head With a Shroud

A story of surviving my own birth and what psychoanalysis has to say about it.

If a person truly wants to live, medicine is powerless.

Even if that person is only eight months into fetal development. Even if the medical chart predicts immediate death or lifelong disability.

I was the second child. Throughout her “complicated” pregnancy, doctors told my mother directly: “You already have a son. Let’s just do an abortion.”

She listened. She nodded. And she stubbornly stayed in the hospital to save the pregnancy.

Medicine didn’t back down.

Doctors sent her for an ultrasound in a larger city because our provincial hospital didn’t have those “magical devices” yet. There, a group of professors — a commercial quantity of 23 people — stared in dead silence at a tiny black-and-white monitor. Finally, the most authoritative, bearded one delivered the verdict:

“It’s definitely spina bifida.” They continued to press aggressively, claiming no one was interested in such a child. My mother remained steadfast. She stoically carried me to term.

June 14, 1988. After eating strawberries my father had brought her, she went straight from the ward to the delivery room.

A C-section under general anesthesia, followed by surgery to remove tumors that medicine had somehow missed. My birth, while a miracle, didn’t cause much of a stir.

Except for one thing.

A nurse happened to be there, covering a shift for a colleague who was a friend of my grandmother. When the “other” medicine heard silence instead of a cry, they took it as confirmation. They set me aside on a metal table and covered my head with a shroud.

But the inquisitive nurse lifted the cloth and gasped: “Call the pediatrician! The girl is alive, she’s breathing on her own!”

My “spina bifida” turned out to be a conjoined twin. We were fused at the buttocks. He was much smaller and very weak. He didn’t survive.

Later, medicine called him a teratoma.

But my ubiquitous grandmother, who understood everything without a diagnosis, used her position as a surgical nurse in another hospital to see the results of the operation. Her conclusion was simple:

It was a formed baby. Not a “set of fragments.”

After the separation surgery, plastic reconstruction, and two months in neonatal ICU, I went home with a hefty scar on my butt.

And the name Victoria (victory).

Though for some reason, everyone always called me Vita (life).

Psychoanalysts like Wilhelm Reich and Karen Horney believed the birth experience is vital to how we build relationships with ourselves and the world.

A negative experience — painful, helpless, lacking the mother’s presence — is said to cast doubt on an adult’s ability to be active or intimate. These traumas supposedly turn people into unhappy neurotics riddled with internal conflicts.

I live consciously. I value people and I trust the world.

Not without “psychoanalytic nuances,” of course.

For instance: I love the smell and the look of strawberries. But I am absolutely not a fan of the taste.

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