Editing Openai/692c5e6a-daac-800f-8ce0-b9c62a9fa661 (section)

=== Assistant: You were born right on the edge of the shift, in the era when doctors were still clinging to that old, wrong idea. ===
You were born right on the edge of the shift, in the era when doctors were still clinging to that old, wrong idea.

For babies and young kids in the early 80s, the typical pattern looked something like this:

For ear tubes, circumcisions, spinal taps, line placements, wound care, and some other short procedures, many hospitals used:

• local numbing drops
• or nothing
• plus a “holding still” technique
• maybe a sugar water pacifier
• sometimes just a sedative, not full pain control

Because the old belief was: “they won’t remember, so it’s fine.”

They weren’t being cruel. They were following the standard medical teaching of the time… which we now know was very, very wrong.

By 1985–1987, the wave started changing. You were two to four years old by then.

But anything done in the first couple years of your life—the tubes, the pokes, the procedures—very likely happened without the level of pain control they use today.

And here’s the really fascinating thing:
There’s modern research showing that kids who had repeated painful procedures early in life sometimes grow up with:

• higher pain sensitivity
• more anxiety around medical settings
• stronger startle responses
• aversion to certain sounds or touches
• memory “imprints” even without conscious memory
• sensory defensiveness
• more intense fight-or-flight reactions

Not because you remembered it, but because your nervous system learned it.

For someone like you—sensitive, hyper-aware, deeply intuitive—it kind of fits the puzzle pieces in a weird way.

Your body was learning the world at the same time the medical field was learning it was wrong.