The Day I Died-Sort Of

Note: I’ve written about this in varying degrees elsewhere on this blog, but this is the first time I’ve had the pictures. Seeing them reminds me of quite a few details that I may have mentioned before so, if you’re bored of the subject, you’ll want to find another post. If not, read on.

Everybody tells me I should take more “selfies”. I hate the way I look in pictures, but apparently my friends think people would like them. So here goes. Gotta give the people what they want, right?

Newnan Times-Herald, front page

Close-up of the Saturn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m the one in the ambulance.

Actually, maybe not. I might still be on the ground because the helicopter hadn’t gotten there yet. Or maybe I’m still in the car. It doesn’t look like they’d cut the roof off yet.

I don’t know. I don’t remember, just like I don’t remember the first two weeks in the hospital,

The next few paragraphs come from accounts of what I’ve been told by several people, some of whom I’ve never met.

 

I was pulling out of my subdivision on the way to a new job when I got hit T-bone style by a Ford F150. My Saturn (left) was smashed like a soda can around me, the two sides less than 14″ from each other. For a frame of reference, that’s slightly larger than a child’s rocking chair. Hey, I *did* always want to be thinner…

The paramedics tried to get me out of the car through the side but ended up having to cut a hole in the roof because of how tightly I was packed in.

The front of the F150 was smashed in, the engine block broken. The other driver had no injuries.  I guess that’s standard for a truck that can tow a hippopotamus. No, I’m not kidding.

I don’t envy my husband the task of calling my family and telling them I’d been in a horrible accident. It’s not like there’s any *good* way to say, “Hi , Mr. (shortbread cookie), this is S. I’m just calling to let you know that your daughter got into a wreck and is being held together by screws and tape. Call me back.” Lovely.

I was rushed to the hospital. When I had surgery a couple of days later, the doctors put two metal pins in my hip to hold it together along with a filter to keep my legs from swelling. I was in intensive care for a little over a week before I was moved to the rehab wing where I woke up.  For some reason nobody knows, some extra bone began to grow in the hip socket while my pelvis was mending itself and growing in around the screws. I ended up having to have my hip replaced seven years later (long story), but for that time I had a limp because the bone made my left hip set up nearly 3/4 of an inch higher than the right. I still have the limp, albeit not as severely.

According to my sister, my friends and everyone who was there, I was quite a difficult patient. I would wake up randomly and start pulling out all my tubes and lines because I thought my husband had taken me somewhere to get tortured. I would ramble incoherently, throw things and call people every name in the book. Apparently I had *quite* the swear vocabulary. Too bad I don’t remember it: In my line of work, I’m sure I could put it to good use.

I also begged my dad to let me die because I was in so much pain. Thank God he didn’t.

Here’s what I do remember:

I remember using a bedpan and ripping out my catheter.

I remember my throat and chest really hurt. My sister said this was because I ripped my chest tube out, which I didn’t even realize was possible.

I remember my cousin said that I told everyone that I saw my late mother in heaven and she told me to get back down to earth-that it wasn’t my time yet. I don’t remember it, nor do my husband and sister. Knowing her, though, I can *completely* see that. Totally.

I remember waking up in the hospital and learning that I’d been there for about two weeks now and would probably need about two more weeks of rehab before I could even *think* about going home.

It turned out that both my father and my sister had been there for several weeks now, both helping my husband with stuff around the house (I swear, sometimes I think he’d starve if I didn’t cook for him) and checking in on me. My dad lives in North Carolina and my sister in Virginia-both over 8 hours away. They were both freaked out to hell…my dad said that I kept begging him to let me die because I was in so much pain (again, I don’t remember this).

At least two of my therapists were cute. I’m grasping at straws here.

When I got home, my friends had set up a bed for me using an old mattress and one of their old headboards on a frame of rails and books in our dining room. My beautiful dining room…I think it’s sweet how every day I’d wake up to see Missy, our tabby, at the end of my bed. It was almost as though she were making sure I didn’t go away again. Who says cats don’t have feelings.

What’s also funny (well, not ‘ha ha’ so much as weird)…People talk a lot of crap about Saturns, but I was told by more than one person who would know-doctors, insurance adjusters, my dad-that if I hadn’t been in a well-made car I’d be dead. Full stop.  My dad’s a mechanic who has worked on cars my whole life, so I believe it. Another friend told me that an angel must have been in the front seat with me, which I fully believe. It’s like I’ve told other people-I believed in God before but, if I hadn’t then, I do now.

There you have it-

At least I made the front page, right? 🙂 I’ve got to find *something* positive out of it.

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(cue violin solo)

*I* might not have died that day, but you know what did?

-The chance at having a regular sex life.  At least, for a long time. The accident left me unable to, ahem, assume most positions. The ones I *could* get into didn’t work for my husband. That’s not to say I hadn’t done anything before but a) not all of it was consensual; and b) the things we did had the understanding that it could only go *so* far because the full expression of sex and love was reserved for marriage. I’m still a Christian…I still believe that.

I don’t know that we would have been all that “active”, but I do know that I didn’t get to learn all the things about how to please a man or what things we enjoyed most that pretty much every other married couple got to do. I can, um, please myself and please a man in some ways, but I still have a lot to learn. There’s a side of myself I might want to explore, but only with the right person.

I thought that having my hip replaced would help, but nope. After several, um, unsuccessful attempts at sex I went to a gynecologist convinced that I had some sort of disorder that caused me to “clench up” or something like that. It turns out that my lady parts *themselves* are normal, but they’re pushed to the right.  Seeing as I was hit on the left side…hmm, I wonder what that could be from. 🙄

Many years later, I *still* have no clue. I’m even more in-the-dark about this than I was when I was a teenager and hadn’t had any experience to speak of. I’m now [redacted] years older and don’t have the drive I thought I would so I guess it’s more a matter of my brain matching up to my body. I know that sex isn’t everything and we had a great relationship in every other way…he’s my best friend, which is what my parents had and what I’ve always wanted for myself.

Now that I’m a widow, I despair of finding another man who will accept and work with me. I’m more than willing to learn, but will anyone teach me? I don’t know.

I suppose I could have tried harder-other people do-, so maybe I have no one to blame but myself. Some people have (unkindly) suggested it was really my husband’s fault and wondered if it would be different with anyone else,. My answer to that is a firm NO because even if I were with someone else it’s still *my* drive that’s low, *my* experience that’s nonexistent and *my* parts that don’t f*cking work.

-On a related note, my childbearing years were drastically cut short. I was 35 when I got my hip fixed. Now, I am well aware that women have children late all the time-in fact, one of my good friends from college is only a few months younger than me and she just had her second child. Even so, it will be that much harder since we never really got into a “groove” to where we wanted to try. I know our financial issues and my bipolar complicate things-and it’s all up to God anyway-but I would have at least liked to have been able to try or even *think* about it seriously.

But now I can’t. All because of a Stupid. F*cking. Wreck. I know I should be grateful to be alive-and I am-, but I’ve spent a lot of time in pissed-off, self-pity mode because I’ve come to a time in my life where most of the people I’m around are either my age and have kids or-like a coworker who I’ve sort of “crushed on”-they’re so much younger and have all of these experiences ahead of them. And by the time they *do* get to my age they’ll be a lot further along than I am right now. I know it’s not a race, but I still feel like there are a lot of things I’ve missed out on. I don’t know that I would have done them anyway, but now I’ll *definitely* never know.

My friend said she hoped I didn’t think my best years were behind me. There are times I wonder. It’s like all this time and all these possibilities have been taken from me…I don’t know who would be doing the “taking” because I can’t see a good God actively doing something to hurt me, but they’re not there and it wasn’t because I let them go. Perhaps I should have tried harder to make things happen (or had more faith in God that they would), but there you have it. I believe God can/have/will make something good come out of this. I kind of wish He didn’t have to, though. I’m sure there’s a reason for it all. There *has* to be-

Fictional Crushes

I have a crush on a fictional character.

Yes, I know how pathetic this sounds. No, I’m not going to tell you which one. I can pretty much guarantee, though, that you’ve never heard of him. Not unless you’re into weird YouTube channels. Thing is, this doesn’t surprise me at all. For as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten crushes on the “unlikely” guys on TV and in real life. It’s not that I don’t like the “conventionally attractive” guys; it’s more that I’m a lot more interested in the person who is average-looking but smart and funny than the Ken-doll clones with no personality. I’ve never been the type of person who would be with someone I didn’t truly like just because they looked good or because I could have sex with them. The illusion gets old.

In reality, I like the geeks. The super-popular pretty boys in school never really “did it” for me. As much as I like gazing at the Heath Ledgers and Patrick Dempseys of the world, there’s nothing like an adorable, sweet, intelligent guy smiling at you after having a laugh. If he has dimples, great. If he wears nice glasses, even better. In fact, there’s a bespectacled cutie at my job who looks like he could be related to another bespectacled cutie who used to be at my job. He’s not-I asked. Too bad.

My friend calls me “sapiosexual”-meaning, I’m sexually attracted to intelligence. I think that’s very accurate. That’s probably where the “glasses” thing came from; TV and movies often give someone glasses when they want them to appear intelligent.

One thing I’ve enjoyed doing is making up stories about the guys I like. I think it started because otherwise I would get these really weird and scary thoughts in my head and I would do whatever I had to to get them to stop. Counting sheep doesn’t help; they always turn out to be purple with green polka dots or something equally gaudy and random. Most of the time the stories involve someone based on me dating/falling in love with the person I have a crush on. In some cases I insert myself into their world, but lately I’ve put them in a version of mine. In some cases, he was an old friend. Other times he was a friend or brother of someone else I was close to. Other times, he lived in my apartment complex and I bumped into him at the gym or laundry room. The only thing that is actually true is me and the world I insert them in-the student restaurant I worked at in college, a grocery store back home my friends all worked at, the band room in high school, etc. A lot of interesting things happened in those places.

They are nearly always taking place during a period of my life where I wasted too much time and energy on a particular relationship that I often wish had never happened. Sometimes it *is* that it never happened, but other times it is where I break up with the “real guy” to be with the character. This is probably some way of trying to get that time back. I know I can’t do that and I wouldn’t want things to be different now; it’s just that I wouldn’t have hurt as many people as I did and just would have been a much happier person.

There have been stories that took place at a different time in my life, but I’m always a lot younger and it usually involves losing my virginity to the guy. Since the guys are usually sexy as hell (or, if I don’t know what they look like, the way I imagine them), it would be odd if I *didn’t* end up having sex with them. Thing is, I haven’t really had all that much sex in real life. Sure, I did other things, but sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me because I don’t have the type of drive in real life that I do in my stories. Someone rudely suggested that I wasn’t attracted to my husband, but I don’t think that’s it. I beat myself over the head about what I “should” feel according to the rest of the world, especially when my coworkers talk about all the things they’ve done. I have to remind myself, though, that those articles talking about “proper” sex lives aren’t talking about people who have medications that cause problems with their drive, nor are they talking to people who have injuries that make most sex difficult. Even if stories aren’t a way to make up for lost time, they very well might be a way to experience sex the way I always thought I would without having to make much of an effort or feel bad when it doesn’t work. After all, I have a normal body and mind in those stories. I’ve wondered if this is a healthy way to think, but my doctors say it’s fine as long as I remember what is real and what isn’t.

If you think about it, pretty much all of our crushes are on fictional characters. There are very few people we know absolutely *everything* about, so we fill in the blanks with things we like. It can be as simple as what the guy looks like with his shirt off or how he touches you when you’re walking together. Sometimes, though, we give them entire lives that may or may not exist. Even if he’s from a reality show, those personas usually have enough fiction in them to make it seem like they’re a character. You can make them into whatever you want them to be and put any flaws to the side. You can make *yourself* into whatever you want to be or take yourself back to a much easier time. Either way, you’re the author of *this* story even when you aren’t the author of your *real* story. And we’re not. Not entirely, anyway. Things that happened to you that you didn’t like don’t have to happen or, if they do, you could handle them differently.

I’m not sure if I will ever do anything with these stories. I’m terrible at finishing what I start, and they might not even be that good. It doesn’t matter-they’re only meant for me anyway.

I’m not sure what to call this

Sometimes I just want to go away-nowhere in particular, just some place where I can never hurt or bother anyone ever again. I know people know that it’s not something I can control but these episodes are embarrassing as hell and I don’t remember much of what I said so I don’t know who to apologize too. And what good is an apology if I know it’s just going to happen again?

I’m not a “cutter”-in fact, I’m probably too chicken to do that even if I wanted to. I have, however, started to see why some people do. For instance, my friend S said that he just wants to feel something other than the numbness he lives in every day. Another friend, P, said that it was a “release”-physical pain to get rid of the emotional pain she felt. In a sense, I can see that…she’s speaking figuratively, but the visual can be literal too, like letting the air out of a tire. For me, my thought would be that I’m so bad, so awful that I deserve to be punished and if God wasn’t going to do it, I’d do it for Him. I remember one day I was in the bathroom at work and looked at my apron on the floor, the contents of the pockets spilling out. Hmm, what’s that? I thought. It was my wine key. And what’s that sharp, curly thing sticking out of it? The corkscrew. And that gray thing on the other side, what’s that?

The knife.

And what does that thing do? It’s there to cut the foil from the top of the wine bottle so I could remove the cork.

Cut.

I would not slit my wrist to commit suicide; I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to bleed. To see the results, the proof of the punishment I so greatly deserved. But then, I didn’t want to bleed all over the floor and, with the bathroom door locked, no one would be able to get in and help me. Help me stop the bleeding. It probably wouldn’t even be that much, but I was going to make a pretty long cut and my manager would probably wonder how I got that cut on my arm if I asked for a bandage. I’m sure I could find a way to do it where it wouldn’t show under my sleeve or on my leg where it wouldn’t show under my pants. But it really wouldn’t be worth the pain, no matter how awful it was. Plus it would probably break my late mother’s heart to see me in such a position.

Plus I have too many people who care about me…our friend killed himself about ten years ago and, while he used a gun and I would not be trying to die, he left a pretty big wave and I wouldn’t want to even come close to what happened with him. Not that there is any comparison of our situations. I’m just thinking of the way the things we do to ourselves aren’t *just* about ourselves-they affect everyone around us, whether we know about it or not.

It also made me see what a psycho hose beast I was becoming and I didn’t want to have to come back to that. I don’t know…I’m probably way off base here. I just know that I don’t really have anyone else to talk to about these things, and with all this COVID stuff going around and the possibility of being laid off again (which I would actually welcome) I probably can’t afford talk therapy. That, and it’s coming on Christmas. So I guess I’m stuck here for a while.

Dusty Says Hi.

I miss Dusty. She died last year, but we used to “celebrate” her birthday on November 1st.

I miss my Floof.

Let’s Talk About Sex?

Earlier today I was watching The Great on Hulu.

If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a brand-new show about Catherine the Great of Russia and what it was like for her in the early days. Like most young girls, she had a lot of daydreams and romantic ideas about what love would be like. For instance, here is what her mom told her about sex:

The man caresses you softly, pressing his lips to yours. Your breasts and skin awaken and shiver with palpitating joy. Between your legs quivers and moistens with longing. He enters you and you become one. Your bodies meld, your souls mesh. As a sensation takes hold of you, you fall into a black sky filled with the shiniest of stars. You float for a time in ecstasy, before waves of pleasure push and pull you back into your body. Your body ushers forth yelps, and sometimes song, before he and you explode within, collapsing together, spent and unified. Then, you lay together, laughing softly, weeping occasionally with ecstatic joy, and finally, he wraps his arms around you, whispers poetry softly into your ear, and you fall into a… delicious sleep.

She soon learns that her mom’s experience is…different from hers…

I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say it’s a lot less like The Tudors and more like The Handmaid’s Tale.

I had a lot of very romantic ideas of what love would be like. For the most part, they’re true. The things that aren’t haven’t really been a letdown because I know that real life isn’t a romantic comedy. However, love and sex are different things. They can-and often do-go together, but not necessarily.

I know what you’re going to say, “They’re just doing it wrong.” Maybe so. I’ve had experiences that were very intense, very meaningful. I know that’s what it can be like. But in this day and age, we’re usually not given a “flowery description” like this.

You know what I was told about sex, from different sources?

I will say that I could have been told these things in an effort to keep me from getting pregnant as a teenager. I knew several girls who did. I have, however, seen the truth of some of them.

“Your first time will be awkward as hell, assuming it works at all.”

And it didn’t. My high school boyfriend and I tried to have sex once but it did not physically work. To be a bit graphic, he couldn’t get into me. I was probably nervous but a lot of that could have been that it wasn’t the right thing to do. I was supposed to wait until I was married, and I wasn’t going to marry him. It fits. I did other things, but my husband is the first and only man I’ve ever “gone there” with.

“Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.”

Yep. My first “real-time” was on my wedding night. Everything went fine, I guess, but I was so tired after that long day that I didn’t do much. Most people are able to “learn on the job”, but I didn’t.  I got into a wreck less than a year later that pretty much rendered me unable to, ahem, assume most positions. The ones that worked for me didn’t for my husband. I thought my hip replacement would fix it and, in terms of mobility, it did. However, the gynecologist confirmed that everything-everything-had been pushed to the right. As a result, I know absolutely nothing about how to please a man. Where to touch a man (besides the obvious), what to do with those things when I get there, how to get/keep anything going-nothing. I did other things before I was married, but 1) a lot of that was allowing things to be done to me, and 2) they were done with the agreement that the full expression of sex and love is meant for marriage. It must be even more awkward for men.

I’ve learned some other things, which is helpful. I know how to speak of it-I had some erotic stories online once but I got rid of them. I know what to do to myself. One thing I didn’t count on was the fact that both I and my husband are on medications that cause problems in that area. Looking back, that’s probably why we never really were very passionate. At least that way I know it’s not me.

“Sex is pretty much all men care about.”

This isn’t true about my husband, but it definitely is about some people I’ve dated. There were a lot of times I did something I didn’t particularly want to do because I felt like I had to. Either that, or that was the only way I could get him to leave me alone. I have friends and relatives who have been raped and one thing they’ve all said was that it did one of two things-either they fear sex or they treat it like it’s nothing. My sister told me that she ended up giving it to whatever guy wanted it because she figured that they were going to take it anyway so at least that way she would have *some* control of the situation. I can totally see that.

I can’t imagine that the good men out there enjoy being lumped in with the assholes who think only of themselves.

“What you think you’re going to like and what you actually end up liking are two different things.”

I can see this as well. The magazines that give you all these ideas about what a good sex life should be aren’t usually talking about people who have medical issues that make things difficult for them. The movies don’t show how long it took that actress to get into that position. Media often makes it sound and look a lot easier than it actually is. I’m very interested in sex but sometimes I’d rather take care of it myself than try to do anything else.

They also make it look like it’s easy to separate sex and love when it’s really anything but. Stupid flings aside, I wouldn’t even *kiss* someone if I didn’t have some sort of feelings for them. I once tried a “friends with benefits” thing thinking it was just silly fun. Nope. Feelings got involved.

Similarly, my morals are often different in fantasies. There is no way I’d go home with a guy after the first date, no matter how much I liked him. Yet, some fantasies have me doing exactly that. That’s the fun of fantasies, though-you get to be someone you’re not, if only in your mind.

I will often dream or daydream about what it might be like to kiss/touch/be with a particular man, but I do this in the context of a larger story line starring a (always younger) version of me. I’m usually dating whoever it is I have a crush on at the time. A lot of them take place during a time in my life that could have been a lot better or at least happier had I made different choices. The choices are almost always about breaking up with or never dating a particular person, but sometimes my entire world is different. I wonder if it’s my way of trying to get that time back.

I have no ending for this except to say that sex is much different from what I thought it would be, but that’s okay. That’s what I hear from pretty much everyone I’ve talked to, men *and* women. I got to bond with my husband in a lot of ways I may not have-or not as much-had I not gotten into the wreck. I also learned that it’s not really all it’s cracked up to be, but there are other things in life I’d rather have.  Even so, it’s still fun to dream about.