On March 13, 2022, I headed to the hospital with my contractions too close together and almost had my fourth child in the car. My sister flew down from Alaska, just to end up speeding to get us to the E.R in time.

After a natural birth (which let’s be honest is excruciating pain at freight train speed) my child came into the world and all was well.

It didn’t last long.

I only held my baby once and then it was time to go in for a routine tubal ligation.

On March 14, 2022, I heard myself say “something’s wrong.” It felt like someone had physically sat me up, I fell over and hit a tray table, biting through my lip. My sister, exhausted from having helped me through the birth ran to get help.

Talk about providence of God, I refuse to say it was coincidence or fate, it was all Him and here’s why: The nurses were holding a refresher class on coding. They rushed into my room, I had passed out, only to paritally wake up hearing them yell “60/30!” and then went into complete and total shock of my body, I couldn’t feel anything at this point.

And frankly there was a sinking realization, a knowing that this was it, I was dying.

In the chaos of everyone trying to figure out what was wrong, I couldn’t open my eyes but heard the panicked “Hemorrhaging! She’s got internal bleeding, get her back, NOW!” as they rushed me down to the operating room.

Long story short, they didn’t have time to intubate me for long enough and they called out that I was on the verge of tachycardia. I heard the last words I would ever hear, the surgeon in a frenzy screaming: “Where’s my scalpel?! Where’s my scalpel?!” The nurses tried to keep me awake, praying over me and then it was lights out.

And then in the middle of surgery, I woke up. I saw my own blood like a fountain in the air and the surgeon scream that I was awake. Lights out again.

It wasn’t strange, leaving this world. My mind was quiet, my body had failed and my soul was still there, alive and well. But then I came back.

When I opened my eyes, several hours into the night, I felt a pain worse than childbirth, waking up to a white hot heat, my body seizing from the pain. They don’t give you pain medicine when you are coming out from anesthesia. You just have to deal with it.

It was confusing at first. I had had so much peace in the dying, in the leaving and now I was awake…my body wasn’t dead. My sisters grief stricken face was there and I had to reconnect to all the memories of and the reality of waking up traumatized.

It took the removal of four “4x”4 lap sponges, a c-section to try to find the bleed even though I had already given birth, multiple lacerations, sloppy incisions, a jagged 6 inch cut, nearly 4 liters of blood gone, to find the nicked artery and finally stop the bleed.

It took three blood transfusions to put it all back in.

And all the while I was in that hospital bed after giving birth to a child, having a routine surgery and then being under anesthesia for hours waking up to the realization of a near death experience.

It took three days, determined and in shock, when I could finally regulate the pain medication and to will myself out of the bed in order to show proof of life, I just wanted to go home.

It hurt too much to hold my baby, she spent a lot of time in the nursery with the amazing nurses. I didn’t even know how to feel like a mother or bond with this baby when I had nothing to give. She was beautiful but I couldn’t take care of her.

There were so many moments of shocking things, waking up with blood still all over, a stained gown. I hadn’t been properly cleaned, a catheter that wasn’t changed for hours, more neglect and poor staff.

I just wanted to survive. All the while feeling nothing but that buzz that generates only out of hypervigilance, out of what would later be diagnosed as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I didn’t feel like a person. I felt like a machine.

Something about being in that place, was like being stuck at a crime scene. And I felt trapped and the only thing I could think over and over was to get out, before it happened again.

I had put my trust into that surgeon. I had believed she knew what she was doing. The nicked artery and lap sponges were the proof that I had placed my life in the hands of a very careless surgeon who had broken that vow to “do no harm.”

The worst case scenario is always the worst until it becomes a reality. And that is why C-PTSD, trauma, is so devastating, there is proof that your worst fears can come true. And when the anxiety shows up for seemingly no reason on a daily basis, it demands that you stay fearful because every time I closed my eyes it meant tragedy would strike again. Imagine being afraid to go to sleep and to wake up. Both of these things turned into triggers for me. Anything that had to do with that event, became a trigger, honestly.

I had been a counselor for over a decade and met people that struggled with PTSD, but I had never fully known what it was like until March 14-18 of 2022.

At first it was just survive. If I wanted to be able to check out and go home, I had to get out of the hospital bed and start walking. If you aren’t familiar with surgery, let alone several to the abdomen, your core, it means walking feels impossible. I remember shaking, the violence of it. How my brain couldn’t do anything but respond. I had no feelings. No thoughts. I just existed inside this body that couldn’t stop the tremors, couldn’t stop the pain. It took Tylenol-3, Ibuprofen 800mg, oxycodone and gabapentin 900 mg just to try to get everything under control. It would take over an hour for it to work and then felt that it had stopped working several hours before I could take anything else.

I do not for one second condone pain medication addiction but I bloody well understand why it happens.

Pain can be a teacher but not until you’re ready to listen.

Sometimes we develop a very human and mortal fear to it that we simply don’t want to be in pain anymore.

So to anyone wondering why addiction is a thing, well you have to understand the relationship the person hurting, has to it. Addiction in general. serves while it destroys, but it wouldn’t be part of anyone’s life without reason.

So in circling back to trauma. It was very sudden, I wasn’t prepared for it. Childbirth is it’s own war in and of itself. I didn’t use pain medication because I didn’t want the birth slowed down or the baby drugged; I wasn’t trying to be tough or prideful. I came to that hospital with the intention to have a baby, unmedicated and go home in 24 hours. That’s what I had done with my other three.

My plans were disrupted. My body destroyed. My life taken from me.

My family, while I was in surgery, my parents, relatives, my four kids, my friends; no one knew if I was ever going to come out of that surgery and when I did, it was a nightmare. They were all shocked and traumatized too.

By no stretch of the imagination was this a pretty scene.

Even the surgeon, who was later fired because of this incident, couldn’t even tell me what happened.

She didn’t show up to check on me for over 24 hours. She was afraid. When she finally came to see me, to see what she had done, she was traumatized too. She sat, shaking across from me and all she could manage to say was: “You lost over 3 liters of blood….we don’t know what happened. An artery was nicked… We don’t know what happened.”

Pain changes your brain, especially hour after hour of it. No real sleep. For every time I closed my eyes, my brain responded with panic. Lights out, sleep was now associated with death. And now as I look back I see all the ways that my brain started to develop new tactics, new survival modes, new ways to try to stay alive. And I am now, thankful for God’s intelligent design. No one showed me how to survive, my brain automatically started doing whatever it needed to in order to live, in order to make it.

I didn’t feel like a person. No emotions really. I simply tried to live with this new body that was covered in dissolvable stitches and didn’t look like mine, the bruising, the discoloration. I didn’t want to look at the scars. They were reminders.

But I was not the same person that, only 24 hours prior had barely made it in time to have my baby.

This person, this was someone else.

Three days after the near death experience, after so many prayers and God Himself intervening; after walking up and down those halls with a tray table, for my own physical therapy, my sister helping me walk; I finally walked to that nurses station myself and to their shocked looks, asked for a discharge home. No one there had ever seen anything like it.

I finally made it home, with my baby.

But it hurt to walk. It hurt to sit. It hurt to stand. I couldn’t move without tears and without help. It was second by second mind numbing pain. Nothing else existed outside of this. What had been done to me was one of the worst experiences of my life.

To feel helpless. To not be able to go to the bathroom to relieve myself alone. To not be able to bathe or sleep without help. It was a spiraling, mentally.

Even when once I had been a mentally strong, independent, self-sufficient, “bad ass” that handled her own business and didn’t feel like she needed anyone or anything to do life-I felt reduced down to nothing. To say that the rug had been ripped out from underneath me. is the understatement of a lifetime, for me. To be completely strong, confident and alive and thriving to feeling like trying to lift my head was painful, that I could only go to the bathroom if someone could help…

Trauma is unexpected, unwanted and downright dehumanizing.

It’s like buzzing a Redwood in half.

It takes all that you were and shatters it into a million pieces.

C-PTSD was diagnosed within a few months of my follow up appointment. the one that I walked painfully into. I had to reface the surgeon that destroyed me, she was again shaken upon meeting again with me. I can honestly say I felt sick seeing her. Not once did she apologize. Not once did she acknowledge that she had failed so horribly. The hospital already had the investigation underway to fire her. I told her exactly what I thought of her, how she had sliced and diced me and that I no longer felt like a person anymore. She had nothing to say. And I didn’t feel better, telling the truth. I wasn’t looking for an apology. I honestly couldn’t feel anything at that point, I was still numb and medicated. And her only answer was to up my medication for the nerves that she had oversewn.

I remember, in the days following, not being a happy mother, not feeling like I had just welcomed my child into the world as I had been dying shortly after. I wanted to be, but I couldn’t. Normal didn’t exist then.

If I could say anything about “feelings” I just had cognition. I would burst into tears, alone but not know why. I would cry profusely when I was in physical pain. But it felt like when that artery was severed, so was my personhood. Being human felt foreign.

Days, turned into weeks and then into months. Where once I was a sharp mind with a quick wit. I was fully immersed in trauma. Aside from trying to meet basic needs, like drinking water and tending to my children. Nothing made sense anymore. Not the American Dream, not goals or hopes or visions. Not wanting to pursue endeavors or day to day tasks.

My life felt like a bomb had gone off and I was in a war I never asked for.

My old mindset to “suck it up” and “deal with it” didn’t apply anymore.

I was shellshocked.

And this went on, day in and day out with post partum depression from a complete dive in hormones. The fact that I was able to get out of bed at all, was God everyday carefully and protectively helping me get up to take care of all four of my children. I was able to love and meet their needs because of what felt like a supernatural strength.

Trauma is awful. No doubt about it. Duh. But it’s not a life sentence.

It took years for me to work through the flashbacks that involuntarily disrupted every single day. I would try to cook dinner for my kids and see the flashbacks, which resulted in an anxiety attack, which then meant me, alone in the bathroom rocking back and forth: teaching myself reality orientation, praying and repeating who I was, where I was and that I wasn’t back there anymore.

At first, I hated what happened. I felt devastated, slighted, betrayed. I felt that my life had been ruined. That nothing would ever be the same. I felt shame, wronged, full of secondhand guilt. My self esteem didn’t exist anymore. I felt worthless and like I had somehow deserved this incapacitated life.

I hated my reality. That it hurt so much. I even hated my body. Resented how many medications I had to take just to function. That I couldn’t be fully present for my kids. I couldn’t make it through one day without breaking down, without flashbacks, anxiety attacks, depression, anger, irritability, poor appetite, fear, a sense of doom. My nervous system was out of control, dysregulated. I had brain fog, couldn’t concentrate. Almost forget about hygiene, nearly forgot to pay bills. And it felt like some kind of unasked for hell that showed up unannounced, uninvited and unwelcome. I felt victimized.

But then I started to see it different. After people praying for me. After I cried out to God in anguish and honestly asked: “Why didn’t you just let me die?”

I woke up one day, after years of being in the rinse, cycle, repeat hell of C-PTSD and thought: I didn’t die though.

I’m still here.

Trauma wasn’t supposed to happen but it did. It changes us, yes.

It ruins everything that we ever knew before.

Every memory used to be hard, used to be a “trigger” but then in the reframing, it isn’t about “being triggered”.

It was the truth that I didn’t die. I lived. Yes, I was in pain, but that physical pain wasn’t the same as it was that first day I woke up.

Yes, the nurses were trying to keep me awake because I was dying, but I came back.

Yes, my body is covered in scars and were they once painful reminders, yes. But now they serve as truth that what almost ended everything, didn’t. Was it the worst case scenario? Yes. Was it painful? Yes. Had I changed? Yes.

Honestly there was a grieving, acceptance and processing that took place. A crying out in prayer, that wasn’t rehearsed or practiced. Just talking to God.

I did ask a lot of the “why me?” I did shout in rage and pain, “Why did this happen?”

I did have days where I didn’t want to wake up, or to get out of bed, but did anyway. I loved my kids and every part of me wanted to be there and be fully present. I wanted to be a wonderful mom. I wanted to be alive, to be a person.

I found the interesting part, was the will to keep going, to do the right thing, to want to do the right thing. That even though I felt decimated, I still wanted to do what was right. I again, attribute this to not being a “good person” but God showing up when I didn’t feel like a person, feel like a human. But still had that drive to keep waking up, even though it was hard, to keep going.

Not because He was trying to make me do what I couldn’t, but because He was strong for me when I wasn’t.

There is no reason I got out of bed with that much pain. Honestly I stopped taking the medication, all of it. The side effects were awful anyway. So to daily be in pain but still make it through the day? That was Him.

My emotions slowly returned, dysregulated. I wrestled with the way my brain was fractured. That my heart felt broken. The way that my soul felt like it was crushed. The way that I could feel so many negative emotions and again didn’t even feel like myself anymore. I had to grieve that loss.

I did finally turn to reading the psalms, not because anyone told me to but because I just wanted to hear from God. I wanted an answer. I will unapologetically say no blog at 3 a.m. that I tied to find or internet search ever helped me as much as this scripture, that Kind David wrote (yes, he was real and yes, he was imperfect and even if you don’t believe in the Bible, he was a real person.):

“The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and to those whose spirits are crushed.” Psalm 34:18.

That was the only thing that truly resonated with me. Echoed like eternity in my soul.

I remembered what it felt like when my body had failed, that I had peace. I didn’t think about social media, about legacies, about reputation about anything. It was a knowing, I was dying and I was at a peace. But I had been sent back.

Even though it wasn’t the reality I wanted, it was the reality I had.

Even though I hated what that surgeon had done to me so carelessly, I forgave her. My children all thank God that I am still with them, that we have the time that we have had together.

Even though my body has never be the same, I am healed.

Even though I have had flashbacks and from time to time still do, now the volume has been turned down on them. They don’t hurt, they aren’t triggers.

I honestly thought that I would never be ok.

Honestly I had days that I knew it was okay not to be ok.

I had times of saying “I don’t want to do this anymore.” or “this is too hard.”

But I will say that I started to see the miraculous in all of it. Yes it was terrifying but I also learned that I still survived it and that I am still here.

We know that after so many X amount of days that our skin regrows, even internal organs. That after so much amount of time, we aren’t even physically the same.

Our memories return and resurface. Sometimes like timid children asking for reassurance and comfort. It’s okay to acknowledge them, safely grieve them and carefully redirect them with sensitivity and love.

There is always a drive to ask “why?” but even if we had the answer, it wouldn’t change the history. Sometimes there is peace in letting go of that question, as we may never know the answer.

I don’t know your story.

I don’t know what you’ve been through.

I want to encourage you to reframe what you went through. Not to sugar coat it. Not to accept malice. But to honestly see what good came from it?

Even if all you can come with is, I’m still here.

Isn’t that enough?

Trauma and tragedy seem insurmountable, they are not.

How we feel and think about it, that can change everything.

We can resent it, hate it, become bitter over it. We can become addicts to stuff the pain. We can pretend it never happened. We have all of those choices.

But if you’re still here…even though you’re hurting, there is still always the chance and opportunity of healing, hope and recovery.

Remember that there are choices, options available, hope, recovery, growth, healing.

Whatever your journey may be, it’s not over.

Don’t give up.