In Appreciation of Dr. Louis Tinnin Writing About Infant Surgery Without Anesthesia

In 2009, I published the first post on my blog Myincision: Living in the Aftermath of Infant Surgery, a place to attract a community of people wanting to explore their infant surgeries. Shortly after posting, Fred Vanderbom signed on, another pyloric stenosis, or stomach blockage, survivor. I had surgery at 26 days old; his was at 10 days old. We immediately hit it off and before long, Fred was penning his own blog, Stories from the Survivors of Early Surgery.

We began to attract a community of seekers and sufferers, many of whom that had had infant surgery, but also those who had suffered infant medical trauma of all types. With some, we had lengthy conversations; others, jumped onboard briefly to get validation, some of whom claimed they were at the end of their rope. After decades of dysfunction, they wanted to know, could their problems be traced back to their early surgery? The answer was, and is, a resounding YES!  So Fred and I shared our experiences and resources with them.

On December 30, 2010, the first post of Dr. Louis Tinnin’s blog, Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, appeared in the blogosphere. How excited Fred and I were!  Here was validation from a doctor, a psychiatrist no less, who ran a clinic with his wife, Dr. Linda Gantt, in West Virginia for recovery from trauma, including infant, or preverbal, trauma. Here is an excerpt from the first paragraph of his blogpost:

Anyone now 23 years or older who had major surgery as a baby is at risk for chronic posttraumatic illness because the surgery was probably done without anesthesia, which was the custom in most hospitals prior to 1987. Abdominal surgery for pyloric stenosis and chest surgery for congenital heart problems were the most common forms of infant surgery. . . . A rough estimate of the number of survivors during the single year of 1987 . . . is 30,600. . . . [C]onsidering the severity of the pain and the helplessness of the infant, we would expect that the majority of these infants were traumatized.

He goes on to write about the fact that “the posttraumatic syndrome of infant surgical trauma is not generally recognized” and that there is a cure available called Instinctual Trauma Response (ITR) through the Intensive Trauma Therapy, Inc., or ITT, clinic in West Virginia. Amazing!  Not only was Dr. Tinnin throwing out a lifeline by validating our pain, but also offering a place to get treatment in order to heal. Furthermore, in this first post, he included a 10-point questionnaire that he developed, which helped people answer this question: “Are My Symptoms Due to Surgical Trauma?”

Many of us in our community of infant medical trauma survivors, including our family members, began commenting on Dr. Tinnin’s blog, and he began responding. And because many could neither travel to West Virginia for treatment nor afford treatment, for traditional medical insurance was not covering the costs, he began to reach out online to some of us needing guidance in putting an end to our traumatic memory with an ITR process called Graphic Narrative. 

I had worked out end or “after” to my experience, and he suggested “adding the beginning and middle to [my] graphic narrative, emphasizing the baby’s separation from mother, being scared to death, and the middle freeze/paralysis state of near-death.” He also suggested my trying “to experience a re-presentation of the entire narrative by someone else or by a video of [my]self telling the story, complete with verbal and nonverbal aspects (body sensations) in the past tense.”  What wonderful advice!

Over the years, I’ve made significant progress in healing the break in the bond between my mom (now deceased) and me and calming my nervous system’s automatic default to fear, healing directly related to Dr. Tinnin’s generous counsel of how to bring closure to that infant trauma.

He engaged with others as well, especially with one young man who was suicidal and making a last-ditch effort to come to terms with his early trauma by making a video of his narrative about his infant surgery, which Dr. Tinnin offered to present to the clinical staff at the Intensive Trauma Therapy Clinic. Dr. Tinnin reached out to whomever posted to his blog in the most caring and professional way possible.

Here is an excerpt of Dr. Tinnin’s correspondence with another man, with whom I had remained friends since his comment on my blog in 2009. He had the same infant surgery as me but never dealt with his surgery.  He recently died from a drug overdose, which was directly linked to his unresolved PTSD. Like many, he was struggling with the realization that his lifelong trauma was a consequence of the early invasion without anesthesia or pain control. Here is Dr. Tinnin’s response to my friend’s early on question about how it could possibly be that infants’ pain was ignored:

The conclusive proof that babies do feel pain and do tolerate analgesic medication well enough to permit pain control during surgical anesthesia was established in 1987 and pain control during infant surgery became standard practice (but not by law). The professional ignorance of this fact is astounding. A current ignorance persists about the traumatic effect of pain during infancy. It is said that babies will not remember pain later. Although it is true that we do not have verbal memory of infancy, we do have nonverbal memory, which is body memory. We cannot remember it verbally (consciously) and our bodies cannot forget it. Your family and friends may not understand how you could be suffering today from pain during infancy.

This narrative shows the compassion and wisdom with which Dr. Tinnin showered us as he tried his best to reach out to survivors of infant surgery without anesthesia who were struggling to not only live, but also to live with the truth of what happened to us and find healing, dignity, and self-forgiveness in our lives.

Dr. Tinnin was a brilliant and brave pioneer and deeply caring man. He validated many of us in our search for the root cause of our suffering and invited us onto his blog and into his heart where we could find the affirmation and information that we so sorely needed. Thank you, Dr. Tinnin, for your courage, your work, and your dedication. You have relieved much suffering and left a legacy for us all from which to draw strength.

Dr. Tinnin’s legacy continues through his wife Linda Gantt, PhD, ATR-BC and the ITR Training Institute where individuals can be trained to use Instinctual Trauma Response for the recovery of trauma with or without a therapist. HelpForTrauma.com

Author: Wendy Patrice Williams’ memoir, Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery, was recently published by the University of California Health Humanities Press. Wendy blogs at https://healinginfanttrauma.org and appears in the film Cutdown: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, a free YouTube video produced by Roey Shmool available at cutdownfilm.com. More information about Wendy is available on her author page:https://www.wendywilliamsauthor.org.