LISTENING, LISTEN TO YOUR WISE SELF, LET YOUR INNER COMPASS DIRECT THE COURSE OF YOUR LIFE.


Trauma seals boy's eyes shutAFPSeptember 07, 2004
VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia: Six-year-old Robert stirs on his hospital bed. He hears and understands what is said to him, but refuses to open his eyes. He calls out for his dead mother.Relatives surround his bed, unable to hold back their tears each time he calls for her. They say she saved him by letting him out of a window at the Beslan school.
It was supposed to have been a great day for Robert, his first at school. Five days later he is here, a bullet wound in the stomach. In a state of acute shock, he will need long-term therapy.
The relatives are joined by paediatric psychologists Zara Arbieva and Dina Guluieva, doing the rounds at the children's hospital in this southern Russian city, where most of the young victims of the three-day siege have been brought.
"So many of these children have lost their mother. This will make their recovery longer and more difficult," Dr Arbieva says.

For outsiders, what the children in this hospital have been through is unimaginable. Held by armed militants for three days without water and food, they were barely able to breathe in the crowded, stuffy school gymnasium that was their prison.
But the manner of their escape was even more traumatic. Rushing out of the collapsed building into a storm of gunfire, witnessing the bloody horror of severed limbs, exposed innards, mothers screaming for their children.
For Robert, whose mother was killed along with hundreds of others in the nightmarish conclusion to the siege, the days of psychological torment have only just begun.
After an initial state of great excitement, where doctors will need to give Robert sedatives to help relax him, the boy will enter a phase where his nervous system will be dangerously weak.
Dr Arbieva says it is during this phase that he will be most at risk from neurosis and he will have to be in therapy for at least a year. Yet neither his intellectual abilities nor his memory should be affected.
BREAKS ONES HEART, SO VERY SAD.