It was four years ago that a paramedic
tried to calm me down by asking me if I had talked to my parents yet. “No” I bawled
at him, as he asked me if I knew their phone number. I purposefully hadn’t
called my parents in the 48 hours I had been in the hospital, because we were
still trying to figure out what was wrong. My thought was that I would call
them when the doctors at least knew something, because the unknowns would not
be comforting to my parents in Ontario as I was 5000km away on the West Coast.
That logic seemed fine when I didn’t have any idea what was coming, and it had
never even crossed my mind that the outcome of that hospital stay was going to
be so life-changing.
The idea of calling my parents when I was
in excruciating pain didn’t seem like the best idea to me, but the paramedic
handed me his phone anyways. Despite being in the worst pain of my life, and
being pumped full of about 20 different narcotics, my brain somehow still
remembered my parents phone number (muscle memory for the win!). I think the
paramedic thought I would be able to be distracted by talking to my parents and
therefore I would focus less on the pain. As the phone rang I was screaming out
in pain, and the thought of someone picking up on the other end wasn’t exactly
comforting.
My dad answered the phone and I cried out
to him telling him I was in excruciating pain. He did what he would do as the
ultra-supportive dad he is, and told me that everything was going to be ok.
After telling me to breathe and calm down, I yelled that I was going into
emergency surgery, and immediately the tone on the other end of the phone
changed. Still supportive, I could hear the panic in my dad’s voice and the
realization that I wasn’t just overreacting to something minor. It was close to impossible to come up with
sentences and focus on anything but how much pain was surging through my body
at that point in time, but I still had to try and communicate to my dad what
was going on. I conjured up some language in between wailing and moaning in
pain as I asked the paramedic what was wrong with me, so that I could tell my
dad patiently waiting on the other end of the line. “Compartment syndrome” he
replied. As I echoed the response into the other end of the phone, my dad had
the same response that I had. “What is that even?” Unfortunately I couldn’t
help him as I had just been introduced to the term mere hours before and with
my foggy state I couldn’t even remember what it was called.
I don’t remember the end of the phone call
even, or what happened from there, but I know talking to my parents did not
pleasantly distract me as the paramedic had hoped. At that moment I was on a
stretcher in an open part of the ER waiting room, visible to most people in the
area. I am usually mortified of people looking at me or paying attention to me,
so much so that I won’t leave a lecture to go to the bathroom because I know it
will just garner attention that I do not want. But this was different. After 48
hours of suppressing pain and being told I “probably just had shin splints” and
hearing every doctor and nurse insinuate that you’re just overreacting and they
can’t imagine how the pain could be getting that much worse, I finally could not
hold it in any longer.
I had been air lifted to this hospital and
during the flight was the most intense pain I had ever felt. I was supposed to
have my legs strapped in and everything tightly contained, but there was
absolutely no way I could go without flailing my leg around to help with the
immense amount of pain surging through my lower extremity. The paramedic could
tell by the look on my face that I was VERY serious when I told him there was NO
way I would be strapping my legs in. As
the plane landed and the ambulance transported us the remainder of the way, I
could feel every pothole and bump surge through my body like a bolt of
electricity. During the transport from one hospital to another the pain had
ramped up and I could no longer keep my screaming inside. I yelled loud enough
for probably the whole lower mainland to hear me…and I wasn’t even on the lower
mainland.
There were no rooms left in the ER, so I
was brought to half a room with a reclining chair in it for me to sit. The poor
little old lady on the other side of the curtain advocated for me as I screamed
and howled in pain. She kept getting the doctors and nurses for me exclaiming
to them “I think she’s in pain”. As cute as it was, and as much as she wanted
to see me helped, there was nothing they could do until a surgery room opened.
All I could do was wait while they continued to flood me with narcotics in
hopes that something would touch the pain at all.
As the years pass since this less-than-fun
ordeal, the intensity of the pain fades, but the recollection of those hours
and days of what felt like excruciating torture does not. I find myself walking through each and every
moment and day of the process in my mind, remembering vividly what was going on
around me. Maybe that was my way of distracting myself, by tuning in to
anything but the pain.
This experience has been an awful one, but
it has equipped me in my line of work, helping me to understand others who have
experienced trauma and how we can’t predict how our brain is going to process
something or put it all together. As much as we (I) love things to be linear
and orderly, that just isn’t how any of this comes to make any sense. It comes
in flashes of different memories and moments that happened throughout the time.
Like the moment I was told my leg muscles had to be removed and I was left
alone to process what this meant for my life. Or the moment I realized I had
lost all nerve endings in my lower leg across that muscle compartment and did
not know if this would ever return. Being told I would be able to hike and do
activities with a cane, or beginning to walk only to realize I had drop foot.
These moments were among many that took processing and required a shift in
thoughts as to what my life may look like from then on.
I have learned a lot. I have learned that
we don’t choose when we are going to process things, and sometimes we just need
to go along for the ride and be open to the (sometimes very hard) lessons that
come along the way. As I work with others impacted by trauma in different ways,
I can understand the frustrations of wanting to tick off the box that says
“deal with ____ trauma” and be done with it. Unfortunately that’s just not the
way we process things, and I am often the one wanting to change this reality
and find a way to cheat the system. “Maybe if I specifically give time for this
to sink and fully be processed, then I can move on” or “perhaps if I just
slowed life down for a while this would be easier” are thoughts that creep into
my mind. The reality is though, that this will never be “over”. There is not
going to be a moment in time where suddenly all of this has a crisp, neat
ending. Life is messy, and this one moment in time will continue to impact
things for a long time to come.
I used to be focused on climbing mountains
and getting the most out of my young adult life, seeing places and adventuring
in any way I could. I still love to do all these things, but will have a
significant amount of pain to manage when lacing up my hiking boots or taking
on any physical adventure. Even the activities that are “easiest” on my leg
come with their fair share of difficulties. Each summer I battle through broken
ankle(s) from the repetitive motion of an ankle unsupported by muscles when
riding my bike. This is one of many things that have just become part of my
reality.
I seem to write as a source of corralling
my jumbled thoughts, and often during this time of year I find myself reflecting a lot on those days. As
I sit and think about what four years has taught me, it allows me to gain perspective
on some things. One of the biggest things I have learned from this is the
amount of time that something can have an impact on you. Trauma or otherwise,
this has given me an understanding of people and our many ways of coping and
understanding life events. I know that as time passes the amount of time that I
think about these things is lessened, but I still do know that four years later
I can still find myself waking up from panicked dreams walking through each
moment of some of the rougher patches during this ordeal. I know that every
person experiences life and trauma in different ways, but if I were to have one
takeaway from the reflections of this year, it would be this: have grace for
people. Allow healing and processing to take place, and be open to listening to
each step of the journey for someone else, because that may be a great source
of healing for him or her. As much as I don’t want this to still be something
that impacts my life, I know that it does. But I also know that from this
experience I have grown and gained many valuable life lessons and perspective.
So I’m going to take the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of this experience and
continue trekking into whatever lessons and processing is to come.
