*** TRIGGER WARNING: Please be advised that the following post contains graphic and triggering content.***
The physical repercussions of what happened to me in that operating room have been the catalyst for me to learn all there is to know about the human body and how it functions. The long road of recovery is still taking place even 10+ years later. The autoimmune issues and secondary complications from all that took place is still a learning process. Just when you think you have it all figured out, your symptoms change, you become reactive to "safe" products and foods, and suddenly you have to start from square one.
Although the physical challenges have been my most difficult to overcome, the emotional, mental, and spiritual challenges I have faced weren't any easier. Of course with that kind of trauma and loss it takes a toll on your emotional and mental state. I spent 4.5 hours every week for the first year after the trauma with a psychiatrist and a mental health team who specialized in Women's Health Postpartum issues. I worked with grief counsellors to process the loss of my babies, and with the help and support of these specialists, I slowly but surely found my center again.
It was hard to process all that went on, all that had happened, and filtering my feelings and experiences to not reveal the spiritual crisis I was in after what I had saw. I was walking a very thin line of receiving help for the emotional and mental aspect, all the while knowing that I couldn't reveal the spiritual experience I had, in fear I'd be looked at as crazy or trigger some kind of event where I got locked up in the mental ward. I was terrified that what I had experienced would be looked upon as a mental crisis, so I kept those details and my experiences to myself.
I knew the minute I woke up in the hospital that I was different. I didn't feel like myself. I could see colourful mists around people, and somehow knew what they were thinking. I remember waking up when one of the nurses came into do a check on me, she smiled as I opened my eyes and hovered over me asking me if I needed anything. I said, "You have to go." She came closer to me and asked me to repeat myself, as my voice was still very much a whisper from the damage that took place during surgery. I said, " You have to go." "Go?" She asked, "Go where?" "The girl down the hall, she needs you." I said. Confused she looked at me and said, "What girl?"
At that moment a CODE BLUE rang throughout the hospital requesting all medical teams to head to the room the emergency was taking place in. As the nurse heard the call, she looked at me. I put my finger (the one with the "ET" heart rate monitor on it) up in the air pointing at the ceiling where the speaker was sounding off. "She needs you." I said. "You have to go!" The nurse was confused but left my room in a hurry to respond to the code call.
Later on that day, before she ended her shift, she came back into my room for final rounds. I opened my eyes and asked her if the girl was alright. She nurse looked uncomfortable, but told me that she was doing fine, that it was a close call but they were able to bring her back. I smiled at her, and said "She's scared. She's all alone with a new baby. She doesn't think she can do it. But she can. This is her chance." The nurse politely smiled at me, and quickly left my room.
When I finally got out of the hospital and could head home, I went to stay with my father. My house had too many stairs and I wasn't even able to walk unassisted at that point, so the stairs were a deal breaker for me. I was on some pretty heavy medications after the trauma. I would slip in and out of a dream state where I was experiencing some pretty new dream content, with some really disturbing messages. I had chalked it all up to the drugs until I stopped taking all my meds and the weirdness continued.
Once I stopped taking my meds, I actually couldn't sleep. I would fall into a dream state where I was back in the hospital waking up for the first time with all the doctors standing over me. I could hear babies crying in the background and the dream took a scary turn when the doctors started yelling at me about how I had already forgotten about my babies. They were tormenting me saying that I just left without my babies and now they will be given away, how someone else will raise them.
At that point in the dream I would wake up, terrified, sweating, crying, and reliving the whole trauma over again. This happened multiple times a night, and went on for weeks. The lack of sleep didn't make my days in physical and emotional therapy any easier. It took a toll on me. It got to a point where I was even scared to fall asleep because I didn't want to experience that dream again.
After 11 days of being awake, not falling asleep for even one second, I asked my doctor for help. She gave me some meds to help me sleep, and we worked through the mental and emotional issues connected tot the dream. I got an overwhelming urge to get a tattoo for my babies, memorializing them in the most permanent way I could think of. My boyfriend at the time (the "would be" father of my children) carried me into a tattoo parlour and laid me in the chair where I got my tattoo.
On my right arm, the side of my body that received the most damage, the side of my body that didn't have collapsed veins, the side of my body that kept me alive, I memorialized my children where I wear my heart on my sleeve. That night, as if I had made some kind of peace within myself. I slept for the first time since the trauma without any kind of nightmare forcing me to wake.
The weirdness didn't stop there though. I had been experiencing these really weird times where my ears would ring so badly that it was debilitating. It sounds like a microphone was too close to the speaker inside my head. I couldn't see anything, or hear anything around me when it happened, other then this loud screeching inside my head. This went on for a while. With no physical or medical explanation, I was left to deal with it on my own.
One night as I was watching tv, this happened again. But this time, the loud speaker in my head came through, like I had been scanning the radio for a clear channel. It sounds like many voices speaking together at one time. RUN! That's what I heard. RUN! Run?! Run where? I can hardly even walk how the eff am I suppose to run?!
The messages "RUN!" came through at least once a day. Me, now confused and numb to these experiences, I just let them come and go. Spirit doesn't like to be ignored though. Of course I didn't know that at the time, so it was a hard learning curve.
When I went to sleep at night all I dreamt about was me being in bed in a dark room. The whispers in the shadows kept repeating "Run... run.... run..." This went on for weeks. Finally, one night, the dreamscape changed. The whispers were still chanting, but this time they became louder. And the louder they got, the more I covered my head with pillows in my dream. I remember watching myself all curled up in my bed, my head covered with pillows, and then the chanting stopped. I watched myself take the pillows away from my head and when I sat up in my bed, there were figures of people standing all around me. They stood there, still, unfamiliar, and silent. And then they opened their mouths all at once and this high pitched frequency came streaming out.
In that moment I woke up.
This dream went on for months. The same dream, the same chanting, the same figures, the same high pitched frequency. I woke up at the same time, every time.
Six months later, I reached a huge goal in physio therapy. Finally walking unassisted, and able to stand for more than 10 minutes, I had another crisis. My boyfriend at the time, was an alcoholic, and an abusive one at that. The truth is, I had no business being with this guy. I knew he was trouble. We had had our first physical altercation the day before I found out I was pregnant. We decided that was our wake up call and that we had to put the past behind us, to start new and be better for our child.
To say that he was supportive of me during my trauma would be a lie. He spent the time I was in surgery drinking in the parkade, he was talking to other women and inviting them over to my house while I was still in the hospital, and he beat me down emotionally for "Not being able to provide him with children." "What's wrong with you? he'd say. Thirteen year old girls get pregnant and have babies the first time they have sex. What's your excuse?"
That kind of mental and emotional abuse is never okay, but when someone is already at their very lowest, that kind of talk can be deadly. Not in a position to fight, argue, or defend myself, I just took it. I just took whatever crap he threw my way and internalized it.
That night, on the day I reached my physio goal, he was drinking and became very dangerous. I had asked him to leave many times, but we both knew he wasn't going anywhere. At the end of my rope, I grabbed the phone and hid it under my blanket. I hit redial knowing he had talked to his parents earlier on that evening. Trembling, I held the phone still allowing them to hear the shitshow that was taking place in my living room. After a few minutes, when I felt they had heard enough, I hung up the phone. They immediately called back, and when he answered he played it cool like all was well in the world.
As I watched his face, I knew they were confronting him about all they had just witnessed. His eyes glazed over in blackness and he threw the phone at the wall smashing it in a million pieces. He threw is lit cigarette on my carpeted floor, dumped his beer over me before throwing it threw my window and came at me as I was sitting on the couch. "RUN!" The voices in my head screamed at me, "RUN! RUN! RUN!"
That was the first time in my life I had been thrown across the room like a rag doll. What seemed to be the longest minutes I had ever lived turned into a nightmare that even I couldn't wake up from. I crawled over the floor trying to reach my cell phone to call the cops. Just as the operator answered he grabbed the phone from me smashing that too. He had spent time in jail as a young defender and was terrified to go back as an adult.
"RUN!" They screamed, "RUN!" I got up an ran to the kitchen. He was screaming at me that he was going to kill me and I believed him.
Just as I reached my butchers block of kitchen knives, he came from behind and attacked me, trying to get the knife from my hands. He threw me against the cupboards and stood over me as I was screaming on the top of my lungs for help. In that moment I knew there wasn't a chance in hell that my neighbour was going to hear me screaming and that I was going to die in my own kitchen.
Suddenly I was looking over my body, again. I was up in the corner of the ceiling looking down on all that was taking place. I kept telling myself that it was okay, help was coming and that I was going to be alright. My physical self kept kicking and screaming and trying to get him off of me, to get his hands away from my throat. My spirit self was screaming at my body from up in the corner of the ceiling, trying to cheer me on and keep fighting.
Just as I thought I was living my last minutes of life, my spirit self, hoovering above me and him on the floor, seen his parents running down the hall. His father grabbed him off me and rushed him to get out of there before the cops came. His mother kneeled down beside me and when I took my first breath free of his hands my spirit self jumped back into my body.
With the boyfriend now gone, and me in utter distress, his mother picked me up off the floor and got me settled on the couch. I was covered in beer, spit, blood, and tears. My house was totally destroyed. Broken windows, smashed tv, broken phones, curtains hanging off the wall, the fridge and its contents tipped over. His mother cried with me as she cleaned me up.
The police arrived and walked threw the hanging screen door that he ripped off on his way out. And when the cop entered my home he was just about as impressed as I was.
I lied. I lied to the cop. I made up some bullshit story about what had happened, and brushed it off even though his mother begged for me to tell the truth. I couldn't do it. It wasn't because I loved him, or wanted to protect him, it was because I loved his parents and his family so much, that I couldn't bear to be the reason of why their son would be in jail.
Against the cop's and his mother's advice, I stood my ground and stuck with my story and let him get away "Scott-free".
I laid in bed all night without closing my eyes for one second. I was waiting for the sun to come up so I could go to my father's house when we woke up. Beaten and bruised, I showed up on his door step and that was the last time I ever stayed in my own house.
I was struggling both mentally and emotionally with all that had just took place. I was getting ready to take a shower to wash the night off of me and I broke down in tears.
In my head, I asked for God or whoever was listening, to give me a sign. Give me a sign that things will be okay, that I did the right thing, and that I'm safe. Not sure, what I was actually expecting, I took off my clothes to get in the shower, and as I stood there, looking at myself in the mirror, tears running down my face, I got my sign.
On my chest was a bruise in the shape of an angel. He had forcefully pushed me against the wall with such power, that his handprints were embossed in my skin.
The angels were with me. The angels were in me. I was finally safe.