TRAUMA DRAMA, Chapter One

By Bonnie Hayden

I was told I walked early. I don't remember.

I once saw a picture of "baby Bonnie" -- ME -- standing in front of our house.

I don't remember. I don't remember when I stopped walking.

I have little flashes of memories, from maybe when I was four years old. Doctors in white coats pulling on my legs, trying so damn hard to straighten out the muscles. Open the joints. Vaguely I recall thick white casts being smeared on my legs.

To this day, I don't know why the doctors were doing this.

Ma never said. She just stood by and watched.

I don't even remember how many times they tried to straighten my legs out and put them in casts. I remember they drilled holes in my knees, and in my ankles. Twice they did that.

I do remember the fear and the excruciating pain I felt every time I had to go to the doctor's office so they could cut the casts off.

I remember Ma covering my ears

and telling me to stop crying like a goddamn baby.

I was no more than four or five years old.

After the doctors were finished cutting off my casts, my dad would pick me up very gently and he would carry me to physical therapy.

I lived there, in what was then Pittsfield General Hospital, for months at a time. I never went to school. What I learned, I learned from tutors.

There at the hospital, therapists would try to force my legs to bend. They wanted to open my broken joints.

Pushing and pulling. Punishing. Always always punishing me with the pain. They were always measuring "degrees of movement" with

I was alone with these people, total strangers, for what felt like hours. Days. I was so very young.

No one talked to me. No one laughed or tried to cheer me up. THEY ALWAYS TALKED ABOUT ME, AS IF I WASN'T THERE. They talked about what to try next. They talked about what decisions they had to make:

which set of casts they would make into splints, splints that I had to wear every single night.

Torture. It was...torture.

Because my joints were collapsing from the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, I had to sit all day long, and my knees would bend and every night Ma would force my legs back into the casts and tape them tight.

Dad would not do it.

Dad said that Ma was just torturing me, for nothing. He said the doctors and therapists were wasting their time.

Eventually I realized. Dad was right.

DRAMA QUEEN: How I Met Bonnie Hayden

By Claudia Ricci

I had the distinct privilege of meeting Bonnie Hayden, of Pittsfield, MA, only a few short weeks ago. Three, perhaps? Honestly, I keep going back to the calendar, and counting the days since I met her in early August, 2025. I keep being astonished, over and over and over again, by her unique life story, and what she has been willing to share about her lifelong struggle to survive rheumatoid arthritis.

Every time Bonnie sends me another piece of her life story -- some of it she sends by text, some by email -- I am astonished,

and completely outraged. I told her last week that her writing, and her story, may be the most powerful writing I've ever read from even my very best graduate students in Journalism at Georgetown University, where I was on a teaching sabbatical during 2009 when my husband, national political activist Richard Kirsch, and I lived in DC while he led the fight to get OBAMACARE passed.

Yes, I am astonished over and over again by Bonnie's heartbreaking life story, I am moved to tears by the needless agony she has endured. And yet not for a single moment have I been moved to pity Bonnie Hayden. Because one of the first things she made clear to me as we talked for hours and hours by phone, was that she has never wanted pity from anybody. And she certainly doesn't want it now.

What Bonnie Wants Now Is VERY Simple:

She wants to write a book. She wants desperately to tell her life story: "This book is my truth," she says. "It's not the life that other people tell me I had. This is the way it was."

All her life, Bonnie has had to deal with selfish and downright nasty family members, first and forement, her mother, and also, her sister who is 16 years older than Bonnie. Family members have tried to ignore or dismiss or discount her agonizing pain, and her truth. Family members who haven't made any attempt to hide their contempt for her, or their disgust, or their feeling that she was a hopeless burden. Family members who didn't really expect her to live past age 18.

More recently, Bonnie, who is 62, says that she is sick and tired of people who try to boss her around. And people who try to take advantage of her. Or use her for their own purposes.

Because she relies on a wheelchair and crutches, Bonnie confided, some people think she is weak, or weak-minded. They often try to dismiss her. Discount her. Or worse, they ignore her completely.

Bonnie grew up being told by her mother, over and over again, that she wasn't wanted. She grew up feeling INVISIBLE.

Somehow, though, Bonnie Hayden endured all of this endless, hellish physical and brutal emotional pain, relying on her faith, and her core of steel. She prayed constantly, pleading that God would grant her one thing in life: love.

I may have only known her a few weeks, but Bonnie Hayden is already one of my all-time favorite heroes. A fiercely determined woman, Bonnie has become a friend that I trust, a friend that I am fiercely determined to defend and support as she expresses her truth.

And her RAGE.

Bonnie Hayden is Determined to Set the Record Straight

Once and for all, Bonnie is going to tell all of the people who should have loved her but didn't to -- in three choice words -- go to hell. tell it the way she lived it. As it happened.

"My sister tries to tell me what my life was like but she wasn't even there." (Bonnie's sister is 16 years old than she is.)

"And my mom? My mom should have had a bumper sticker that read: everthing will be fine just as soon as you realize that I -- MOM -- am God!"

I am overwhelmed with admiration for Bonnie's fierce determination to do what everybody else tries to do: simply, to live a normal life, despite the rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that makes the body's immune system turn on itself. RA has ravaged her joints.

I am also infuriated into a bloody red rage

that her mother refused to bring her, when she was six years old, to Shriner's Children's Hospital in Springfield, MA, after the Pittsfield doctors said Bonnie needed to see a specialist. Instead, Bonnie was never seen by a rheumatologist, as she should have been, but instead spent months in hospitals as a parade of orthopedists who didn't have a clue how to treat her autoimmune disease basically experimented on her child's tender body -- they tortured her body, starting when she was only two years old.

*********

Within moments -- literally moments -- of hearing Bonnie's calm and yet very cheerful voice over the telephone, one thing became clear: I knew in the depths of my bone marrow that I was in the presence of a true hero.

I have been working as a journalist, a personal essayist and fiction writer for some 50 years, as a recent Substack column of mine reveals. A half century of writing?

It hardly seems possible sometimes. But it's true. I began my daily newspaper career at age 26 in April of 1979 at the Chicago Sun-Times, where after less than a year as the paper's environmental reporter, I proposed to my editor that the Sun-Times mount a state-wide investigation into the crooked and shady -- and altogether illegal -- dumping of highly dangerous and unhealthy chemical wastes into landfills that were supposed to be reserved for plain old household garbage.

"The Toxic Time Bomb" series of articles appeared in the Sun-Times in November, 1980, and the following spring, our team of a half dozen investigative reporters was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative reporting. Instead of sticking around Chicago to continue working with the likes of the extraordinarily successful investigative reporter Pamela Zekman, I opted instead to seek greener pastures in New York, accepting a job in July, 1982 as a Staff Writer at The Wall Street Journal..

*********

Over the course of my career writing journalism, essays, and in the early 1990s, fiction (I am at work on my sixth novel, "Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears,") I have done thousands upon thousands upon thousands of interviews. Actually, it feels from this vantage point that I may in fact have done millions of interviews.

But honestly, how can I possibly know?

I do know one thing for certain though. Three weeks ago, without thinking about it too much, without comparing Bonnie to any other "subject" I have interviewed, without even knowing quite what was happening to me, I knew deeply and intuitively in the depths of my bone marrow, that I had been given a rare and precious opportunity: to speak to a person who at 62, was not supposed to be here. A woman who was told as a teenager that she would never thrive. Or be normal, i.e., she would never have a partner. Nor would she, for God's sake, with her joints broken and her limbs shrunken by rheumatoid arthritis, EVER HOPE to bear children.

Ah but there we go again with la miracolosa Bonnie Hayden: she is the proud mother of three adult children, one of whom she lives with -- thanks in partnership to Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity -- in a cozy little home in Pittsfield, MA, where she (and her son, Bobbie) chose to paint the living room walls a soothingly dark, dove gray, with crisp white trim.

It has taken me a few weeks to begin to understand that it is in fact the Divine Creator Herself -- in italiano, CARA DIVINA -- who seems to have chosen me for this extraordinary assignment: to partner in a unique writing project with a person who has boundless determination. And who has demonstrated the kind of bravery that is rare in this day and age. And above all, she is a person who has endured outright cruelty most of her life, still finds it in her heart to love very deeply.

********* As I wrote just a few days after the first interview I had with Bonnie on August 1, 2025: "Bonnie Hayden has a life story that will first break your heart, and then, perhaps, it will remake your heart, so that you will once again begin to believe in miracles. In italiano, miraculos.

I MIRACULOS

As a very young child, just after her second birthday in 1965, Bonnie's mother, Rose was told that her daughter, who had a rare disease that today would be called Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, couldn't possibly make it to her 18th birthday.

When Bonnie fooled all the doctors and was still living and breathing at age 18, she was told she would NEVER BE ABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.

Bonnie defied everyone -- most notably her own mother -- and delivered three healthy children beginning in mid-October, 1986, which ironically is when I had my second child.

We were in the same hospital the same day, both giving birth to baby girls.

*********

Diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was only two years old, Bonnie spent most of her childhood living in hospitals -- for months at a time. Doctors had no clue what to do with -- or for -- her.

So, literally, they experimented.

She was treated by orthopedic specialists who tried setting her limbs in casts.

When that didn't work, they drilled holes in the bones of her tiny knees and ankles, and then strapped her into weird contraptions called tractions, trying to get the muscles and joints of her legs to straighten out.

Three separate times, they broke her thin little wrists when she was a child and reset them, thinking that might help straighten her arm muscles.

When she was six years old, Bonnie's mother, Rose, was instructed by local doctors in Pittsfield that Bonnie needed to be seen by specialists in rheumatoid arthritis at Shriner's Hospital in Springfield, MA, where she might get the appropriate treatment.

Rose chose to ignore the doctors' advice, telling Bonnie it was too much of a bother.

To this day, Bonnie, who is 62 years old, has seen a rheumatologist exactly once, for a consult, about 15 years ago:

"He told me there was nothing he could do to help me with the arthritis. He offered me morphine for the pain. I told him 'No thanks.' If I have pain, I take Tylenol."

What follows is the second chapter in Bonnie Hayden's healing story. Stay tuned, because Bonnie says she has been getting ready to tell this story for most of her challenging life.

When I had the privilege of meeting Bonnie for the first time on August 25, after she had spent a total of four hours on the phone, telling me her story, she said she has "always been told that I should write a book."

Indeed, Bonnie seems she's about ready to burst, because she wants so badly for the world to know how she grew up. How she suffered, oh my DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, but also, how she managed to prevail against not just overwhelming odds.

She managed to prevail against all possible odds. She managed to prevail when anyone else would have gone sailing off into the sunset.

Because pain doesn't get any worse than the pain Bonnie endured at age 2, and age 5, and age 7, and age 11, and 13 and 14 and 24 and

yes, every single day of her entire life she has endured pain that would have sunk me for sure.

The second time I interviewed Bonnie, on July _____ for two straight hours, typing a total of 25 single-spaced pages of notes (because that is just one thing I was taught to do, very very carefully at The Wall Street Journal) she confided in me, very sweetly, that "I have always wanted, I have always intended, to write a book about my life. And people over and over again have said to me, 'Bonnie, you could, and should, write a book.'"

Well, now it's time. Bonnie is quite honestly, a bit nervous (and i am quite honestly more than a bit nervous because I feel so incredibly protective of my sweet new friend.)

But then Bonnie says something that sends me into hysterics, laughter that is, and I say to her and myself, "she is one tough cookie," and I take a breath in and say she/we will be fine, telling this story, together, my arm linked with hers. (Bonnie relies on crutches or a wheelchair to get around, and always has.)

Yes, she is one helluva of brave woman, and smart as a whip, as gifted as ANY of the students I taught for a year at Georgetown University in the Graduate School of Journalism! (No, dear Bonnie, I wasn't just saying that to butter you up or make you feel good -- it's the God's honest truth!)

In the end, when I said to her this afternoon, are you sure you're ready for this, Bonnie? Are you certain that you are ready to go out into the world without any cover? Are you prepared that your story could go -- well, who the hell knows? These days, a story goes viral faster than it takes to write down even one sentence!

She paused. She went silent as she does now and then as we are chatting. She thought about it for a while. I think it was in that moment that it really dawned on her what I was saying: once you go public in this godforsaken modern world, where misery and mayhem live side by side with blessings and beasts (like i will say it, okay, like our inhuman vermin that is the non-president, would-be DICTATOR DUMP)

When you drop all your cover from your life and the lives of the ones you love most, that for Bonnie being her precious children, well you better be prepared to get wet.

And then, Bonnie Hayden just got to her feet -- and here I am giving her speed she doesn't have with her legs but absolutely has with her BOUNDLESS HEART -- she ran right off an elevated platform --picture it here with me -- as if she is in fact one of those extraordinary divers we love watching in the Summer Olympics.

"I'm ready," she squeals and she just takes off -- goddammit Bonnie Hayden you are so damn fast!

I shout to her, "HEY Bonnie, for heaven's sake, wait up, will you? Wait up for me, I'm right behind you!"

But -- and here I'm laughing to think about it, because Bonnie Hayden, despite her RA, is such an incredible daredevil, and she's so incredibly gutsy.

And now she is out of earshot, she is flying out and over the water in a perfect jack-knife, she must be diving into the water by now I think, but I can't see her --

and I wonder, is she, like me, holding her breath on the way down into the blissfully cool water?"

********

What makes Bonnie Hayden want to tell her (almost impossible to believe) heartbreaking story? Why did she tell me almost immediately after we met each other in person that "people keep telling me to write a book and I want to. I want to write my story."

She wants to tell it so that others will know. She wants others to know what she lived through, not just physically, but emotionally too, because Bonnie's mother made it crystal clear to her daughter, starting from her first waking memory, that "I was not wanted. I was the fourth child, born 16 years after Louise..."

But do not for a moment think DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT that Bonnie Hayden EVER IN A MILLION YEARS wants your/our pity. No! UH HUH. Bonnie isn't the least bit interested in pity and in fact, when people have from time to time tried to use her to scour up pity, for their own purposes, she has gotten rightfully and understandably pissed off.

No. She wants others to know, for the record, of course, what happened. And to preserve for her children, and for their children, should they decide to have offspring, the extraordinarily deep trauma that she has survived.

But most of all, she wants to inspire others to be courageous. And to hang on to hope like a drowning victim would hang onto a rope.

She wants to reassure others, and to inspire others, people who live with excruciating pain -- physical, mental or emotional -- that she has been doing all that and then some, enduring pain that presses into her deepest fibers for more than six decades. NEVER LOSE HOPE, she says and never ever stop praying. PRAY EVERY DAY. PRAY EVERY MOMENT. Because she does just that. She continues to pray to a God that she is absolutely certain exists, despite the fact that she doesn't -- and I certainly don't either -- understand why this God allows people to suffer? Why most of all, why this God of OUR FATHERS especially, allows precious little children, the tenderest of children, i bambini, to sustain pain like she endured?

Because one thing we -- even the most diabolical among us and you know of whom I speak by now -- all can probably agree, children, especially children, never ever should have to endure the torture that she suffered.

She wants to tell her heartbreaking story, right now, before another moment goes by. Because she knows people are suffering all over, in Pittsfield, across Massachusetts, and all across the nation. And the world, too. From Gaza to the Ukraine, from South Sudan to the Congo, in Afghanistan and yes, in our own backyards, too.

Bonnie has an urgent message for all of us who feel so incredibly discouraged and fearful, nearly at the end of our ropes.

NO MATTER HOW BAD LIFE SEEMS, dear Bonnie says, NEVER EVER GIVE UP HOPE.

"Because there are angels out there," she says to me, and when she says it I get chills, running up and down my arms and legs. "Claudia, I know for a fact that there are angels out there to help you when we are most down and out. I know because I have met them, I have met them when I have felt like I had nowhere to turn!"

Oh yes, my new bestest in the world bestest, she knows about angels,

first-hand.