People who have had a near death experience, what was it?
Hospital Isolation and Public Invalidation
When we got to the ER it was overfilled with patients. They didn’t put a mask on me before wheeling me in. I was going to pass away anyway so it didn’t really matter much. I lay in that bed my body feeling like it had been run over for 3 hours.
No one washed the glass from my eyes. No one checked on me after the X-rays and CT scans. They refused to give me anything for the pain and finally showed up the last hour with some Tylenol. I think I actually laughed.
My husband stayed by my side calmly talking with me the whole time. I realized in that moment that this was the summary of my life. My husband was the only one there as I lay in what I thought was my final hour and I had never felt so effing alone.
After I was taken to get X-rays and a CT scan I called my best friend of 9 years who lived 5 minutes from the hospital. I told him what happened and he freaked out asking me if I wanted him to come.
How the F was I supposed to respond to that?
I was like if you want you can.
He was broke so I told him we’d call him a lift. Another hour passed by and he never showed up. My husband texted him after that hour and he told us he was just getting in the shower. That hit me like a ton of bricks.
Somehow the tests came back and I hadn’t broken anything or gotten any brain damage. No one could possibly understand that but I wasn’t happy. All I had to show for this was huge bruising and soft tissue damage.
Before this I’d suffered almost my whole life with ideation of taking my own life, debilitating PTSD from so many messed up horrible events in my life, and a failed attempt as well as several other chronic disabilities both psychiatric and physical. I was bitter I’d survived.
I knew I’d have to live with what happened for the rest of my life while to everyone else besides me and my husband it was just a neat story that they’d forget about in a few days. Another messed up experience for me to relive over and over every day till the day I die, yay.
As I was discharged I told my best friend over text to not bother coming at that point because I was going home. The next two weeks consisted of me laying in my bed in the dark, sleeping mostly and balling to myself for the few hours I was awake each day while I tried to bring publicity to the assaults.
I made a petition to try and get the city to put up Nets or something effing anything because we were all playing Russian roulette and there had been over 200 assaults just like my one that summer. It was pointless and it went nowhere. I was just made fun of by hundreds of strangers online.
I left the house once to do a requested news interview after my post about the assault went viral on Facebook. I ended up being on the news twice and on the radio once for an interview.
I had a stranger tell me in a Facebook comment that he was tired of hearing about how all females have trauma in PTSD, that I should stop self-diagnosing myself (I am very much professionally diagnosed) and that the problem was that I was soft and needed to get over what happened because nobody cares.
I’ve been questioned by people about the validity of my story. I’ve been stopped on the street by locals telling me it doesn’t look like my head was hit that hard. My story has been invalidated over and over. I’ve been asked by my brother’s girlfriend if I’m sure I was actually hit in the head and questioned about why it affected me so much since all I got was just a bruise.
I was told by hundreds of people how lucky I was that I didn’t suffer permanent injuries or die. How I should be grateful, you know, that out of millions of cars mine had been targeted and that out of all the places The Rock could have landed it landed directly on my head.
No one understands how infuriating it is to be told you’re lucky after something like this happens. Nobody understands how insensitive it is to tell a Survivor that they’re lucky. And guess what, because they mean the best all I get to do is swallow the hurt and thank them and be told off for complaining about people trying to be nice.
