Son of a Bitch! Bringing up Trauma

I've been telling my story to anyone willing to listen for the last 7 years, but here we are actually writing the story and I am finding myself more emotional now than every. Writing about the call, people's reactions and the memories that are flooding in is completely different when I see it written in front of me and I really wasn't expecting this reaction from myself.

That overwhelming fear of every image, smell and sound of where I was when I got the call, the drive to the hospital, sitting in the room at the hospital, waiting to hear if the surgery is a go, to the hallways and to the OR is completely different now when written down. As I said in my last post, I had written a chapter, and that was Chapter Four - "The Call". I actually found myself crying as I started to write the story and remember that fear and how emotional my husband was when I started to walk away to the OR. That's never happened when I tell people about the story, when I actually verbalize it. Perhaps it's articulating the story in another way that makes it so much more fresh to the mind. Perhaps it's because I can skip over the details when I talk about it but when I write it I need to describe everything in that moment. I have to describe what a room looked like, what something smelt like, what sounds I heard at the time. It's triggering those memories/traumatic events even more when I have to think of those finer details. I wasn't prepared for the emotional toll of it.

While I am sure this is going to be a therapeutic experience in the long run, I guess what I am trying to say is Bitch... what the hell is going on with me?!

All of this reaction and emotion from writing a simple chapter, I can only think about what it will be like for me when I started writing and having to think about those same details as I write the book in it's entirety. Thinking about the post surgery experience while I was in a coma, I was so aware of the sounds and the smells during that time. The dreams too were exceptionally vivid and have stuck with my hard over the years. I cannot let them go. One was even traumatic. So traumatic that I talked to a counselor about it while I was in the hospital because it bothered me so much. I couldn't understand why my brain was creating these horrific events and images in my mind. But these stories/dreams are integral to write about. While they are odd, disturbing and interesting I feel it necessary to include them.

This dream that haunts me, that I needed to talk to someone about involved me and my younger brother. I had hurt myself, and hurt myself badly in front of him and while I lay dying, soaked in blood he was screaming and clung on to me. Even though it was an awful dream because of my body getting used to the medication, the sights and the sounds of horror in that dream were terrifying. I couldn't shake it for weeks, even after coming home, and writing it here I'm really giving the cliffs notes version because I don't want to think about it in depth. I'm not prepared for it.

I guess this was a quick get it off of my chest post. A rambling post. Maybe I need to hold on to those cool rocks some more and calm down. haha.

Ashley / Bitch I Lived