You told me about how you were hurting from a muscle relaxant and started crying, and the doctors said you were making a scene. Well, what did they expext?!? They were doing things that hurt you. Trying to heal you, yes. But hurting you in the process.

I face the reality of having to deal with these people on a regular basis. A person with CP needs a team of specialists and because of deep-seated awful feelings, I am not seeing them regularly, because it brings back unpleasant memories. Occupational therapists, physiotherapists, doctors, nurses, seating clinics. I associate fear with all of them, because when I dealt with them, physical torment was not far behind.

I underwent regular operations and physiotherapy, some of it brutal. I forced to undergo pool therapy when suffering from fear of drowning so severe, I wanted to run away. I did run away one night and hide in a change room, I got reprimanded and yelled at for that.

I cried, I screamed, I probably resisted in other ways when I wasn't crying or screaming. My parents said something like I was making a scene. My father screamed at me for crying. They sent me off to a psychiatric institute for one and a half years for "non-compliance". That basically saying "We're locking our child up for a year and a half because she's been bad." My parents say I refused to be helped and was kicked out. They are still angry and bitter and will not sit down with me and a psychiatrist to talk things out because it's "all been done before."

They made me out to be the bad seed from hell, but I wasn't trying to make their lives miserable. In some instances, I was reacting to what was going on around me and in others, I was just being a normal kid. Kids will sometimes hit their siblings and not want to play with their little sister because they're cramping their style. My sister would run to my mother, tell her and then my mother would say: "You're lucky your sister wants to play with you, most siblings wouldn't want to play with disabled children."

Now maybe there's some truth to that statement, but a nine year old kid isn't ready for the truth. They told me that I was going to be abandoned by my own friends on a regular basis and from the way they were screaming at me, they were looking like they were rejecting me. Screaming and bitterness is not the hallmark of an understanding parent, compassion is. It's OK to punish a kid, but if they're still punishing themselves well into adulthood for things they did as a child....Houston, we have a problem.

So I stopped crying and screaming, just took everything in what appeared to be good-natured silence. Because my parents told me to be a "good patient". That includes not making a scene. But the terror remains, so I avoid the medical doctors completely. Now I have no choice, but to deal with them, and IT MAKES ME SICK TO MY STOMACH.

Psychiatrists are less culpable. The idiots that dealt with me in the institute did almost as much damage as the med docs, because they didn't understand me and I didn't understand them. I have been trying to understand and think like them ever since.

Besides, psych docs deal with the mind. not the body. If they take great care, the bodily damage they will inflict on you will be minimal. In the event of drugs and treatments that cause harmful side effects, there should be a greater respect for these in the psychiatric doctor community, because many people will not seek treatment because of them. My activist friend, named Sue, refuses to deal with psychiatrists at all, because her memory was destroyed by electroshock therapy, there is medical proof for the fact that her memory is destroyed. She's even counselled me not to deal with them. I was trying to explain my new diagnosis to her and she said beware of labels. I stopped explaining myself in terms of diagnosis and started explaining myself in how I felt and reacted to things, using the symptom list from Psych Central.

The thing is: I researched my "label" and went through the list one thing at a time, to determine if what they were telling me was hogwash or not and what I found, not only confirmed the diagnosis, it actually helped make a lot of sense of my life, like why I was systematically tearing down social supports needed to recover from depression. And other behaviors, some of which caused me grief with my family.

There is a thing more crippling than cerebral palsy: the prison of your own mind.