Yet again mom & dad were sent home to agonize over whether their baby boy would survive. Almost 2 weeks later on July 23rd, Little Oliver was born. Weighing in at 4lbs 5oz he was going to be a fighter, but he was not breathing and had to have more life support than they initially thought they would have to do.
This sweet lil baby has a rare condition called Eagle – Barrett syndrome, also known as Prune Belly syndrome. It’s a little complicated, but basically he doesn’t have abdominal muscles like we do to keep his organs safe and help his body function the way it should. Because of this condition, Oliver has Chronic Kidney Disease and is in and out of complete Kidney failure. He will need a kidney transplant, but will not meet the weight requirement until around 3 to 5 years old. Oliver lives most of his life in the hospital, occasionally going home for days at a time.
Oliver’s family is doing everything they can to stay strong for both of their kids (Oliver has a super sweet & sassy older sister Emelia) but they’ve officially reached the point where they need help with the cost hospital living and Oliver’s long term care.
Oliver’s family is constantly separated. Violet (mommy) is with him at the Hospital while Lionel (daddy) works and Emelia (big sis) has to go stay with her grandparents in San Diego every time Oliver is hospitalized. Being away from each other is excruciating for the whole family. They will need some extra financial help to make ends meet having to drive from Ventura to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and to San Diego to see Emelia. Hospital expenses with transportation and food are expensive. Lionel is working to support the family the best he can, but that means long hours and not being able to see Oliver while he is in the hospital. Oliver needs feeds and medication every 3 hours, because of this Violet had to stop working to take care of him full time. They are living with Violet’s mother in Ventura at the moment to help out financially, but it is still hard to make ends meet when you are spread so thin and far apart. Even when Oliver is home, there are so many doctor visits, appointments therapies, and then more hospital stays.
Once he busts himself out of the hospital again (which we know our little fighter will do!) Oliver has a long road ahead of him. He will have multiple surgeries before he is even 2 years old (he’s already had 5). Oliver will also have issues resulting from Prune Belly syndrome including, but not limited to: learning and motor delays; oral issues in which he has difficulty eating by mouth; muscle tone; mobility issues (problems sitting up unassisted, difficulty walking); skeletal and joint issues; organ issues from his kidneys, colon/rectal, bladder. All of these issues will need specialized treatment plans and some of those plans include expensive medical equipment that is not paid for by insurance including specialized car seats (infant car seat $2000, then $3000 for next size), mobility devices, and even just medical supplies like duo derm or extra syringes for easier feeds. Oliver will also need specialized therapies for his entire life. Right now Oliver is scheduled to have 2 days of Physical therapy and 1 day Occupational therapy a week.
Oliver is so loved, and we just want to give what we can to him and his family. If you would like to assist with their financial burden, any donation through GoFundMe would be greatly appreciated. All funds will go directly to Oliver’s immediate care and long term needs. This little bit of help we can give to them will help relieve so much in their lives.
Background on Oliver:
Oliver has been a miracle from the beginning. His mom and dad, Violet and Lionel, were not sure they would be able to have another baby, and then they were happily surprised with little Oliver. At Violet’s 16 week ultrasound they received the devastating news that their baby boy was sick. Due to LUTO (Lower Urinary Tract Obstruction), his bladder was so distended it’s all you could see on the ultrasound. He needed a life saving surgery while still in utero if he was going to survive. Unfortunately, the doctors made them go through weeks of agonizing tests before determining that they were willing to try to save Oliver with a neonatal surgery during which they placed two shunts to drain his bladder and restore his amniotic fluid. The surgery was a success! Everyone was hopeful for little baby Oliver. Around 30 weeks Oliver’s amniotic fluid started to dramatically decrease again and they were told that there were going to be some very hard, but important decisions coming up. At 33 weeks Oliver had no fluid left and was being crushed, but because of his precarious medical state, they wanted to wait as long as possible to deliver him. Yet again mom & dad were sent home to agonize over whether their baby boy would survive. Almost 2 weeks later on July 23rd, Little Oliver was born. Weighing in at 4lbs 5oz he was going to be a fighter, but he was not breathing and had to have more life support than they initially thought they would have to do. He was put on a ventilator and an umbilical tube for nutrients. Lionel was able to follow him to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles so he could be admitted into the NICCU where his Nephrologist was waiting to assess his kidneys and his Urologist would administer the surgery to find and relieve the LUTO. His condition worsened and surgery was going to have to wait. Violet wasn’t able to see him for 2 days while she was in the hospital recovering from birth. The first couple days of Oliver’s life were hard. His underdeveloped lungs were leaking air into his rib cage, his electrolytes and blood count were low, he needed a pick line and a dialysis catheter and then did not respond well to dialysis at first. The first week Oliver was on and off of dialysis as the doctors fine tuned his treatment, which was so scary because the mortality rate for babies on dialysis is 40%. On August 6th he was finally strong enough to have surgery to remove his shunts and try to figure out his LUTO.
Around this time Oliver received his official Prune Belly Syndrome diagnosis. Although this was heartbreaking, having a diagnosis is the path to finding his best treatment plan. The doctors and his family set out to find out what was going to work best for little Oliver and how they were going to do that for him. The Nephrologist was able to walk Violet through a lot of her questions, but the scariest questions will not have answers until he is older. Oliver started to respond to the dialysis and with further testing they were able to pull him off of it and his kidneys decided to function on a low level. Just enough to produce urine, but he still requires several medications to survive. It was a long road with lots of ups and downs, but Oliver is a fighter and he started gaining weight and being the wonderful baby he is.
The nurses trained Violet to be his at home nurse, for his necessary 24 hour care. She learned how to clean his catheter, do rolling diaper changes because he is so fragile, clean and replace his Nasogastric tube (NG tube), give fortified feeds through his NG tube, and how to correctly administer his medications and shots. Oliver got to go home on September 23rd at 3 months old. That weekend they were able to bring Emelia home as well and they were finally together as a family of 4! Emelia loves her brother and has enjoyed helping mommy as much as she can with Oliver. Even though they want to stay together as a family, that isn't possible right now with Oliver back in the hospital. On November 2nd Oliver was retaining fluids and was taken to the ER. During the intake interview he had a seizure that lasted for 18 minutes. He is now admitted at Children's Hospital Los Angeles in their Pediatric ICU with kidney failure. They are performing tests and monitoring him to decide their plan of action. They have discussed putting him back on dialysis. We will update as more information becomes available.
A sincere thank you from all of Oliver’s loved ones for the support this family needs right now.
by Brian Dunning
Filed under Paranormal, Urban Legends
Skeptoid Podcast #612
February 27, 2018
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In the early 2000s, a sensational news story took the world by storm: a young boy was proven by experts — so said the reports — to have lived a past life as a World War II fighter pilot who was shot down. James Leininger, born in April 1998, is the subject of books and TV shows and countless articles citing him as proof of reincarnation, bolstered by an assailable mountain of undeniable proof. Today we're going to look into this amazing story of a young boy who thought he was reincarnated... and, in the process, also look at the people who helped him get there.
Such cases are not uncommon. There are whole books about similar stories, where James Leininger is only a single chapter. We could talk about any one of them, but this case is a good one because it is probably the best known, has received both skeptical and credulous attention, and still has a large following of believers. The basic facts of the case are that James Leininger was born in 1998, and while other children become obsessed with trucks or tractors or horses or plush toys, James' fixation was airplanes. He loved them. Every birthday or Christmas brought him a shower of new airplane toys. By the age of two, he knew many models by name, especially those most commonly produced as toys and featured in books: fighter planes, like Mustangs, Corsairs, and Spitfires. His parents took him to aviation museums, and he loved the WWII fighter planes. It even got to the point that his parents tried to distract him away from airplanes — unsuccessfully. It's a familiar experience to many parents.
Another thing James had in common with many toddlers was recurring nightmares. His, not surprisingly given his favorite toys, was that he was in an airplane that was crashing. He'd cry and scream and wake his parents. Sometimes it would happen five times a week. James' mother Andrea began to suspect that the nightmare was so traumatic because it had an extraordinary cause. Perhaps James had lived it in another life.
By the time James was two and a half, he'd said the man crashing in the plane was named James, and that the plane was a Corsair — a famous WWII fighter plane in the Pacific. His parents reported that he even gave a partial name for the aircraft carrier he'd been on, the USS Natoma Bay, an actual WWII escort carrier.
Eventually, Andrea got ahold of a book on children who had lived past lives and studied it, while his father Bruce obsessively went through WWII records trying to piece together the bits little James had offered into a consistent narrative. Bruce garnered further details from James by going through the book The Battle for Iwo Jima with him. Their conviction that little James had been a Corsair pilot named James from the Natoma Bay who was shot down at Iwo Jima was so strong that they even took him to a reunion of crew from the Natoma Bay.
Eventually the Leiningers wrote a 2009 book promoting their son as an actual case of reincarnation, titled Soul Survivor. Although they clearly believe their son was reincarnated, the weaknesses in the story are apparent to the skeptical mind. All of the evidence is purely anecdotal, and is practically the gold standard of confirmation bias and observational selection. The story as the public knows it was written by the parents themselves after nearly a decade of personally trying to confirm and prove their belief. Reading their book, I marveled that the only proof they gave over and over again is that there is no way a three-year-old could have had knowledge of aircraft carriers or known the names of specific fighter planes. That's an insult to every three-year-old who ever lived.
We might well be tempted to observe that as poor as the evidence for this story is, it seems bizarre that Andrea and Bruce Leininger — perfectly intelligent, normal adults — would believe in it so wholeheartedly. Indeed, as we mentioned earlier, there are many such stories, all fully endorsed by intelligent people, despite a total lack of evidence or plausibility. It turns out that we do have a potential explanation for how these smart people can believe such a weird thing.
Let's look at the most famous case of an alleged reincarnation, that of Bridey Murphy. Virginia Tighe was a Colorado woman who became famous as the poster child for 'past life regression' in the 1950s when, under hypnosis, she spoke of being the reincarnation of a 19th century Irish woman named Bridey Murphy. Her story was published in a book, The Search for Bridey Murphy, in 1956 and was a sensation, becoming a best seller. A Hollywood movie was made the same year. Suddenly everyone believed in reincarnation and in hypnotic past life regression.
Most investigators seeking to either confirm or disprove the reincarnation claim scoured old Irish records trying to find someone named Bridey Murphy in 19th century Ireland. Nothing was ever found. All of the names and places she had come up with were weak matches at best, and none of the specific names or dates could be verified. One newspaper, however, looked a little closer to home. Reporters for the Chicago American found that when Tighe was a little girl, their neighbor across the street had been an Irish immigrant named Bridie Murphy-Corkell. Case closed. The memories of Bridey Murphy had been memories of a neighbor when she was a little girl. Were book sales impacted? Not in the slightest. In fact a second edition even came out.
But even more surprisingly, even Virginia Tighe herself never believed a word of the reincarnation story. She once said 'If I had known what was going to happen I would never have lain down on the couch.' She even refused to give permission for her name to be used in the book, so it used a fake name, Ruth Simmons. So how could her story have exploded so enormously?
It turns out the book was written by the hypnotist himself, Morey Bernstein, a wealthy businessman and amateur hypnotist. Bernstein was completely persuaded that Tighe was reincarnated from Bridey Murphy — or, at least, always said that he was — the book was making a lot of money. From his 1999 obituary in the Washington Post:
Publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy made him a celebrity, and he was convinced that Tighe's recollections about a previous life in Ireland were authentic, according to his brother, Robert A. Bernstein, of Bethesda. Tighe, he said, was never totally convinced that she really ever had been Bridey Murphy.
Bernstein was a lifelong believer in reincarnation, and it's not much of a stretch to assume that he probably coaxed her through the story in pursuit of his belief. This is also something we routinely see in other stories of reincarnation: the people who are the subjects are often surrounded by true believers who are really the ones creating and promoting the story.
This is not to say they do it dishonestly; not at all. When we believe something wholeheartedly and want to persuade others that what we believe happened actually did so, we all tend to exaggerate, hoping to make our case sound more persuasive. This is not something we do consciously or deceptively. If I know in my heart of hearts that what I'm telling you is the truth, I might very well add in some extra information — even something I make up completely — if it will help convince you. To our point of view, these little white lies are helpful not harmful, because the outcome is that you will believe what we already know to be true. So we should expect that those who believe these stories of reincarnated children are going to say anything they can — even rearrange the history of who knew what when, what word was pronounced how on what date, what stories a child might have heard — and we must be careful not to misinterpret these anecdotes as infallible factual accounts.
How can the Bridey Murphy story help us understand the James Leininger case? For one thing, it suggests that there's not much point in going back into the history books and trying to learn about the USS Natoma Bay or whether it carried Corsair fighter planes (it didn't) or what fighter pilots were named James in the war. None of that matters. Bridey Murphy tells us to look closer to home.
Maybe...just maybe...James Leininger had a Morey Bernstein of his own.
Carol Bowman is the author of several books on reincarnated children and promotes herself as a 'past life regression therapist', as if that's a thing. Hers is the book that Andrea Leininger turned to. Let's hear Bowman's own words from her website about her involvement in our case:
In 2001 I got an email from a mother in Louisiana, Andrea Leininger. She told me that she had just gotten a copy of my first book, Children's Past Lives, and she believed that her two-year-old son, James, was having nightmares about a past life. He would wake up screaming about 3 or 4 times a week about his plane crashing... I told her to follow the guidelines in my book for helping James work through his nightmares...
Little Fighter 6
So from about the age of 3, James' parents were following the advice of a past life regression promoter to manage the boy's interest in WWII airplanes — having first already decided on their own that he was in fact a reincarnated pilot. Part of Bowman's advice was to repeatedly assure this toddler that he was, in fact, a reincarnated WWII fighter pilot. The Leiningers wrote in their book:
Carol advised Andrea to tell James that what he was experiencing were things that had happened to him before, that it was now over, and that he was now safe.
That is psychologically outrageous. Remember, the notion that James had been reincarnated was never his own; it was his parents', primarily Andrea's, own idea. The parents, under the guidance of a strongly motivated self-described 'therapist', put the idea into his head themselves. Bowman describes her book as 'a memoir of [her] discoveries after she witnessed past life memories in her own two children, and a guidebook for parents.' No. No parenting guidebook should advise teaching your three-year-old to believe a delusion, certainly not one that takes away his individuality and teaches that he's someone else. Nevertheless, Bowman continued exploiting little James to promote her agenda, just as Bernstein did before her:
I encouraged Andrea and her husband, Bruce, to write a book about James's memories. Finally, after three years, they were ready to do it. I introduced them to my wonderful agent, Al Zuckerman, and their book, Soul Survivor, will be released at the end of May.
Bowman and Bernstein had other things in common; most notably, a total lack of relevant education in psychology or any kind of therapy. Both wrote popular books promoting themselves as experts. And sadly, both managed to convince people of the reality of reincarnation. People who invent their own field and declare themselves its expert are usually dismissed as cranks; but when we fail to apply a skeptical process, we can easily end up conferring unearned respect on those very same cranks and, in the process, regard an innocent toddler — who wants only to play with his airplanes — as proof of the supernatural.
By Brian Dunning
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Cite this article:
Dunning, B. 'The Boy Who Thought He Was Reincarnated.' Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, 27 Feb 2018. Web. 25 Mar 2020. <https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4612>
References & Further Reading
Anonymous. 'Reincarnation all over again.' Blog. Skeptico: Critical thinking for an irrational world, 7 Jul. 2005. Web. 22 Feb. 2018. <http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/07/reincarnation_a.html>
Anonymous. 'Shot Down in Flames.' Blog. The BS Historian, 3 Aug. 2009. Web. 22 Feb. 2018. <https://bshistorian.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/shot-down-in-flames/>
Little Fighter Boy Cartoon
Barnes, B. 'Morey Bernstein Dies.' The Washington Post. 8 Apr. 1999, Newspaper.
Bowman, C. 'Soul Survivor, the book by Bruce and Andrea Leininger.' Children's Past Lives. Carol Bowman, Past Life Therapy, 25 May 2009. Web. 21 Feb. 2018. <https://www.carolbowman.com/blog/soul-survivor-the-book>
Bowman, C. Children's Past Lives: How Past Memories Affect Your Child. New York: Bantam Books, 1997.
Carroll, R. 'Bridey Murphy.' The Skeptic's Dictionary. Robert Todd Carroll, 24 Feb. 1999. Web. 20 Feb. 2018. <http://skepdic.com/bridey.html>
Leininger, A., Leininger, B. Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.
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