Drowning

Have any of you experienced a time when you were unable to breathe? Literally one of the worst sensations you can ever feel. I have had a rough couple of weeks and haven’t really felt like reflecting on life or really anything, until I saw this picture on Facebook.

When I was 7 or 8 I was with my family at a place called Surf and Swim. It has a really amazing tide pool and we would go there all the time as a family. I remember swimming there 3 times a week during the summer, playing racquetball, and eating some of the best tasting french fries (chips?) that I have ever had to this day. But I think pretty much all food tastes amazing after you have been swimming for hours. One of the times, we were at Surf and Swim in the tide pool just riding the waves without a tube. My dad was close by me as we jumped in and out of the waves. I didn’t time one of the waves right to jump over it and it pushed me under the water to the bottom of the pool. I knew how to swim, but my foot got caught in a suction drain and it wouldn’t let me break free to get to the surface. It was one of the most frightening times of my life. I was frantic and flailing trying to free myself and finally had to breathe, taking in water instead of air. Right as that happened a firm arm grasped me and pulled me to the surface, freeing my foot from the drain. Even though the pool had many lifeguards, none of them had seen me go under and not come up. But my Dad had, and he caught me just in time. In reality I was under probably only 20-30 seconds, but when you are literally stuck underwater and can’t break the surface, it feels like an eternity. Just thinking about the event right now makes chills run down my spine.

After my Dad pulled me up I remember him smiling and saying “Hey, you okay? We lost you there for a minute.” But I know it was his way to try and calm me down (and probably him as well), because we had both been frantic. Me underwater fighting to come up, and him above searching to try and find me. Not really been much of a fan of swimming pools, lakes, or oceans since.

Fast forward 6 years. My sister and I had just come home from a youth activity and we were both starving because it had been such a busy day and we hadn’t had time to eat. We sat down in the barstools at the counter and dug into our Sloppy Joes (what a horrible name for a sandwich by the way). I found myself scarfing down the food, not chewing enough and a piece of my Sloppy Joe went down “the wrong pipe” and I choked. OF course, of all things I end up choking on something called a ‘sloppy joe’. I remember trying to cough really hard trying to get it to come up and I grabbed my sisters arm trying to let her know I was in distress. But she thought I was being a pesky sister by getting her white shirt dirty with the sloppy part of the joe, and to be candid, I WAS a pesky sister most of the time.

Anyway, within seconds I threw myself away from the counter, throwing the barstool to the ground at the same time, which caught everyones attention. I was grabbing at my throat unable to talk or breathe. My mom started screaming for my dad and he came running in. Without even thinking he immediately started the Heimlich Maneuver, and on his second attempt the food dislodged and I began gasping in air. Breathing never felt so good! And just so you know, my Mom makes amazing Sloppy Joes from scratch, and I have eaten them since! Food for thought, if a cat has 9 lives, how many must I have? Hmmmmm. Good question! 🙂

Is it interesting to anyone else that in both of those experiences my dad was the one to save me? I’ll reflect on that more later.

Both of these stories involve the physical side of not being able to breathe (and more of my lovely near death experiences). But what happens when we find ourselves fighting to stay above water in the deep end of life completely unable to catch our breath? Can they be just as “near death”?

I just realized that I am really tired. Being up at 4am will do that to a person. So I will answer that question and more tomorrow! Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Growing Pains

I always wondered what it would be like to be one of “those people” who always talk about how much they loved high school. And how they would love to relive it again. Are you kidding me? Seriously? High School is one of the most traumatizing events of a persons life. It was for me anyway. I’m not sure my theory of the connection between brain injury and hormones can be validated with science, but for me, that is when everything fell apart.

Being a 13 year old is such an awkward age. You are trying to find your identity. But really you get lost in what others think of you. And if what they think is either good or bad, then that must be who you are. Well, at least that was the case for me. Turning 13 was a game changer. I fell in with the popular crowd somehow, but I was always an outsider. This story is really painful, and I don’t know how to retell it at all. I’m not even sure there are words to describe it. But here it is, I did something impulsive, something not in line with who I was. I said something mean about a boy to one of my friends, and somehow word got back to him. And then that boy decided to make my life a living hell. To be honest, I am still afraid of running into him to this day. I was bullied to a point that I was scared to go to school. And it continued from Junior High well into High School. I never understood how that one thing that I said, one thing, could make such an impact on his life that he could take it out on me for years. How do you hold on to the hate for so long?

He decided to give me a name, an ugly one that I won’t repeat. Every where I would go, in the halls, when I walked into a class, he would yell or say this name. And everyone knew that it was meant for me, and they would all laugh. Because he was the most popular boy in school, and they just wanted to fit in. Just like I did. To be honest, they were probably just grateful that it wasn’t them. I wished I was invisible. I wished I would just die, and I came up with scenario after scenario of different ways that I could make it happen. Not a day went by that I didn’t hear that name being called. It finally died down my junior year of high school. I guess the novelty of it wore off. But the damage was done.

I became obsessed. Obsessed with my weight, how I looked each day, what I wore. My OCD swept into high gear. There would be days that I couldn’t get my hair to look perfect, so I would get in the shower and do it all again, and again. I couldn’t leave the house until it was perfect. I remember forgetting my earrings one day and I went in to full meltdown mode. I drove myself home in the middle of school -who cares that I missed biology- I just had to get my earrings so the anxiety would subside.

My parents recognized that I changed. That they didn’t know who I was anymore. We went to therapy. It helped for a while. I was prescribed my first depression and anxiety medication. I was just 16. Now we are treading into scary territory for me. You would think with all the things I had talked about in this blog, that being honest about all this wouldn’t be a problem. But this still hurts. So, since I couldn’t figure out how to to take my life, I found another way to relieve the pain, by inflicting it upon myself. I mean, didn’t I deserve it? I was the one who started it right? I called the boy a name and so it was all my fault. I deserved the pain. I began something that people call cutting. It actually started by accident. I cut myself shaving my legs and the pain took over and stopped all my racing thoughts. So it became part of my life. The scars are still there, and the cutting only stopped a short time ago. Any time I have a high amount of stress in my life, unfortunately I am always drawn back to it.

The perfectionist in me needed to be in control. And in addition to cutting, food took center stage. Portion control, starving myself. Then one day, full on bulimia. That part didn’t actually start until I was in my 20’s. And this will be news to almost everyone except my husband – that I suffered with bulimia on and off for 7 years. Now, I want to address this right. These are hard things. So here is a little bit of information.

From a noted Psychologist, “We can go to any school and ask, ‘Do you know anyone who cuts?’ Yeah, everybody knows someone, and very often, kids who self-harm have an eating disorder. Many are sensitive, perfectionists, overachievers. The self-injury begins as a defense against what’s going on in their lives. They have failed in one area of their lives, so this is a way to get control.”

“Self-injury can also be a symptom for psychiatric problems like borderline personality disorder (sound familiar?) anxiety disorder, bipolar or schizophrenia. Yet many kids who self-injure are simply ‘regular kids’ going through the adolescent struggle for self-identity. They’re experimenting. I hate to call it a phase, because I don’t want to minimize it. It’s kind of like kids who start using drugs, doing dangerous things.”

I am pleading with you! If you know someone who is starting down this path. If you are recognizing even the littlest of signs. Don’t ignore it. Get them proper help! This has ramifications far beyond the teenage years.1-800-273-TALK is a really great resource available 24 hours a day. All I know is that I wanted to find someone that understood. If you aren’t that person, figure out a way to become it. Get educated and arm yourself with knowledge, compassion and love. And if you are the person who this describe please know, You are NOT alone. We understand, and there is help for you!

Riding in Cars

Just two months later. We were driving in a loaned vehicle while our family car was being worked on in a shop. Again this is early 1980’s, people – no carseats with 5 strap harnesses – (although my mom DID make sure we had carseats) but we were going for such a short drive, that they weren’t transferred to the loaned car. We were taking my sister to dance practice. (What is it with the relationships between dance and my accidents??). We were driving along the main street in our town and I think we were making a left turn. The car we were riding in was a type of roadster with really heavy doors. I’m not sure if it didn’t shut tight enough, or I was being the daredevil I was and played with the handle. Who knows. What I do know is that while we were driving I fell out the passenger side of the door. The car behind us was following really close and didn’t see me fall. She ran over my back and my newly brain injured skull. I have pictures of my back (hopefully I can add them to this post soon). I had bruises up my spine kind of in the shape of her tire tread. Another trip to the Childrens Hospital. They thought I was there because I was having complications from the balcony fall. When they learned this was a new accident, and the nature of it, there was shock, disbelief and I’m sure, a loss of hope.

How can someone recover from that much trauma? Just to be clear I believe in a  Heavenly Father, I believe in Angels, I believe in Miracles. I am a living, breathing one myself. And I 1000% believe that I was being watched over through each of these traumatic events and more to come. What’s interesting is that used to have dreams all the time when I was younger about these accidents. That when I fell from the balcony someone below would catch me every time. My other dream was that as I lay on the cold asphalt of the road, just before I was run over, someone laid across my back and protected me from the weight of the car. I had these dreams often enough that they became reality to me.

After both of these accidents my Dad and other Uncles, Grandpas, and Friends laid their hands upon my head, using their Priesthood Power, and my Dad commanded me to get well. Commanded me to come back. And I did. 20 years later my story is still told. We have run into the doctors and nurses that cared for me and that all shake their heads in disbelief. I am 33 years old on Wednesday. I have survived. My life is not very pretty, and I’ve knocked on deaths door many times since those accidents, but I am still here. Still surviving. Still living.

SO where does this whole “Lash Therapy” thing fit it? Oh, you’ll see. And you probably won’t believe how ‘lashes’ can change the course of ones life.

Lets Start Here…

Let me just preface this post by saying how much I love my life right now. That is a very Bold statement coming from me. I haven’t liked much about myself, the way I lived, the way I treated others, for a very long time. But now there are quiet moments in my thoughts, there is peace in my heart. This. Is. HUGE! And you will get to read why.

Let’s just get some of the crazy out there right in the beginning. I like to jump in the deep end lately, or maybe always.

I have been told this story many times, and I hope to get most of the facts straight. If not, I’m sure my mom will set me straight just after she reads this. The reason I was told this story was because I was two years old when it happened. I currently have a little two year old girl, and cannot even imagine the horrific nature of these accidents and how they would affect me as a mother. I know just how hard it is to be a parent and my heart feels so much pain for my mom and what she must have suffered seeing her child placed in these situations.

So, it was summer. I was a very adventurous 2 year old with a penchant for pushing the boundaries. We were at a dance competition for my older sister. We were up on the second floor getting her ready, when I decided to be “adventurous”. The second floor had a balcony where you can see to the floor below. This was the early 1980’s and along the walkway, there were only two bars separating the people up top on the balcony to the floor below. In just seconds, people started screaming out that someone had fallen over the edge, a 15 foot fall onto concrete. So I fell. Landed on my head and fractured my skull. I’m not sure what happened after that. I know in one of these accidents I was life-flighted to Primary Childrens Hospital. That my stay in the hospital was relatively short. And that every doctor and nurse proclaimed it a miracle I was still alive. I’ll hopefully be able to clarify some of the other details, but maybe the details aren’t that important. The aftermath is what is important. I sustained a brain injury. We would find out much later (when I was 18 or so) through an MRI that my left frontal lobe had been damaged. Google ‘left frontal lobe damage’ sometime. Interesting read. It is your executive function. It impairs your attention span, your ability to finish tasks, motivation, judgment, and organizational capacity. “Because of how your emotions are affected, the symptoms experienced from frontal lobe damage may cause you to become impulsive or assume risky behaviors.” Ummm, yes to all of the above!

I wish that were all there was to this story. Girl falls from balcony. Girl has brain damage. Girl deals with it throughout her life. That would be nice. But not even close.

By they way. The Armory where I fell is located on the campus of my Junior High School. I had classes up on the balcony/second floor where I fell. Very weird and ironic. Instead of just two bars of separation. It now contains 8. Wonder why…hmmm Liability issue, you think??