Howard Dully
Dully was born on November 30, 1948, in Oakland, California, the eldest son of Rodney and June Louise Pierce Dully. Following the death of his mother from cancer in 1954, Dully's father married single mother Shirley Lucille Hardin in 1955.
Neurologist Walter Freeman had diagnosed Dully as suffering from childhood schizophrenia since age 4, although numerous other medical and psychiatric professionals who had seen Dully did not detect a psychiatric disorder. In 1960, at 12 years of age, Dully was submitted by his father and stepmother for a trans-orbital lobotomy, performed by Freeman. During the procedure, a long, sharp instrument called a leucotome was inserted through each of Dully's eye sockets 7 cm (2.75 inches) into his brain.
Dully took decades to recover from the surgery to the point where he could function in society;[vague] he was institutionalized for years as a juvenile (in Agnews State Hospital as a minor), transferred to Rancho Linda School in San Jose, California, a school for children with behavior problems, incarcerated, and was eventually homeless and an alcoholic. After sobering up and getting a college degree in computer information systems, he became a California state certified behind-the-wheel instructor for a school bus company in San Jose, California.
In his 50s, with the assistance of National Public Radio producer David Isay, Dully started to research what had happened[why?] to him as a child, speaking with his family, relatives of other lobotomy patients, relatives of Dr. Freeman, and gaining access to Freeman's archives. Dully first related his story on a National Public Radio broadcast in 2005, prior to co-authoring a memoir published in 2007.
“Is this every kid's worst fear - that his mother and father don't love him? It was mine. (239)”
“When we realize, really get to know what stinkers we are, it takes only a little depression to tip the scales in favor of suicide. - Dr. Walter Freeman (62)”
“We never talked about the future. We never talked about what would happen when we got out of Rancho Linda. I don't know if that's being a teenager, or being a teenager in a place like Rancho Linda, but you lived only for the day, or only for the moment. It was all about getting through whatever was happening right now. You didn't worry too much about what was coming later, because right now was all you could deal with. It was like you were in a river, caught in the current, and you were going whatever way it took you. You knew you had no control over your own destiny-- so you didn't dream, and you didn't plan. There was no reason to plan. You knew you had to survive what you were going through, and the way to make it survivable was to try to have fun.”
“We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, 'I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and i'm going to try to make myself a life worth living.”