1:00pm May 17, 2012

➸ The moon forest: reblog if you have survived something, anything

tw: fight, nastiness, suicide

gimpunk:

secretsofthedisabled:

fromonesurvivortoanother:

missingkeys:

fromonesurvivortoanother:

you don’t have to be specific. let’s just let each other know that we are still here, alive and kicking

…

This is going to be in the directly or indirectly avoiding death category because I’ve already written it too long as it is.

At least two near-drownings.

Several suicide attempts and over a decade of suicidal thinking.

Within the psych system: One attempt to kill me by not treating an anaphylactic med reaction (survived due to the intervention of someone from the VNA). More instances than I can remember of medical neglect with no apparent intentions to kill me. And the later instance where they knowingly gave me the med I was allergic to, refusing to give me anything to stop the reaction until I obeyed their instructions.

Several people who have threatened to kill me, both in overt and covert ways (covert = “Let’s try to see if we can get rid of her disability benefits and services”). Including instances where people posted my address and purported staff hours on the net, asking if anyone could come and kill me.

I’ve had too many close calls with medical conditions, often combined with neglect by people who assumed someone who looked like me couldn’t possibly be right or experience what I was experiencing. How close I got to death in each case varies, but I’ve been close enough to learn it has a gravitational pull.

Some of those things: Repeated full or partial intestinal blockages. Early-onset gallbladder disease. Severe tachycardia (highest recorded heart rate around 250 bpm). Intermittent muscle weakness affecting respiratory muscles. Repeated lung infections, leading to bronchiectasis, leading to more infections. Some which have gone to pneumonia and others “just” green phlegm and screwed up oxygen levels. Asthma crises that required months of prednisone. Mysterious infections that doctors couldn’t locate, as well as multiple infections at once that they could locate. Severe dehydration. Aspiration. And that’s off the top of my head.

Another factor in my medical close calls has been my tendency to overwork myself. Which wreaks havoc with my body at times, or makes me forget how necessary certain ongoing medical treatments are. I also have real trouble taking care of myself and some of the UTIs, dehydration, and results of being unable to take meds on my own have been related to that.

I’ve survived several kinds of abuse: Physical, mental, emotional, sexual, stalking, harassment, institutionalization, school bullying, torture. Some of those things involved direct threats to my life (the man who molested me used to start to slam my side of the car into other cars, only swerving away at the last second, in what he later admitted were attempts to threaten me with death), while others were only a threat due to the consequences of the emotional damage, ©PTSD, and depression.

I’ve also survived my own lack of awareness of danger. When I was a young kid, I was riding my bike and went down a steep path. My bicycle went out of control and I still didn’t know I was in danger. I didn’t hear my parents screaming at me to jump off. I was saved from a drop off a cliff by running into a rickety little wooden fence… with my face.

And aside from that. I’m bad at noticing cars. I’ve walked into traffic accidentally dozens of times. Bad at noticing steep hills. Been cornered by a pack of wild dogs behind a factory at three in the morning. Again it’s countless things, more than I can remember. None of them purposeful, I just have too much sense of danger sometimes and too little other times.

And then of course there’s self-injury. In my case the most dangerous one has always been banging my head hard and repeatedly. That’s something really unpredictable where every time you do it could be your last. I don’t consider dermatillomania in the same category as self-injury but it too can unpredictably lead to death, by skin infection.

And I have to add that yes things like depression and PTSD can lead to suicide or self-injury. I may not fully subscribe to the idea that mental illness is always, well, an illness in the way modern psychiatry describes it, but I’d never deny the damage these patterns can cause.

The weird thing is I rarely think of how much shit I’ve survived all at once like this. At the same time I can’t always feel like I can claim any kind of credit for having survived. Often it was circumstances beyond my control.

One thing I have thought about is how many times one little thing could have changed and I’d be dead. I’ve seen other people die from the same things all the time, and it’s not like there’s anything better about me, just luckier.

Notes: