Dorey Whittaker
AUTHOR

Dorey Whittaker

Literature & Fiction
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Born and raised in southern California, Dorey Whittaker currently lives in beautiful central Virginia with her husband of almost forty-five years. She and Bruce have two grown daughters and four wonderful grandchildren. Dorey is one of the rare women who is not ashamed to tell her age - she is 70 years old and thankful for every year she has had. Once you hear her story you will understand the reason why she is blessed to be this age. She knows that life is a gift that can easily slip away, so she made the decision to live life to the fullest, be present and be positive, make it an adventure - not a marathon. To quote from Stephen King's book, Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living or get busy dying." Dorey chose to get busy living. Like many, she knows the literal scars of childhood abuse. Outrageous neglect is the only way to describe her childhood but she refuses to let it define her. In addition to going through Rabies treatment at the age of three, having her tongue bitten off and sown back on at the age of two, Dorey was accidently poisoned three different time before she turned four years old. The first two time she had her stomach pumped but the third and last time was by far the worst. Ant poison laced with arsenic and strychnine almost took her life before she could celebrate her fourth birthday. She spent a week in the hospital struggling to survive blistering of her entire body, inside and out. Although she survived, the initial blistering caused her eardrums to continue blistering and scaring over for the next several years. By the time she entered kindergarten two years later, Dorey had lost almost 85% of her hearing due to the built-up scaring. Isolated, angry, and distrusting of everyone, she retreated into the solitude of her imaginary world. Almost deaf, she was passed from grade to grade, learning nothing and failing grades became her norm. The future looked bleak for this twelve year old girl who had long since given up any hope of becoming anything but a complete failure - until two men took the time to step into her life-path and offer hope of a better future. The first man was an eye, ears, nose and throat doctor. The school demanded her parents have her eyes examined, hoping that was the reason for all the failing grades. The doctor took one look at her ears and volunteered to do medical treatments free of charge, attempting to scrape away years of built-up scar tissue. It took months of treatments to accomplish this task and almost a year to teach Dorey how to pay attention to all the new sounds in her world. Then enters gentleman number two. As she entered eighth grade her school records indicated she was a catastrophic failure, an "unreachable/unteachable" child. But one teacher did not pay attention to the label assigned to this thirteen year old child (see Dorey's Blog "Unsung Heros" for details). Instead, he took the time to plant the prospect of a brighter future into a child who had given up. He saw a defeated, isolated hopeless, ignorant child and shined the light of hope on her path. Convinced she was as big a failure as all of her grade had been, she drank in this new found sense of hope like spring water in a desert. Someone finally saw what others had missed, and she was too afraid to dream - Dorey was not stupid, she was just ignorant - and that can be fixed. We will save the journey from there to now for future Blogs so keep coming back, but now you know the root theme of all of Dorey's novels; unsung heroes who step into the path of a hurting person and offer help and hope.
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