(1) The two headed baby
(1) The two-headed baby
Good evening,
ladies, and gentlemen, I am inclined to bring your attention a to case that has medical science most baffled.
I have the good fortune of knowing someone close who for personal and professional reasons followed the events and developments of an elderly couple that had a baby who was born with two heads, one of which was dead unfortunately.
This second head, although nearly as well formed as the living one, was not welded upside down on top of his head as in the so called “Homes” cases, but grew out of his neck also, and tilted against his shoulder.
At the hospital, after the birth, when it became certain the living body was in no threat of dying, the doctors considered cutting off the dead part, for aesthetical reasons, but it could not be done. Any attempt would result in hemorrhage and death of the infant. Further, this impossibility would increase over the years as the organism relates and adapts to itself.
Even partial removal proved too dangerous and left mixed feelings as to the aesthetic result. Despite worried doctors and parents, the childbreast fed normally and seemed oblivious of the host. Both parents were in their seventies at the time and had difficulty in ignoring it.
They wished medicine could have made the abstraction for them by completely removing this horrid outgrowth. Anticipating a child at their age was adventurous enough already without this rare birth occurrence.
The excitement of pregnancy turned to anxiety as soon as it got detected on the ultra-sound. Apart from already careful gynecological monitoring because of the mother’s advanced age, more was always waiting to detect complications both to the mother and her fetus. Despite the apparent growth and development, the brain never functioned to even produce a weak wave of activity, even less provoke any reaction whatsoever of any type.
It would never live, talk or be able to do anything except lean against his shoulder. In anxiety and disgust the parents feared the birth and growth of their baby. It was the live birth they feared most of all, being the moment when they would see the child for the first time with their own eyes.
They usually fully expressed this fear in bitter frightening scenarios of what he will look like and how they would fear and despise him. When they were alone at home, curtains drawn, they would hurry to the basement, close the door behind them, shut the lights and agonize over such thoughts crouched in a dark corner.
They had considered abortion or provoking some kind of murderous accident to kill the unborn infant, but their fear of going to hell prevented them from seriously attempting false laboring her pregnancy.
So, her first attempts at breast feeding were admirable enough, even though she wanted to feel nothing of the dead head against her skin. The skin would always be blue purplish or ghastly white, all dependant, and cold, so a towel was wrapped around it tightly with no risk of causing suffocation.
Many times, she fainted to a lengthy coma at the task or would cry and whimper pitifully, but it is admirable and a vast improvement considering her total hysteria at the live birth when she felt the dead head pushing first, she only screamed repeatedly as she flung her arms in all directions and tried to bite and scratch the nurses trying to restrain her. She nearly died and even after the delivery, she wanted nothing to do with the baby.
The father had fainted long before that. He was overcome with a feeling of nausea and illnesses the moment the contractions began and collapsed to the floor. So, I consider her ability to have begun breast feeding as the crucial bounding point between her and her baby. They could have both died eventually for distinct reasons if this process was never assimilated.
The parents slowly got used to it, even though they had no intention of naming it and treating it like a separate entity. The mere touch and sight of it inspired disgust and regret.They were however not the only ones. The child himself began to manifest a curiosity towards his strange companion.
Already from the age of one on, playing at touching the dead head or always having his hands there, was the same. This was particularly trying for the parents. They desperately hated to see his tiny fingers pry their way between the loosened lips to feel the inside of the mouth, the nostrils or when he would play with the eyes and lift the eyelids.
That was terrible as they would lift to reveal full white eyeballs with no iris or pupil, and the lazy dead eyelid skin would fail to close properly down, to everybody's dismay. They considered that when the eyes were fully closed, it looked more comatic-like than cadaveric. Despite all that, they managed to help the child adjust to the increasingly occupying attention of this deadhead.
I do not know if he knew already by then if it was dead or simply unresponsive. He sure seemed preoccupied and aware of something he had difficulty in viewing properly. He certainly was aware that those around him were not like him. Normal life at home was impossible, and they sure wished it could have been different anywhere else.
It would have given them some respite. But the sight of them pushing the stroller attracted enough undue attention to them already, given their age, and the prospect of the baby being seen was truly traumatizing and downright devasting when it did happen.
In those days, sneaking blankets correctly to hide the baby sometimes worked, but when he was running around and being of school age and wanting to play in parks there was no hope of easily concealing his defect anymore. They planted high bushes all around the house to who would gather around from seeing anything.
The mirror soon became the boy’s most prized possession, I suppose no one else found it easy to keep their eyes off it that deadhead, I even wondered if the child would suffer an attention deficit of some sort, as he was the one most ardently at it, in the art of showing awareness of the dead head, and all agreed that we might all do it also if we had been born like that.
The mirror was the only way he could fully inspect the unusual occurrence in more detail since he could as a rule see but what his eyes allowed him to see when he turned his head to the left.
If you saw something like that firsthand, you would understand the surreal nature of the situation and how difficult it was not to stare at it in horrible fascination. Another remarkable particularity of the host is that despite its officially dead character, tooth growth occurred as did hair, mucous secretions, ear wax, morning eye grains and sweat.
The parted lips drooled saliva and had to be wiped constantly.The mother cut the hair, though, with no stylistic intent, she also cleaned the eyes, nose, and ears, but did not brush the teeth. It was explained to her the teeth would painlessly decay away eventually.
This unexpected growth and need for maintenance was not a sign of life at all, however. Baffling as it is, the head was dead and always remained so. As would just about everything in the child’s life prove to be unsettling, a new frightening situation troubled him now at night.
When he would awake, turn his head, and see the dead one, eyes half open, tongue lolling out, he would scream as loud as he could until the parents rushed to his room and reassure him that despite the awful sight he beheld, it was completely harmless and unintentional on its part.
Maybe it did not help that the mother never tried to treat it like a friend, speak to it or say prayers at night for it too. Outside of hygienic care, she always had the utmost disgust for it and acted like it was nonexistent. Maybe it would have sponsored some familiarity between them if she had acted otherwise, but for the moment,
it reached a point where to relieve him of his near-permanent nightly terror they put a cloth bag over it and tied it well so it could not slide off. That worked well for a month until she decided to remove the sac for a quick cleanup check.
He was in the tub at the time and when she removed the bag, they both screamed so hysterically that Grandpa clicked his way nervously up the electric stairs only to faint immediately in the bathroom doorway at the sight.
The head was completely covered in a thick growth of various shades of green and yellow mold that seemed to move on its own. This was a close one, the doctor explained, because the head, although dead, would have completely molded and rotted irreversibly if it had remained covered only a few days longer.
It needed exposure to fresh air to prevent this. In between, before the child could look at it without crying at all, a wooden board was placed between them. This was a particularly trying time for both parents and child.
I guess this is what fostered after that a continuous care, for the rest of his life, for his dead host, knowing how vulnerable it was to decay. The parents were relieved the child appeared to develop something of a relationship with himself. He asked fewer questions that they hated to think about and answer.
They never got a clear answer to what caused him to be born this way. Their parents passed away when he was six, and he moved in with relatives. No family pictures were ever taken of them together. He did not want any of himself and he had a few of his parents. Photography was not a pleasant opportunity for them, and everyone knew why.
Some differences run silently deep and speak for themselves in what they are. I can attest though, through my friends' careful documentation of the facts, that they succeeded in making a positive outlook on life for him possible by seeing to his needs like other children and keeping the freak freaks and morbid curious away and unable to spy.
The calm and discretion also helped them to search for solutions more effectively with what you have to deal with that can’t be easily waved away by resolution or turning your back and walking away.
It is not always simple, and it certainly was particularly challenging for him. Through careful grooming and care of his dead host, he had learned long ago the indispensability of that, a most unexpected development followed in his life.
In his early twenties, when already certain prospects, apparently so taken for granted by the mainstream, aspects of life considered normal, appeared, in his case, largely out of accessible reach on account of this one difference that so set him apart from normal people. Abnormality is not only in the mind. Your looks can also deprive you of human status.
If he could go back and still be a monster, he would ask that it be in his mind that he would set himself apart from the others. His sensibility registered early, that some individuals are horribly monstrous and that their monstrosity involves harming innocent of all ages, oblivious to torment, and social taboos, but on the outside look so ordinary, even often harmless.
Many could walk undetected in society, despite their differences severing them in any way to the others. Physical monstrosities attract on the other hand the human inclination to judge on superficial criteria, individuals who usually harm no one.
This paradox forged a regret he was not born with an undetectable monstrosity instead, though never with the desire to harm anyone. Some people are morbidly attracted to such things. He had a close encounter with just such a person.
As in those years, the care for his host included also shaving it and whatnot, and maybe partially for these reasons, a female friend of the family fell maniacally in love with the dead head. Even before she admitted her feelings, in words, her gestures over the past two years she spent visiting the household were apparent to everyone already.
She increasingly fondled, caressed and gently spoke to the lifeless semblance of the living head, to a point where his embarrassment each time progressively turned to humiliation. She never spoke to the boy, and even appeared less than interested in him. It was exactly as if he was the lifeless host.
She had developed a friendship and familiarity all on her own with the dead one instead filling in the silence between them in her mind with phrases that outdid any harlequin romances. It finally culminated in a serious marriage proposition.
It was met by the child with pain, and he left the room quickly, hearing her shouting after him that he was the one in the way, he should have been amputated at birth, him the living head, he had killed “Fleury” in the womb, his dead head of a brother, out of jealousy.
I recall this part to underline how this was the only time anyone ever gave a name to the head. The thought of doing so had never occurred to him.
He never forgot how it sounded to his ears, how it disturbingly left the lifeless head strangely invested with a life personified with a name, probably in all similarity to when people name a hurricane or something for the sake of practicality, and even then, a hurricane is alive and so are plants, they certainly did more than his host ever did. This is what prompted his total and complete retreat from all human contact.
These reflections founded the basis on which he would continue to reflect, his dead head, away from the majority that shoved him to seclusion in the cracks of his monstrous marginal state, a thing that became a necessity if he wanted to live as long as nature intended him to.
At this point in my narration, someone asked me:
"But was not the elephant man worse off and suffer more?"
His deformity certainly was severe, I answered, but in the end, although we may categorize abnormalities by levels of visible differences acceptable to us, suffering pain in itself is not reserved for deformities and the like.
Although we may quickly sum up the hardships and difficulties of others subjectively, it is rarely of any use to those concerned.
The last word goes to them anyway, to anybody. Only we know for sure how we feel and again, the intensity is best taken for word by those who express it. Anyone who does not is bound to encounter resistance, and in those times, as in all other moments as well, body language speaks on its own.
He could easily read how people felt just by the way they acted around him. My contribution was to make known to you a baffling medical case that has science much perplexed. It is not intended for comparison. I used the knowledge of this case to underline the complexity of issues at stake in something we all share in common, starting life at birth the way we are.
