A man can become something he never expected. I have lived most of my adult life as a cowboy. I’ve traveled through a good portion of my life on the back of a horse. Considered slow as a child because of severe dyslexia, my choices were few. After high school graduation, I eventually moved into a bunkhouse, lived close to the earth and slowly learned I was a creative man with grit. I became a horseshoer for 30 years. The technique of hot-shoeing led to blacksmithing. Later, discarded horseshoes in the heat of my forge became metal sculptures of horses.
For the past almost four years, I’ve written my memoir about 3 years of my life spent on the island of Okinawa with my family during the height of the Vietnam War during the early 1970s. I was a Air Force brat.
My dyslexia is so bad, that the only way I can write is with Dragon voice recognition software. My wife (she was my girlfriend when I started writing) edited it alongside me. It was a long haul of daily conversations about the smallest of details. For that, I am grateful. We got on so well, we decided to marry.
Here’s an excerpt from my book. In this chapter, I tell how the US Military used me as a test subject for dyslexia. I was 10 years old.
Chapter 15: I become a military experiment -
Excerpt by Tolley Marney with Cristina Acosta, copyright 2020. All Rights Reserved. Permission to copy MUST by in writing and signed by the Author(s).
Back in Camarillo, my mother took me to the Oxnard Air Force base hospital twice a week to have the doctors suck blood out of me for testing. They told me the treatments were to help me read. They worked so hard on me that I thought I was dying of a mystery disease and they didn’t want to tell me.
Besides the bi-weekly blood draws, once a month I peed in a cup and they tested my urine. The absolute worst part was the quarterly brain scan called an EEG test, or Electroencephalograph.
Every three months, they made me do the EEG test. After a blood draw, a nurse, who was always a woman, led me through a different door that led deeper into the hospital. I walked alone down a long corridor, following her to a large room that was a little bigger than my school classroom with a high ceiling about two stories tall. The walls and high ceiling were completely white and smooth. The hard floor was plain concrete. The air was cold, as though the chill of an early winter morning in Southern California was permanently trapped in the large room. The scent of bleach was subtle. A steel metal table, longer than my father was tall, was about twenty feet from a big machine on a platform ten feet above the table. The platform was the size of my school bus. A white steel railing surrounded the edge of the platform and connected it to a second story doorway.
The entire machine was a big shiny steel square with lights and levers on a front panel about the size of my dresser. There was nothing else in the room except the machine and the steel table.
The nurse led me to the center of the room and motioned to me to climb onto the table. She left the room without a word, leaving me alone. A doctor entered the room, striding purposely to the steel table where I sat. The doctor ordered me to lay down on the cold table and keep my head still. He held my head briefly in both hands, adjusting the angle of my skull on the top of my neck. He didn’t look into my eyes when he touched me. Again, he admonished me to not move.
He reached over to a tray layered with small metal items, picked one from the group and with his left hand cradling my head, he pushed the sharpened end of a steel electrode into the flesh of my skull. His left hand countered the pressure of each puncture. The doctor pierced my skin deeply enough with the sharp steel point that the electrode stayed stuck to my head. When I flinched, which I always did with the first electrode, he would repeat his admonishment.
“Be still.”
The doctor inserted eight to ten sharpened steel electrodes into my skull by slowly pressing each electrode through my skin in the pattern of a headband going around the top third of my skull with a few on the top of my head.
He then connected each electrode to a long thin cable about 30 feet long, leading to the control panel of the large machine. With each connection, the pain around my head spiked. I learned to block the pain into a blur. I tried to think of other things, but I never could. The immediate pain scared me every time.
The doctor insisted that I not move a muscle. When I flinched, he again ordered me to be still. He never offered me anesthetic or any kind of numbing gel.
When he was done forming my crown of steel electrodes he ordered me to lay completely motionless for an hour. He sternly reminded me to not swallow or put my teeth together for the entire 60 minutes. The he left the room to reemerge out of the second story door onto the platform with the machine. He stood at the control panel, looking down at me on the steel exam table. With a curt nod, he signaled to me that he was starting the timer for the test.
With my body flat on the table my saliva pooled in the back of my throat. I spent every waking second trying not to gag, move or let my teeth touch.
When I moved the first time the Doctor would yell, “Stop that!” without a glance towards me.
When I moved a second time the Doctor would glare down at me then shrug, then say, “We’re starting over.” He moved some of the controls and the timer started again at the beginning.
I lay on that cold metal table with the doctor standing above me, working the controls of the machine until the full hour to hour and a half had passed. The large ticking clock timer was the only sound in the room.
Towards the end of the testing time, tears formed, then spilled from my eyes. Most times, I started clicking my teeth together in the Morse Code pattern of SOS hoping someone would hear me and save me. Or maybe the doctor would stop.
Short, short, short, long, long, long, short, short, short, I clicked my teeth. The doctor ignored my SOS at the end of the timed hour. When the buzzer went off, the doctor exited the platform through the second floor door and returned to the lower level of the room to stand by my body. He rarely spoke. He leaned over me, inspecting the electrodes to be sure than none of them had loosened and fallen out during the test. They were always securely fastened into my flesh.
His expertise assured, the doctor separated the cords from the electrodes still stuck in my head. Then he held a cotton square in his left hand and reached for an electrode. Each electrode popped out with a soft sucking sound like someone was plunging a sink. I felt the blood trickle from every place an electrode had pierced my skin. If I reached for my head, the doctor stopped me with a grunt and pushed my hand back to the table.
When he was done, he turned his back to me to dispose of the blood soaked cotton squares, then walked from the room without a word. He left me laying on the table with my arms at my side. Like a reclined Frankenstein’s monster at attention, I lay unmoving, awaiting the next command.
About ten minutes later, I heard the door open and the same nurse entered. Her footsteps clicked across the concrete floor to the steel table.
“Its time to go,” She said. She didn’t touch me or say more. She rarely made eye contact with me.
With that statement, I rose from the exam table and swung my legs around. My legs dangled over the side about 12 inches from the floor. That 12 inches became a cliff that threw me into despair. By then, I was too light headed to jump off of the table, so I turned onto my belly and scooted off until my feet touched the ground. I wobbled for a moment before I could stand. The nurse nodded her head towards the nearest door.
Then she stepped ahead of me, escorting me wordlessly out of the room. I followed her as she backtracked her way to the waiting room. I always felt worse at the end of the tests. More than from any physical pain or weakness, I was in despair.
I knew that if the doctor had found what was wrong with me, he would’ve been happy with me and said something. His silence confirmed that I had failed his tests. I was the unloved and unwanted Frankenstein’s monster. I would never be cured.
My mother met me in the waiting room at the end of each session. On the days I got the EEG done, she held me at arms length by the shoulders, assessing my appearance with the eye of a professional beauty expert.
Without a word, she moved her hands over my head, wetting her finger with saliva when she found a scab to wipe from one of the small puncture wounds. Taking a comb from her purse, she arranged my straight hair over the punctures, using more saliva to keep my hair in place.
When she was done, she stood back from me to assess her work, then smiled with satisfaction. She turned from me without a sound, expecting me to follow her back to the car. I slipped into the front passenger seat. We rode silently back to the house where she dropped me at the front door. She returned to work. For the rest of the day my head hurt, a throbbing pulsing pain.
I roamed around the empty house looking for a snack. There was rarely any food. Sometimes I went back and forth to the refrigerator, opening it every few minutes to see if food had magically appeared. I tried to find something on TV to get my mind off of the pain in my head and the hunger in my stomach.
End of Chapter 15. I am looking for an agent and publisher. If you have any leads, please contact me and I will follow through.