ThePruneBellyGirl

The doctors' round comes sweeping into the girl's room at Karolinska Hospital At the head, the chief physician and docent N.O. Ericson, accompanied by a whole bunch of medical candidates and nurses who listen attentionally as the chief physician explains that here we have Mariana, and when she stands she looks like a pregnant woman, and when she lies down she looks like a sunked sofa. The candidates laugh.  The associate professor looks pleased.   The mother goes up to the maternity flat and cries.    #ThePruneBellyGirl #PruneBelly #PruneBellySyndrome #rare diseases #survivor #childhood #handicap #autobiography #disability #childrenshospital #karolinska  These poems are originally written in Swedish and translated by myself. So if the translation sounds weird - please just laugh, or cry, or just shake your head and move on to the next poem, hoping for a better translation there... Thank you for your patience, and ...

Go home and make another baby, they don't say. Not explicitly. But still. In a way. In what they don't say but still say impliedly. For this child, this newborn child, the one you just had, the one you made this time, that child is not up to much . Go home and try again.   #ThePruneBellyGirl #PruneBelly #PruneBellySyndrome #rare diseases  #survivor #childhood #handicap #autobiography    These poems are originally written in Swedish and translated by myself. So if the translation sounds weird - please just laugh, or cry, or just shake your head and move on to the next poem, hoping for a better translation there... Thank you for your patience, and for following my story! By the way - my lyrics sometimes sounds weird in Swedish too...  

The mother and the father get a few minutes for themselves with the girl, their newborn daughter, their firstborn daughter, before they take the girl to a hospital in Stockholm. They carefully lift the blanket around their daughter to take a sneak peek at that huge belly that no one really knows yet whether it might contain a tumor. Or something else. Then a nurse comes to pick up the girl with the prune belly. They fold the blanket back. As if guilty. Caught of having looked at their own daughter. They say goodbye. The girl says goodbye. The first goodbye of all the goodbyes that will come.   #ThePruneBellyGirl #PruneBelly #PruneBellySyndrome #rare diseases  #survivor #childhood #handicap #autobiography #separations #newparents    These poems are originally written in Swedish and translated by myself. So if the translation sounds weird - please just laugh, or cry, or just shake your head and move on to the next poem, hop...

A da y old, the girl is taken by air to Stockholm. Carried in a baby bag. A nurse is flying there with her. The mother and the father goes home from the hospital. Without the girl. It will take un til October before she comes home to her parents for the first time. She gets a golden heart in memory of that day. The date is engraved. October 23, 1965. She is three and a half months old. The next day she gets a fever and a cough and has to be hospitalized again.   #ThePruneBellyGirl #PruneBelly #PruneBellySyndrome #rare diseases  #survivor #childhood #handicap #autobiography    These poems are originally written in Swedish and translated by myself. So if the translation sounds weird - please just laugh, or cry, or just shake your head and move on to the next poem, hoping for a better translation there... Thank you for your patience, and for following my story! By the way - my lyrics sometimes sounds weird in Swedish too...   ...

The new-born girl is so pretty and so sweet. And everything is actually normal, looks completely normal. If it weren't for the belly. “ The abdomen is soft and flaccid and appears to lack a muscular wall. To the right of the abdomen the colon is seen with clear peristalsis. To the left a mass of string-shaped resistances. No urethral orifice can be found.” The wrinkled belly looks like a dried plum. The swollen belly looks like an inflated balloon. But without a string to hold it in. But there's no air in the balloon. Not helium either. But what is in the balloon? A tumor? The X-ray only shows - something. A decision is made. To refrain from further investigation, to abstrain any action at the hospital in Umeå. This case is so complicated that it must be referred to another hospital. To a larger hospital. To a hospital far away. To the Crown Princess Lovisa's Children's Hospital. In Stockholm. The girl is not fly...

The year of grace 1965, July 7, by the way, it is Wednesday and the time is 11:13 a.m. At Umeå Hospital, at the maternity ward, a girl is born. A girl with a prune belly. Sixty years later it is time to write her story. The story of the girl with the prune belly. It was about time then. That it was written. Maybe at the last moment.   #ThePruneBellyGirl #PruneBelly #PruneBellySyndrome #rarediseases #survivor #childhood #handicap #autobiography    These poems are originally written in Swedish and translated by myself. So if the translation sounds weird - please just laugh, or cry, or just shake your head and move on to the next poem, hoping for a better translation there... Thank you for your patience, and for following my story! By the way - my lyrics sometimes sounds weird in Swedish too...