Mariane Perreault

For as long as I can remember I loved writing... I wrote journals to help me remember, stories, songs, poems... writing about this now is very difficult. A part of me needs to share my truth, another part of me wants to curl up in a ball and die like I did many times during the VCUG tests. I can remember the pain, the fear, the despair, the shame, the feeling of myself fading away... I had my first test at six months old and the last VCUG test when I was six years old. My childhood felt like a never ending walking the plank. Im sure you can imagine what it did to my psyche, my body, my soul... I don't know a life without the effects of this test... I remember what it felt like to black out and leave my body... I remember watching myself from across the room, I can still hear my screams echoing and the coward conductors scattering away like roaches once the test was done, once they got their pictures that showed functioning everything. Based on my medical records it is unclear how many VCUG tests I experienced but I know it was a couple too many. I remember looking up at my mother in despair...she who was frozen I knew wouldn't do anything to stop them. For as long as I can remember, I was told these tests were for my own good and they weren't suppose to hurt nor be a big deal... so I was expected to suck it up and act like it was nothing. And that's what I did. Except, I was completely broken inside. Dissociation became my best friend, chronic pain and severe anxiety became my normal... I felt like something was severely wrong with me but I did not have the words to express myself as a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 year old. I did my best to appear normal and fit in with everyone else. Unfortunately my parents never validated my experiences, they pushed it under the rug... punished me for struggling and suffering. To this day they claim to not have known I was suffering so deeply. If the medical people said it wouldn't hurt, then in their eyes it did not hurt me and therefore I was just being difficult. Ive been struggling with flash backs and constant vaginal pain my entire 32 years of life... and still I would tell myself things like 'oh it was just a little test.They said it wouldn't hurt. It's just you. Get over it. No big deal. It was for your own good. bla bla bla'. The last test I experienced when I was six, I remember so clearly...I yelled so loudly I felt like I lost my voice in the ethers. My father said he heard me screaming from the waiting room...I died of shame and dissociated instantly after the test. I just remember lying there during and just feeling myself dying from within... feeling myself fading away into compliance... helplessness, hopelessness, total darkness. After the test we went to Wal-Mart, I came back for a moment and I blacked out again while entering the store when I looked up at my parents and they were completely disconnected, they did not see me. Everything faded to black. I wonder where I would go? Where do we go when we dissociate so hard? Protector parts of myself must have taken over because I was seemingly okay enough that no one would have known what I'd experienced during the summer break. Because of this test I also fell victim to molestations in my childhood and later in my early 20s...3 rapes that took me years to realize it was even considered rape. I just remember thinking, 'Im such a dirty slut I just slept with someone I did not want to have sex with' 'I said no but it must have been my fault because of my cute outfit' or 'Why was I frozen? Why couldn't I move, scream, push him off? Why was I watching from the ceiling unable to move?' It took me so long to understand my mind, my body... thank goodness my soul was not completely lost...shattered, scattered perhaps... nevertheless, I was able to keep a glimpse of light in my heart... I was a passionate, creative, talented child despite everything... I am grieving now my stolen childhood, what I could have accomplished by now if I would have known what I was really dealing with. I believed I was a defect, a monster, disgusting and broken. I was diagnosed with major depression and social anxiety in my late 20s... really I think they are just symptoms of CPTSD and perhaps DID, undiagnosed of course because in the medical and mental health field, they still don't seam to understand the impacts of this violating test. It's very suspicious to me how all said 'professionals' just shrug it off. I went to the clinic countless times about vaginal pain... they never connected the dots... from before I could even remember to this day almost on the daily it feels like my vagina is on fire, like a debilitating migraine between my legs. For me it wasn't necessarily the catheter that was the worst part... yes it hurt like hell fire when the conductors shoved it up my urethera so violently, I will never forget, the worst part for me, the part that really did me out, was the filling of the bladder... no words to describe what happens in the human body when this is done. Anyone who performs this test on a child should go to jail for life. Anyone who does this test regularly should have to experience it themselves. At least this way they could offer proper care before, during and after to the patients. Studies have been held, practitioners know the devastating side effects and yet it remains the bullshit golden standard. Mark my words there will be hell to pay. The thought that children as still undergoing this test makes me want to barf. I am tempted to go to every hospital, break down the doors and stop these psychos. I was a perfectly healthy baby and they took me as an experiment. They scrambled my brain and put my nervous system into permanent flight or fight. I wasn't strong enough to fight or flight, I learned to freeze and fawn. I want to finish off by saying I am very angry and very thankful for the UNSILENCED MOVEMENT for giving us a platform to express ourselves about this very real, uncomfortable and under the radar medical trauma. I was silenced for way too long... now it's game over for all the 'trained professionals' who referred me over and over and fucken over again for unnecessary VCUGs. GAME OVER!