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When You Don’t Have A Clue What You Really Look Like
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) and me — and my family
My brother is ten years older than me, and we weren’t raised together. He’s told me poignant things. He says he can no longer remember our mother’s face. She died when I was three months old, and he was in fifth grade.
My brother was, like our father and uncle, an athlete in school and as a young adult. He was coxswain of the UCLA rowing crew and rode his bicycle up to 100 miles a day around the Los Angeles Basin. He was on the “Dating Game” and “Battle of the Network Stars.”
I remember attending the UCLA rowing events and watching my handsome, golden-skinned, green-eyed brother with his full head of curly blonde ringlets …
How proud I was. I even said to people around, “Look, that’s my brother! My brother is in that boat!”
He fell in love and got engaged to a girl named Rochelle. Now I was in fifth grade and Sam and Rochelle were driving down Olympic Blvd. in Los Angeles at about 10:00 a.m. I don’t know where they were headed.
But they never got there. A drunk driver crossed the median divider and hit them head on.
Rochelle was killed and my brother’s pelvis was shattered and nearly every bone in his body was…
