Part 9: Finally Seen, Finally Believed
“For the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants.” —Psalm 135:14
I never got to start fourth grade.
According to my surgical records, I was admitted to the hospital just before the school year began. For years, I remembered it differently. Trauma has a way of rearranging timelines. But the records are clear.
I didn’t walk into a classroom that fall. I didn’t sit beside my friend Stacy. In fact, I wouldn’t see her again until junior high school.
Instead of a new lunchbox and sharpened pencils, I began that year in a hospital gown.
My mom had reached a breaking point. Year after year, she had watched me try to become continent—to stop wearing diapers, to “succeed” in a way doctors insisted was simply a matter of effort. She has told me many times since that she finally realized, “If you could have done it, you would have done it a long time ago.”
She was exhausted. Frustrated. And beginning to suspect something wasn’t adding up.
So she took me to see a new specialist—a man whose name I would never forget: Dr. Alfred DeLorimier, Chief of Pediatric Surgery at UCSF.
He has since passed away, but he changed my life. Not just medically. Emotionally. Spiritually. He saw me in a way no one else had.
I remember sitting in the exam room beside my mother. I don’t recall my dad being there. My memory goes blank in that space, which tells me he likely wasn’t. My mother, though, was right next to me—tense, hopeful, bracing.
They handed me a gown. I lay on my side as he explained he would perform a diagnostic test.
It did not feel simple.
He inserted a small probe and asked me to pretend I needed to use the bathroom and hold it. I tried. I closed my eyes. I concentrated with everything in me. I tried again. And again.
I wasn’t just cooperating. I was performing. Trying to produce the right response. Trying to prove something. Trying to please—like I always did.
Afterward, he performed a brief digital exam. Then he did something I have never forgotten.
He closed his hand into a tight fist and held it in front of us.
“This is what a healthy sphincter muscle does when it is activated. It closes.”
Then he slowly opened his hand.
“Now imagine that muscle has been cut in two. When you try to contract it, instead of closing, it opens.”
That was what was happening inside my body.
Every time my brain sent the signal—hold it, squeeze, try harder—the muscle responded in the opposite way. The very effort that should have produced control was producing the reverse result.
It was not weakness. It was not lack of discipline. It was not immaturity.
It was damaged anatomy—most likely the result of surgical injury during one of my earlier reconstructive procedures.
There is something devastating about realizing that what felt like failure was actually structural damage. All the striving, all the concentrating, all the desperate effort had never stood a chance.
I was not disobedient. I was injured.
What makes that moment heavier is this: my mother had questioned my original surgeon more than once. She told him something did not seem right. She asked whether there could be another explanation. She expressed concern that I was trying and not succeeding.
Each time, she was reassured.
We were told I would learn—that it was a matter of discipline, cooperation, trying harder. This simple diagnostic exam—the one that took only minutes—was never performed. No one stopped to ask whether the issue might not be effort at all.
I am not suggesting harm was intentional. But dismissal has consequences.
Years passed. Years in which I was pushed to try harder. Years in which I blamed myself. Years in which shame rooted itself deep inside my developing identity.
You do not need a courtroom to know when something has gone wrong.
My mother’s face that day is etched into my memory: shock, remorse, relief, grief—layered together.
I didn’t know Psalm 135:14 at ten years old. But that appointment became vindication. Truth surfaced after years of confusion, shame, and misplaced blame.
For the first time, I felt relief, validation, and a quiet, boiling anger. Relief because someone finally understood me. Validation because I had always sensed something wasn’t right. Anger because I had carried shame for something I never had the physical ability to control.
But anger was not an emotion I had permission to express. So I buried it.
I sat there on the crinkled paper of that exam table, absorbing a truth that would take decades to fully unravel: nothing was ever wrong with my character. Something had been wrong with my body. And no one had known—not even me.
Something settled inside me that day:
I was never the problem.
And yet I cannot help but think about the years that passed before that truth was spoken aloud.
Five years before kindergarten. Then kindergarten. First grade. Two years of second grade. Third grade. Nearly fourth.
All of it in diapers.
Back then, parents did not often question their doctors. My mom trusted medical authority. That was the culture. I am not angry at my parents. They were doing what they believed was right with the information they had.
Still, I am baffled by how long it took.
Picture a five-year-old. Then that same child in first grade. Then second. Then third. Imagine them carrying something visible that sets them apart. Imagine them absorbing the looks, the whispers, the cruelty. Imagine the quiet conclusions forming about their worth.
It is a long time.
During those years, beliefs about my value and ability took root. What began as confusion hardened into identity. Those thoughts embedded themselves deep inside me.
And it would take many years to untangle them.
Another surgery was scheduled—one that promised to change everything. To make me normal. To free me from diapers. To silence the cruelty. To remove the visible marker that had separated me from everyone else for as long as I could remember.
To give me the life I had so desperately longed for.
I was afraid. But this time, hope was stronger than fear.
This felt like a new horizon—one that promised I could walk into school like every other child.
I believed I would be accepted.
I believed the shame would finally lift.
I believed vindication would be mine.
For the first time in my life, I felt as though the truth had finally been revealed, and I went into that surgery certain this would be a turning point.
But what does vindication really look like?
What happens when the truth finally comes to light after years of misunderstanding?
And how does it shape a child’s heart to discover that she was never the problem to begin with?
In the devotional that follows, I want to reflect on what it means to be seen, believed, and vindicated by God—especially after carrying shame that was never ours to bear.