0:00

This is actually happening, features real experiences that often include traumatic events.

0:03

Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode, and for more information about support services.

0:16

Once I went through this because it shattered all of my beliefs, I am moral aware that we are not necessarily who we think we are.

0:27

There's more paradoxes in life than there are things that make sense From

0:43

wondering I'm Whit missile dine.

0:45

You are listening to, this is actually happening Episode two 17.

0:57

What

0:57

if

0:57

you

0:57

saw

0:57

the

0:57

face

0:57

of

1:01

death?

1:08

The new year is a great time to plan for the future.

1:10

Like the one you can have with a degree from university of Maryland global campus, an accredited state university, you MGC has been online for over 20 years.

1:18

Helping working adults and service members learn the skills they need for the careers they want.

1:22

And with no application fee through February 14th, there's no better time to start.

1:26

UNGC offers online courses more than 90 degrees, specializations and certificates and career relevant fields and no cost digital resources replacing most textbooks classes.

1:37

Start soon. Get started today with no application fee through February 14th, learn more at UMG c.edu/podcast.

1:47

Jake Brennan here hosted disgrace, land a music and true crime podcast about musicians.

1:51

Getting away with murder and behaving very badly with episodes on the rolling stones.

1:56

Cardi B Nirvana, Nipsey hussle, the grateful dead and more streaming.

1:59

Now on Amazon music find and follow this Graceland, Amazon music app.

2:16

I have a great grandmother whose name was Florence before my grandmother was born.

2:22

Florence had a baby girl and she died.

2:25

The baby girl died when she was two.

2:28

And after that, Florence just went insane.

2:31

And after that event, from what I could piece together is kind of this generational.

2:38

It was like a tsunami on the family.

2:41

When

2:41

my

2:41

grandma

2:41

was

2:41

born,

2:41

she

2:41

was

2:41

named

2:41

after

2:41

the

2:41

dead

2:48

baby. And she wasn't from what I understand wasn't necessarily wanted and it was not treated well.

2:56

So my grandmother grew up and was extremely abusive.

3:01

My grandma was a heavy alcoholic.

3:05

She would lock my uncle and like the seller with the lights off for punishment.

3:13

I know that she would keep my mom and my aunt inside for like a couple of weeks at a time.

3:21

One of their cats had babies and then taught my, my aunt, like how to kill the baby cats by drowning them in the bathtub.

3:30

And so I know for, for my mom, it was a very confusing home life.

3:36

My

3:36

dad,

3:36

his

3:36

family

3:36

is

3:36

mostly

3:44

immigrants. His dads are immigrants from Poland.

3:47

My dad's mom was an immigrant from Portugal and they were very, you know, the American dream white picket fence type deal.

3:58

On the other hand, my mom's side of the family is like almost exactly the opposite.

4:03

She grew up and almost abject poverty.

4:07

There's kind of like this dark heavy cloud hanging over the last couple of generations on that side.

4:14

So my mom was very, very eager to get out of that environment.

4:22

And so she met my dad who is the exact opposite of everything that she grew up with and she married out of poverty.

4:31

And my dad kind of just taught her how to be an adult.

4:35

And she really desperately wanted like this very happy, wholesome family, but it kinda reminds me of the idea that if you want something so bad, you almost scare it off.

4:49

And so I think in some aspects, that's what happened for a few years in my family.

4:55

I

4:55

am

4:55

the

4:55

youngest

4:55

of

4:55

three

5:01

kids. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, since I was the youngest of three, I was extremely self-sufficient.

5:08

My

5:08

mom

5:08

likes

5:08

to

5:08

tell

5:08

this

5:08

story

5:08

that

5:08

when

5:08

I

5:08

was

5:08

one

5:08

and

5:08

a

5:08

half

5:08

or

5:08

two,

5:08

I

5:08

potty

5:08

trained

5:15

myself. So from the very beginning, I was very head strong and confident and curious, and I wanted to be friends with everyone.

5:24

I

5:24

had

5:24

this

5:24

intense

5:24

joy

5:24

for

5:24

life

5:24

and

5:24

I

5:24

was

5:24

just

5:24

full

5:24

of

5:32

life.

5:32

My

5:32

parents

5:32

raised

5:32

us

5:32

very

5:36

Catholic. My mom is very extroverted, outgoing life of the party.

5:41

Very bubbly, always has something to say.

5:44

And my dad is very artsy and stoic and pretty quiet.

5:48

There was in those early years, a really strong sense of stability and balance and so filled with love.

5:57

But when we moved to San Antonio, when I was six, was when I remember things just changing.

6:05

My

6:05

dad's

6:05

company

6:05

had

6:05

moved

6:05

us

6:05

to

6:05

San

6:05

Antonio

6:05

with

6:05

the

6:05

promise

6:05

of,

6:05

you

6:05

know,

6:05

we'll

6:05

move

6:05

you

6:05

back

6:05

to

6:05

Birmingham

6:05

or

6:16

Atlanta. And we bought property and built this, this house on it.

6:21

Well, after a couple years, there was this big shopping center built behind the house that we had just built and the property value plummeted.

6:33

And then my dad lost his job.

6:36

So we were stuck with this house that no one would buy.

6:43

I think the stress of that on top of a lot of behavioral issues from that were starting in my siblings as where I can really pinpoint when the chaos started, something was off.

6:58

When one day there were construction workers behind my, like the fence in my backyard, a few feet away.

7:07

And my mother in a complete like hysterical rage took our garden hose and started screaming at the construction workers and spraying them with water over the fence.

7:22

And I had never seen that much rage after that was when these episodes, these unexpected episodes of rage started happening in my house.

7:35

And they weren't just from her, the tension in my house built up so much.

7:41

Everyone was always screaming at each other and not just raising their voices, but on bridled fits of rage, screaming, throwing things violence.

7:53

So what started as just kind of increased stress from life over a couple of years, turned into, I don't know when I'm going to be subjected to someone's total fucking emotional hysterical breakdown.

8:10

And

8:10

so

8:10

the

8:10

pattern

8:10

was,

8:10

I

8:10

tried

8:10

to

8:10

make

8:10

myself

8:10

as

8:10

small

8:10

as

8:17

possible. I tried to never have any needs.

8:19

I very much took on the role of being the peacemaker and the caretaker.

8:24

And a lot of times hide in my room and try to stay out of the line of fire.

8:32

My mom used to use this analogy.

8:36

Like you're like my clean little room.

8:39

I'm always worried about other rooms in the house being messy, but I can always expect that your room is going to be clean.

8:45

She had no idea what I was doing to myself in terms of not making any of my needs known, ever.

8:53

And I felt like this empty cup that they were pouring their rage into, even though I didn't understand what the hell was going on after the explosions would calm down, there would be like these talks of something's got to change.

9:12

We can't function like this as a family.

9:14

And then I would always be so hopeful that something was going to give, and then these big explosions would just pass over and it felt like everything just went back to normal.

9:27

It was very confusing for me.

9:29

And it made me feel like I was crazy.

9:31

And so it created in me this sense of impending doom, very, very intense sense of impending doom that I still have to this day, it's gotten better.

9:42

But even in my dreams, almost every night, my dreams are about something bad is about to happen.

9:48

And I'm not quite sure what growing up.

9:55

I was very well behaved, but when I turned 12, everything changed.

10:00

I became very, very, very sad.

10:04

Whereas I used to be able to self-regulate my emotions really, really well.

10:09

I felt like I was, I was stuck in this emotional rut then when I was 13 and we moved from San Antonio to Atlanta is when it was like, I stepped through a trap door and I completely changed.

10:27

I

10:27

didn't

10:27

want

10:27

to

10:27

kill

10:27

myself,

10:27

but

10:27

I

10:27

just,

10:27

wasn't

10:27

interesting

10:27

in

10:27

being

10:27

a

10:27

conscious

10:27

human,

10:27

being,

10:27

the

10:27

feeling

10:27

of

10:27

not

10:27

wanting

10:27

to

10:27

be

10:27

conscious,

10:27

but

10:27

not

10:27

being

10:27

suicidal

10:27

very

10:27

much

10:27

feels

10:27

like

10:27

I

10:27

want

10:27

to

10:27

want

10:27

to

10:44

live. I remember a time when I was happy.

10:47

I remember a time when I was safe and I want that again, but I don't see myself ever feeling like that.

10:55

So in the meantime, I just want to numb out or sleep.

10:58

And then hopefully someday it comes back.

11:00

I

11:00

started

11:03

self-harming. I would cut my wrists and my hips.

11:07

It started out as like, I don't want to kill myself.

11:10

I just don't want to be conscious, but escalated into, I want to die.

11:15

I

11:15

would

11:15

do

11:15

things

11:15

like

11:15

wrap

11:15

fabric

11:15

or

11:15

bed

11:15

sheets

11:15

or

11:15

something

11:15

around

11:15

my

11:15

neck

11:15

and

11:15

just

11:15

feel

11:15

what

11:15

it

11:15

would

11:15

feel

11:15

like

11:15

to

11:15

hang

11:25

myself.

11:25

My

11:25

parents

11:25

thank

11:25

God

11:25

have

11:25

always

11:25

been

11:25

very

11:25

open-minded

11:25

and

11:25

receptive

11:25

to

11:25

mental

11:25

health

11:25

because

11:25

right

11:25

after

11:25

my

11:25

mom

11:25

had

11:25

my

11:25

brother,

11:25

she

11:25

fell

11:25

into

11:25

a

11:25

horrific

11:25

postpartum

11:40

depression. So my parents were very willing to get me help.

11:44

And when they took me to a therapist and a psychiatrist, they put me on an antidepressant and that started the whole dance for a couple of years, my cutting got worse.

11:58

And so my therapist recommended that I go to an outpatient psychiatric program.

12:03

So I went there for a week and that's where I learned how to do drugs.

12:09

When I was 13, I would binge drink with my friends.

12:14

I started moving to prescription drugs.

12:17

I would find painkillers and I became violently angry towards my parents and my siblings.

12:26

It turned me into a different kid so quickly.

12:30

I would look in the mirror and be like, what the fuck is happening to me?

12:34

I don't like this, and this is scaring me.

12:37

But no matter how many times I got in trouble, I have to get high.

12:42

I have to get drunk because I cannot stand being conscious.

12:46

During

12:46

that

12:46

time,

12:46

I

12:46

went

12:46

through

12:46

some

12:52

experiences. I experienced sexual assault.

12:55

And also shortly after that, my first consensual sexual experience was overwhelmingly dramatic.

13:04

And I still have flashbacks to this day from it.

13:08

So after that, I became actively suicidal again and knew that if I continued to black out, I would kill myself.

13:16

And it escalated.

13:17

One night. One of the drugs I was abusing at the time was Ambien.

13:22

If you abuse it, you hallucinate like crazy, but then you also black out.

13:28

So you're just like on another level, fucked up.

13:31

I finished snorting what I had.

13:34

And then the next thing I remember, I'm standing in my kitchen and my parents asked me a question and I said, something really bizarre.

13:42

And then I remember running upstairs and sitting on my bed and my dad came up to try to sit with me and I, and I said, I need help.

13:52

And he said, Kim, we used your entire college tuition to send you to rehab.

13:57

I don't know what else to do for you.

14:00

You can't live here anymore.

14:01

This is it.

14:03

And that's when I opened my window and tried to jump off my roof.

14:08

But

14:08

my

14:08

dad

14:08

was

14:08

there

14:08

and

14:08

picked

14:08

me

14:08

up

14:08

and

14:08

threw

14:08

me

14:08

over

14:08

his

14:14

shoulder. I woke up on the couch the next day.

14:17

And that was actually the last time I ever touched any substance.

14:21

I was 15 that's when I was kind of rescued.

14:25

I

14:25

found

14:25

this

14:25

recovery

14:25

community

14:25

and

14:25

everyone

14:25

was

14:25

so

14:25

supportive

14:25

and

14:25

they

14:25

became

14:25

my

14:25

second

14:35

family.

14:35

When

14:35

I

14:35

was

14:37

16. My parents split up and they're still married today.

14:41

But at the time they split up for a while, both of them were so engrossed in the separation that they were just in way too much pain to really pay to me three months after I turned 18, I showed up with a U haul, a pack, mesh it up.

14:56

And I moved.

14:58

I worked three jobs, went to a community college at night, slept in my car before class, went to class, went back home and did it all over again, five days a week, I noticed these patterns where I would feel a shit ton of energy.

15:16

And then I would crash from it.

15:19

I would be going a hundred miles per hour.

15:22

And then by the end of the day, I'm curled up on a ball, crying hysterically and feeling this like existential despair.

15:31

So

15:31

when

15:31

I

15:31

was

15:31

21,

15:31

I

15:31

moved

15:31

to

15:31

downtown

15:31

Atlanta

15:31

and

15:31

started

15:31

to

15:31

going

15:31

to

15:31

Georgia

15:31

state

15:40

university. The nursing school, this guy kind of started coming around the periphery of my friend group.

15:47

We got to know each other a little bit more and instantly became like two halves of a whole, because of our backgrounds.

15:55

There was a lot of codependency there, but there was still like this genuine love.

16:02

The only man I let see me, the only man I ever expressed needs to, he had been a heroin addict.

16:12

And so when we met, we both were clean after about a year and a half, one day, I get a call from him and he's crying.

16:20

And he said, can you come to my old house immediately?

16:23

My stomach sank.

16:25

And I said, did you relapse?

16:26

And he started crying. And he said, yes.

16:28

I told him, I will stand behind you this once.

16:33

But if this happens again, I have to leave after that.

16:38

He didn't relapse again.

16:40

And I was so happy.

16:42

A

16:42

few

16:42

months

16:42

later,

16:42

he

16:42

came

16:42

to

16:42

my

16:42

home

16:42

and

16:42

completely

16:42

unexpectedly

16:42

broke

16:42

up

16:42

with

16:51

me. And I was hysterical.

16:53

What the hell is wrong with you?

16:55

Why would you leave?

16:56

And he said, I don't know how to be happy without you.

17:01

And if I keep feeling like this, I will not be able to stay sober.

17:05

And I couldn't argue with that.

17:07

It rocked both of our worlds.

17:10

I mean, not only did we love each other so deeply, we were part of each other's families.

17:17

It felt like a divorce.

17:18

After

17:18

a

17:18

couple

17:18

of

17:18

months,

17:18

he

17:18

was

17:18

like,

17:18

that

17:18

was

17:18

the

17:18

biggest

17:18

mistake

17:18

I

17:18

made

17:18

of

17:18

my

17:23

life. Please take me back. And I said, no, it was gut-wrenching to watch.

17:29

And he never believed that he was as loved as he was.

17:33

My

17:33

whole

17:33

world

17:33

kind

17:33

of

17:33

fell

17:37

apart.

17:45

This podcast is sponsored by better help online therapy.

17:48

We talk about better help a lot on this show.

17:51

And this month we're discussing some of the stigmas around mental health.

17:54

For example, some people think you should wait until things are unbearable to go to therapy, but that isn't true.

17:59

Therapy is a tool to utilize before things get worse and it can help you avoid those lows.

18:05

And we've been taught that mental health shouldn't be a part of normal life, but that's wrong too.

18:10

We take care of our bodies with the gym, the doctor, and good nutrition.

18:14

We should be focusing on our minds just as much I've been going to therapy on and off for years.

18:19

And it's been helpful in my life. Not only in times of crisis grief or tragedy, but in the routine times as well.

18:24

When I just need a space to clear my head and talk better help is customized online therapy that offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist.

18:34

So you don't have to see anyone on camera.

18:36

If you don't want to. This podcast is sponsored by better help.

18:39

And this is actually happening. Listeners get 10% off their first month at better help.com/happening.

18:43

That's

18:43

better

18:46

help.com/happening.

18:50

Today's episode is brought to you by the zebra.

18:52

If you resolve to run a marathon or learn a language, you probably don't have time to shop for insurance.

18:58

The good news is that our friends at the zebra can do it for you, and you can save hundreds, doing it, searching online to find the right policy for your car or home can take hours.

19:07

It's a cumbersome, annoying process.

19:09

And in the end, I just want someone to simplify the options and clarify what will work best for me, the zebra compares car and home quotes from every major insurance company side by side, giving you all the facts you need to make the right decision.

19:22

It's the fastest way to find the right coverage at the right price.

19:25

All from a provider you can trust.

19:28

In the last year, I did a deep dive on all of my spending and insurance was one of the last items on my list.

19:33

But when I went to the zebra, I was shocked to find out how much I was overpaying on several policies, save time and money in minutes.

19:41

Get your free quote today.

19:42

By going to our special URL, the zebra.com/happening.

19:45

That's

19:45

the

19:48

zebra.com/happening.

19:58

So three months before I got sober, I was put on effects or when I was put on effects or something clicked, and I didn't want to kill myself anymore.

20:07

But the thing with the effects are is if you stop taking it for a day or two, you start to withdrawal really bad.

20:14

Your neurons are misfiring.

20:16

So it's like the electrical grid in your brain just starts to go crazy.

20:21

My highs and lows were at that point, pretty moderate.

20:25

And I was in a really good place, but the effects are, have always given me migrants.

20:30

And it was at the point where I talked to my doctor and she said, you know what?

20:35

We can wean you off of effects.

20:37

Or I weaned off of it with my doctor.

20:41

The withdrawals were pretty bad, but I had a few months where I was feeling really good.

20:47

And then I was feeling really, really good.

20:50

I felt like I was on fire and I felt like I could do anything and take on the world.

20:56

And then one day I was like, I stepped through a trap door and I could not get out of bed.

21:03

It

21:03

wasn't

21:03

like,

21:03

I

21:03

was

21:03

just

21:06

sad. It was like, I went into a different reality.

21:10

I

21:10

had

21:10

this

21:10

overwhelming

21:10

panic

21:14

attack.

21:14

The

21:14

next

21:14

morning

21:14

I

21:14

wake

21:14

up

21:14

and

21:14

before

21:14

I

21:14

even

21:14

opened

21:14

my

21:14

eyes,

21:14

I

21:14

feel

21:14

the

21:14

panic

21:14

in

21:14

my

21:14

body,

21:14

still

21:24

there. And I hear this voice in my head that says, we now notice the protective layers of sleep beginning to lift in my eyes, shot open.

21:38

And I thought, what the fuck was that?

21:41

And I have a full-blown panic attack.

21:43

When I heard that voice in my head, it felt like it was coming from a couple other people.

21:50

And it felt like a third party's observation of me, but I could just hear it in my head, in the panic attack, I felt shaky.

22:04

It's like a trembling.

22:05

And it's like a trembling that is from such a place of fear.

22:09

It feels like its origin is coming from the core of my body.

22:13

And it feels like there's a fist around my stomach squeezing my stomach.

22:18

So when I try to eat, it feels like I'm eating sand.

22:21

And

22:21

so

22:21

I

22:21

just

22:21

feel

22:25

raw.

22:25

I

22:25

actually

22:25

was

22:25

eventually

22:25

diagnosed

22:25

with

22:25

bipolar

22:25

disorder,

22:25

but

22:25

I

22:25

think

22:25

I'm

22:25

going

22:25

to

22:25

increase

22:25

my

22:36

meditation. I'm going to increase exercise.

22:38

I'm going to go to more meetings.

22:40

I'm going to surround myself by people.

22:42

I love I'm going to do all the things and we're not going to get back on a fixer.

22:46

So

22:46

I

22:46

was

22:46

under

22:46

a

22:46

ton

22:46

of

22:50

stress. And on top of that, I was starting my first job as a nurse, I had just graduated nursing school and I was determined to be like, people who have gone through worse, I'm going to get up every day, show up to my job.

23:06

But on the other hand, I was still waking up in a state of panic every single morning.

23:11

I'm trying to force myself to eat breakfast almost every day.

23:15

I'm throwing up from panic, but still I was like, I don't care if I feel like I'm going to die.

23:21

I'm going to do this job.

23:22

After

23:22

a

23:22

couple

23:22

of

23:22

weeks,

23:22

I

23:22

am

23:22

in

23:22

a

23:22

state

23:22

of

23:22

anxiety,

23:22

fear,

23:22

panic,

23:22

and

23:22

it's

23:22

not

23:22

going

23:32

away. It's like being stuck in the same moment.

23:34

Then I stopped being able to go to sleep.

23:38

Do you know the feeling when someone pops out and scares you or something startles me, you get a rush of like, feels like electricity through your body and your stomach drops and your heart races.

23:49

I'm laying in bed.

23:50

And I notice I'm having this sensation every three minutes.

23:55

One of those times I feel myself start to drift off.

24:00

And I hear that same like narrative voice in my head that said, one day, Kim, you will die.

24:08

And I got this fear, like I've never known in my life.

24:12

I was not just logically facing the fact that I was going to die someday.

24:17

But in my gut, I felt my own mortality.

24:19

And every night was getting worse and worse.

24:23

One

24:23

night

24:23

I

24:23

was

24:23

laying

24:23

on

24:23

my

24:23

parents'

24:23

couch

24:23

and

24:23

I

24:23

start

24:23

to

24:23

get

24:23

these,

24:23

I

24:23

guess

24:23

you

24:23

could

24:23

call

24:23

them

24:34

visions. And in my mind, I know they're not actually happening, but there are these scenarios playing out before me and three of them happened.

24:43

The first one was of a soldier in world war one in a trench.

24:49

I have never been in a war.

24:52

I've never been scared. Someone is going to kill me, but this felt so realistic.

24:56

It felt like I wasn't observing him.

24:58

I felt like I was him. And I was watching this person feeling what this person felt in this trench and being absolutely uncontrollably, terrified that my life or death depended on whether or not someone was going to blow me up.

25:16

And I had no idea when it was going to be.

25:20

And I just had to lay there and take it until I got help.

25:23

And then the scene changed to this middle-aged woman.

25:31

And someone called me and said that my son died in a car accident.

25:38

And

25:38

it

25:38

felt

25:38

like

25:38

the

25:38

bottom

25:38

of

25:38

my

25:38

soul

25:38

opened

25:43

up. And that grief that this woman felt that for some reason, I could also feel, it was almost like this disgusting spiraling, indescribable feeling.

25:57

It was like nothing I'd ever experienced.

26:00

It was nothing I could ever even imagine.

26:02

It was such a foreign feeling.

26:05

It felt like I was seeing a new color for the first time.

26:08

I was like, what the hell?

26:10

What is this?

26:11

The

26:11

last

26:11

scene

26:11

was

26:11

this

26:11

woman

26:11

in

26:11

a

26:19

basement. And she was on a concrete floor and she was chained to a pole.

26:25

She was abducted and being held in some man's basement.

26:30

And she had lost since of the days passing of the week's passing.

26:36

She was in this state where she didn't know when he was going to come back and she was being beaten and raped by this person.

26:44

And she had no sense of time of when it was going to be over.

26:48

She had no sense of being anywhere else, except in that moment in suffering.

26:53

And

26:53

then

26:53

the

26:53

vision

26:57

stopped. And I was just laying there helpless because all of these unexplainable feelings and envisions in my head and physical symptoms are just wrecking me.

27:12

I

27:12

couldn't

27:12

do

27:12

any

27:12

activity

27:12

that

27:12

was

27:16

soothing. It, I was just stuck in the same mental and physical anguish.

27:20

I

27:20

didn't

27:20

sleep

27:20

that

27:25

night. I don't remember the next day, my days were spent curled in a ball or my mother trying to get me to eat.

27:33

The other thing I would do is sit on the back porch because the sun helped my body some.

27:39

And when the sun went down again, I laid back on the couch.

27:43

I

27:43

took

27:43

that

27:43

new

27:43

mood

27:47

stabilizer. And as soon as I laid down, I started feeling my legs.

27:52

Like I felt like there were ants crawling in my legs with some mood stabilizers and SSRS.

27:59

And especially anti-psychotics, you can get a side effect called .

28:04

It feels like your skin is going to burst open.

28:08

And it feels like someone is taking the panic and restless nerve pathway in your brain and cranking it up.

28:16

And so you cannot sit still, you have to move.

28:20

And so I'm laying on the couch and I'm basically writhing in the sheets.

28:25

And I feel like an animal stuck in a cage.

28:29

And I'm almost like about to knock my arm off just to get out.

28:35

And

28:35

I

28:35

hear

28:35

in

28:35

my

28:35

head,

28:35

this

28:35

chattering

28:35

of

28:35

like

28:35

people,

28:35

it

28:35

felt

28:35

like

28:35

a

28:35

small

28:35

crowd

28:46

talking.

28:46

And

28:46

then

28:46

I

28:46

heard

28:46

this

28:46

laugh

28:46

and

28:46

it

28:46

was

28:46

this

28:46

booming,

28:46

deep

28:46

metallic

28:46

sounding

28:56

laugh. I don't know if this makes sense, but I could see and feel the colors, black and blood red.

29:03

And I thought to myself, that is a devil and this is hell.

29:07

In

29:07

that

29:07

moment,

29:07

I

29:07

was

29:07

reduced

29:07

to

29:14

nothing. There were no options left to self-sooth.

29:17

There were no options to regulate.

29:20

There was nothing to do, but feel everything.

29:24

I

29:24

don't

29:24

know

29:24

what

29:24

I

29:24

did

29:24

after

29:24

that,

29:24

but

29:24

I

29:24

do

29:24

know

29:24

when

29:24

the

29:24

sun

29:24

came

29:24

up

29:24

a

29:24

25

29:24

year

29:24

old

29:24

woman

29:24

crawled

29:24

into

29:24

bed

29:24

with

29:24

my

29:24

mother

29:24

and

29:24

asked

29:24

her

29:24

to

29:24

hold

29:24

me,

29:24

I

29:24

don't

29:24

even

29:24

know

29:24

what

29:24

I

29:24

thought

29:24

or

29:39

felt. I was like an, my doctor prescribed to me out of Ana.

29:46

So I took it and I finally slept and I slept 8, 8, 9 hours.

29:54

And I was like, that saved my life.

29:59

And

29:59

so

29:59

that's

29:59

when

29:59

I

29:59

decided

29:59

like,

29:59

maybe

29:59

I

29:59

can

29:59

get

29:59

back

29:59

on

29:59

the

29:59

effects

29:59

are

29:59

and

29:59

get

29:59

my

29:59

life

29:59

back

29:59

and

29:59

just

29:59

continue

29:59

to

29:59

deal

29:59

with

29:59

the

30:10

migraines.

30:10

I

30:10

had

30:10

exhausted

30:10

every

30:10

option

30:10

and

30:10

I

30:10

had

30:10

to

30:10

get

30:10

back

30:10

on

30:10

this

30:10

thing

30:10

I

30:10

did

30:10

not

30:10

want

30:17

to. And I got back on the effects are and sure enough, two weeks later, my panic stopped when I got back on the effects are after several months, I noticed like, Hey, I'm, I'm not getting these migraines anymore.

30:30

And I would say my migraines went down from 13 to 14 times a month to maybe three.

30:36

To me, that was a life-changing victory for me, but it terrified me because the only thing between me and my life being destroyed as this pill.

30:48

And I hate that feeling.

30:50

What if I can't get that pill?

30:53

The

30:53

day

30:53

is

30:53

following

30:53

the

30:53

panic,

30:53

going

30:53

away,

30:53

seeing

30:53

those

30:53

visions

30:53

that

30:53

I

30:53

had

30:53

and

30:53

feeling

30:53

all

30:53

those

30:53

things

30:53

I

30:53

felt

30:53

sent

30:53

me

30:53

in

30:53

to

30:53

kind

30:53

of

30:53

an

30:53

existential

30:53

questioning

30:53

because

30:53

I

30:53

believed

30:53

in

30:53

a

30:53

God

30:53

or

30:53

a

31:15

something. But what I had seen during those six weeks was a reality that I didn't know existed at all.

31:23

I saw an experienced, a level of anguish that I never could have imagined.

31:29

I saw the power of the subconscious mind.

31:33

I didn't know if it was spirits.

31:36

I didn't know if it was my brain doing crazy shit.

31:41

I realized, I didn't know shit anymore.

31:44

I

31:44

was

31:44

just

31:44

cracked

31:44

open

31:44

to

31:44

an

31:44

entirely

31:44

different

31:44

way

31:44

of

31:50

existing. And it challenged everything.

31:53

I thought I knew about anything ever.

31:55

I

31:55

could

31:55

not

31:55

understand

31:55

how

31:55

this

31:55

suffering,

31:55

not

31:55

just

31:55

in

31:55

myself,

31:55

but

31:55

seeing

31:55

the

31:55

suffering

31:55

of

32:05

others. I could not reconcile that with the idea of good or love.

32:09

I

32:09

saw

32:09

how

32:09

deep

32:09

the

32:09

human

32:09

psyche

32:09

goes,

32:09

and

32:09

I

32:09

saw

32:09

how

32:09

deep

32:09

we

32:09

can

32:09

get

32:09

pulled

32:09

into

32:18

it. And so if you were to come to me and disclosed to me, every terrible thing you had done, I wouldn't be shaken at all.

32:26

I wouldn't be scared. I wouldn't judge it.

32:29

The human experience goes to that depth, but there is no judgment.

32:33

There was just, it was total neutrality, all of a scary things didn't scare me anymore.

32:41

Death didn't scare me anymore.

32:43

What I found in myself to be character flaws or something didn't scare me anymore.

32:49

I was just in a place of total acceptance because I knew, I didn't know shit.

32:54

And at the end of the day, whatever greater reality there is behind what we can consciously see and feel is so powerful and so huge.

33:04

Like we're living in a delusion.

33:07

I

33:07

wanted

33:07

as

33:07

little

33:07

stimulus

33:07

as

33:13

possible. I didn't want to see a lot of people.

33:15

I didn't really know who I was.

33:18

And so I wanted to sit with this new person that was starting to form.

33:23

And I really was in a place of deep solitude.

33:27

I

33:27

had

33:27

that

33:31

experience. I, I lived with my parents for a year afterwards and I kept thinking like, I want to go back to my old neighborhood and Atlanta.

33:38

I want to slip back into the life that I used to have.

33:41

But when I moved back to Atlanta, that life wasn't there anymore because I had changed on the inside.

33:46

Everything on the outside was different.

33:49

It felt like I was returning to a chapter that was just done up until then.

33:55

Different phases kind of happened slowly and over time.

33:58

But this one happened like a bomb in my life.

34:01

It was like, I revisited the bomb site and my home wasn't there anymore.

34:05

And I was surrounded by also everywhere that James and I used to go and, and he was really struggling.

34:12

And I just had to accept, like, it's done.

34:15

You have to move on.

34:17

You have to move on to the next phase.

34:19

Prior

34:19

to

34:19

this

34:19

episode

34:19

that

34:19

I

34:19

had,

34:19

I

34:19

was

34:19

really

34:19

confident

34:19

in

34:19

some

34:27

ways. But in other ways I was very, very, very self-conscious.

34:33

I, I felt like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to be a nurse.

34:36

Like, what if I give a wrong medication?

34:38

What if I accidentally like kill someone somehow?

34:42

What if I look at a patient in the wrong way, and then they die.

34:45

Like I was really scared, but before this episode, but after that episode, I was like, I can survive an unimaginably painful experience and feel like I'm being tortured.

35:00

I can learn how to do this.

35:02

I

35:02

made

35:02

it

35:02

through

35:02

nursing

35:05

school. I passed my boards, I ready to learn.

35:08

And I felt like I had come into my element because in healthcare you see people at their absolute worst.

35:18

It takes a certain amount of resilience to show up in that job and not have it really, really wear on you.

35:28

I knew that I could do it.

35:31

I knew I could do all of it.

35:33

I knew that I had within me a and in a determination that I had previously grossly underestimated and that experience got me in touch with it More

35:53

Williams and we host the show, even the rich.

35:57

And now we're bringing you a brand new podcast from Wondery called rich and daily.

36:01

That will have you sip it on that hot celeb tea, and then doing a spit take.

36:05

Because according to our parents were super funny In

36:09

a way that only best friends can we give our take on the stories that have the entertainment world abuzz, and sometimes we'll even finish each other's sausages.

36:18

Yup. Rich and daily. We'll keep you up to speed on all of the secrets scandals and celeb news.

36:23

Is that rumor you heard about Rihanna.

36:25

True. If it is you better believe we'll have something to say about it.

36:29

Listen To rich and daily on apple podcasts, Amazon music, or you can listen to episodes.

36:33

Ad-free by joining Wondery plus in the wonder With

36:37

rich and daily feel the gossip Wondery feel the story.

36:47

I have a friend that's living in Singapore and in January of 2020, he was supposed to come over on a business trip.

36:56

And he said it had got canceled because of what he said was this new flu that's getting pretty bad in China and it's starting to spread.

37:08

I was not too concerned about it.

37:12

I thought that it was weird. He would skip a business trip because of it, but I just didn't give it a second thought.

37:17

So

37:17

then

37:17

we

37:17

get

37:17

the

37:17

first

37:17

few

37:17

cases

37:17

in

37:17

the

37:17

U

37:17

S

37:17

and

37:17

then

37:17

a

37:17

couple

37:17

of

37:17

weeks

37:17

later,

37:17

I

37:17

got

37:17

the

37:17

lockdown

37:28

happen. And that's when it became very real.

37:30

And what happened at my hospital was our patient census dropped because everyone was too scared to come to the hospital.

37:37

Even people who needed to come, like I eventually had a man who had had a stroke and waited seven days to come to the hospital because he was scared.

37:45

Meanwhile, our fifth floor starts filling up with COVID patients because the patient census was low.

37:55

They started cutting our shifts for the people who didn't work on the COVID unit.

38:00

And I was furious.

38:01

I

38:01

was

38:01

very

38:01

ready

38:01

to

38:01

leave

38:01

Atlanta

38:01

because

38:01

after

38:01

losing

38:01

James,

38:01

and

38:01

then

38:01

shortly

38:01

after

38:01

that,

38:01

after

38:01

losing

38:01

everything

38:01

in

38:01

my

38:01

life,

38:01

I

38:01

felt

38:01

like

38:01

I

38:01

was

38:01

living

38:01

in

38:01

a

38:14

graveyard. I kept thinking to myself, I feel like I'm a stranger living in my own life.

38:19

So that's when I started travel nursing.

38:22

And I put everything I owned in a storage unit, got rid of a lot of it and took an assignment, taking care of patients in a long-term care facility who had had COVID, but we're having a difficult time coming off of the ventilator.

38:38

And that's when I saw face to face.

38:41

How, how fucked up it is.

38:44

I

38:44

was

38:44

at

38:44

the

38:44

longterm

38:44

care

38:44

hospital

38:44

for

38:44

may

38:44

of

38:44

2022,

38:44

October

38:44

of

38:52

2020. And then I went to a small town in Southern New Mexico and took a night shift COVID assignment there.

39:02

And I will never forget some of the things that I saw.

39:06

I always want to be a nurse.

39:08

I always wanted to work in like emergency scenarios, but there, there is nothing that you can learn in school to prepare you to stand in a hallway of 20 dying people at once.

39:21

There's nothing that can prepare you for that.

39:24

There were people who were on the vent for three months and were just not getting better.

39:32

There was this one patient in particular that I still think about him.

39:38

He had gotten COVID and had a tricky to me, which is a hole that they put in your throat and attached the ventilator to that he had, I'm assuming permanent brain damage and kept pulling his tricky osteomy off, which when you do that, you die.

39:57

So when all else fails, you have to put patients in restraints to keep them from killing themselves.

40:05

One of the times before he was restrained, he pulled off his tricky ostomies someone called a code blue.

40:12

And I went in there and that was the first time I had seen someone blew head to toe.

40:19

They were able to revive him.

40:21

And that's what he got put on restraints.

40:23

Unfortunately, the man never oriented.

40:27

And so that poor man stayed in restraints for months.

40:32

I don't know where family was.

40:34

My contract was done before I saw what happened to him.

40:37

One

40:37

night

40:37

in

40:37

particular,

40:37

I

40:37

was

40:37

sitting

40:37

at

40:37

the

40:37

nurses

40:45

station. I hear a nurse aid calling out for help.

40:48

And I see this nurse aid standing in a room like totally pale.

40:52

And I walk in and then I see this man laying on the floor and he is blue from the chest up.

41:02

And this had been a man who had previously an independent patient, and now he was on the floor.

41:08

And so I tell her to call a coat and I get on top of him and his eyes Twitch up towards me.

41:15

And I start doing compressions.

41:17

And then his head falls to the side.

41:20

He starts foaming at the mouth.

41:23

I start doing these compressions.

41:25

Then I followed his sternum break and I sat out loud.

41:29

Holy fuck. I just broke his, the ribs break early and compressions.

41:36

And so that was my first experience being the one to break someone else's ribs and the popping over and over again made me feel so sick.

41:47

And I remember the nurse aid next to me saying, it's okay, sweetie.

41:51

You're doing great. Just keep going.

41:53

You know, the whole code team comes in, get them back on the bed.

41:58

We work on them and then they call it.

42:00

They can't get them back, you know, and then everyone leaves and it's just me and, and the charge nurse.

42:06

What

42:06

went

42:06

from

42:06

chaos

42:06

was

42:06

all

42:06

of

42:06

a

42:06

sudden,

42:06

totally

42:11

silent. And we just zip them up in a body bag and write his name and date of birth on there.

42:18

And then that's it, that's the end of an entire life.

42:22

And

42:22

it

42:22

was

42:22

the

42:22

first

42:22

very

42:22

chaotic

42:22

code

42:22

I

42:22

had

42:22

been

42:28

in. And I realized that I was the last thing he saw before he died the gravity of the career.

42:38

And the assignments that I had gotten myself into really hit me.

42:43

Then the fear of death is the driving factor to so many aspects of human existence.

42:49

And I was there in the final moments of someone's entire life.

42:55

And then it just feels like, all right, the credits start rolling.

42:59

After that, touching someone in their last moments and like being on top of them is this strangely intimate experience.

43:09

You're there to witness this person's last moment on earth.

43:13

I get goosebumps thinking about it because there is no other feeling like that.

43:17

From

43:17

that

43:20

moment. For some reason, it opened me up even more.

43:24

It gave me even more of a capacity to love people.

43:27

I

43:27

feel

43:27

like

43:27

nurturing

43:27

people,

43:27

whether

43:27

it's

43:27

in

43:27

my

43:27

personal

43:27

life

43:27

or

43:27

in

43:27

a

43:27

career

43:27

is

43:27

my

43:36

vocation. And sometimes you have to go between, you know, kind of tough love and also like tender love.

43:43

And it opened me up to more gentle, tender love about a week after that, I was drinking orange juice and I was like, oh, this orange juice is like watery.

43:58

And then I went to drink my coffee.

44:00

I was like, oh, this is watery too.

44:02

And then I was like, oh shit, I have pretty bad asthma.

44:07

So my roommate and I, at the time both got COVID, we actually worked together on that floor.

44:12

It was horrible.

44:14

I felt like I had been drugged.

44:18

It moved to my stomach over the next few days.

44:23

And then after that was when I felt like I couldn't breathe.

44:26

One day when I had enough energy, I stood up to cook and about 10 minutes after standing, I got really dizzy and really winded.

44:36

And I laid down on my stomach and I did it catch my breath for three hours.

44:41

I couldn't breathe.

44:43

And I felt like there was something physically like sitting in my lungs.

44:48

It was very uncomfortable and I couldn't cough anything up.

44:52

And it took me a month and a half to be able to work out again because I would get heart palpitations when I would start to work out.

45:01

After

45:01

I

45:01

recovered

45:01

from

45:01

COVID,

45:01

I

45:01

went

45:01

back

45:01

to

45:01

work

45:01

and

45:01

there

45:01

was

45:01

a

45:01

night,

45:01

we

45:01

get

45:01

a

45:01

huge

45:01

influx

45:01

of

45:01

patients

45:01

and

45:01

we

45:01

have

45:01

to

45:01

move

45:01

the

45:01

entire

45:01

second

45:01

wing

45:01

upstairs

45:01

to

45:01

make

45:01

room

45:01

for

45:01

all

45:01

the

45:01

COVID

45:01

patients

45:01

coming

45:01

in

45:01

on

45:01

top

45:01

of

45:01

that,

45:01

everyone

45:01

on

45:01

the

45:01

COVID

45:01

side

45:01

was

45:22

unstable. There's like a screen that measures everyone's heart rate and oxygen saturation level.

45:30

And I walk out of the hallway and everyone's de saturating.

45:33

All

45:33

of

45:33

us

45:33

were

45:33

going

45:33

room

45:33

to

45:36

room. It's like playing. Whack-a-mole like trying to keep these people from dying at a certain point.

45:44

All of this just stood there for a second, trying to like calm down.

45:48

And I just remember feeling a single bead of sweat, like slowly dripping down my back and being like, this feels almost like a mass casualty event everyone's dying and there's nothing we can do.

46:01

The ICU beds are taken up.

46:03

We don't have any more beds.

46:04

When

46:04

you

46:04

see

46:04

people

46:04

at

46:04

their

46:09

worst. It's really easy to pass all kinds of judgment on them.

46:14

But what my experience drilled into my mind is that, first of all, you don't know what someone else is going through.

46:23

You don't know the depths of suffering that anyone around you husband too, during that time death became certain to me and death become much less scary for me.

46:37

I

46:37

truly

46:37

think

46:37

that

46:37

being

46:37

able

46:37

to

46:37

face

46:37

death

46:37

and

46:37

suffering

46:37

and

46:37

bounce

46:37

back

46:37

from

46:37

it

46:37

a

46:37

couple

46:37

of

46:37

years

46:37

prior

46:37

helped

46:37

me

46:37

continue

46:37

to

46:37

show

46:37

up

46:37

and

46:37

work

46:37

with,

46:37

with

46:37

these

46:37

people,

46:37

the

46:37

experience

46:37

that

46:37

I

46:37

had

46:37

made

46:37

me

46:37

able

46:37

to

46:37

face,

46:37

seeing

46:37

so

46:37

much

46:37

death

46:37

and

46:37

so

46:37

much

46:37

suffering

46:37

without

46:37

totally

47:01

imploding. I'm able to walk through it with more grace, I think.

47:08

And I think I can take better care of myself outside of work in a way that I wouldn't have been able to.

47:16

Before shortly after I started nursing, I was sitting on my parent's back porch and it was spring time and they have this beautiful trees in their backyard.

47:30

And these trees have flowers on them.

47:32

It was at the peak of spring and I saw one of these big, beautiful pink flowers fall off the tree.

47:39

And I got sad and I thought, no, like the flowers are starting to die.

47:45

And there was this voice in my head that said, Kim, the flowers are supposed to die, but they're going to come back.

47:51

And I was like, oh my God, I'm always going to face suffering, but then it goes away and then I'm going to feel joy.

48:00

And then I'm not going to feel joy.

48:02

It's a cycle and accepting the fact that the joy is going to go away and the pain will come back.

48:09

It absolutely will come back and I will continue to face loss.

48:13

It is so freeing.

48:15

It

48:15

opens

48:15

you

48:15

up

48:15

to

48:15

cherishing

48:15

into

48:15

loving

48:15

in

48:15

a

48:15

way

48:15

that

48:15

I

48:15

just

48:15

didn't

48:15

before,

48:15

after

48:15

James

48:15

and

48:15

I

48:15

broke

48:15

up

48:15

and

48:15

I

48:15

moved,

48:15

I

48:15

had

48:15

to

48:15

not

48:15

have

48:15

contact

48:15

with

48:15

them

48:15

because

48:15

he

48:15

kept

48:15

relapsing

48:15

and

48:15

he

48:15

did

48:15

finally

48:15

get

48:15

clarity

48:15

that

48:15

he

48:15

had

48:15

complex

48:15

PTSD,

48:15

which

48:15

is

48:15

a

48:15

bit

48:15

trickier

48:15

to

48:15

treat

48:15

than

48:43

PTSD. But I believe that by the time he received that diagnosis, he was just too stuck in the cycle of relapse.

48:51

And I always kept tabs on him cause he was still very good friends with my family.

48:57

And I was always checking on him through someone else.

48:59

And two weeks ago I got a call from an old friend and she said, something happened last night, James relapsed.

49:08

And he died four of his family members.

49:10

And I don't know a handful of our friends all reached out to me and said, you know, like you need to know that he still loved you all the way up until the end.

49:19

And I never got a chance to tell him that, that I feel the same because I didn't want to contribute to his relapse cycle.

49:29

But that man loved me in a way that few people are capable of loving and I will never not love him.

49:37

And I never stopped loving him.

49:39

And even if I had known exactly how it ended, I wouldn't have changed anything.

49:44

And I hope now that he has relief from the horrible battle that he had for many years, I hope he can see how special of a human he was, that he was never able to see it when he was here.

49:59

And in a weird way, I still, I almost feel closer to him right now.

50:04

I feel like he's standing right next to me.

50:06

I guess his passing reminds me again of impermanence, even though it did in this way, there is value in experiencing the life we had together, regardless of how it ended.

50:21

And that's how I am continuing to try to live flowers die.

50:26

And then, but then they come back and there will never be another James, but that's okay.

50:31

And there's more in life to experience, you know?

50:35

And, and just having the experience is where the value lies.

50:39

What

50:39

I

50:39

realized

50:39

during

50:39

my

50:39

episode

50:39

was

50:39

that

50:39

because

50:39

I

50:39

felt

50:39

like

50:39

my

50:39

pain

50:39

was

50:39

never

50:39

going

50:39

to

50:39

end

50:50

yet. It did end. I realized that literally everything is temporary.

50:54

And it sounds scary because that means like I'm going to lose everything, but it's true.

51:01

We're, we're all gonna lose everything at some point.

51:04

But the thing is, is that it's cyclical.

51:06

Like you lose something and then something else comes into your life to make it full and beautiful.

51:12

Before I went through this experience, I had a pretty solid understanding of who I thought I was.

51:19

And once I went through this, because it shattered all of my beliefs, I am moral aware that we are not necessarily who we think we are these days.

51:34

I see how there's more paradoxes in life than there are things that make sense, our ideas of, of who we are oftentimes die.

51:45

And because I was connected with that reality of impermanence letting go of old ideas is, is less scary.

51:55

I'm not saying it's not scary at all, but it's less jarring being thrown into mystery and the unknown and the unseen and the paradox of things opens you up to whether or not I want it to be like this.

52:13

This is how it is. And so for me, it drove me even more into my practice of meditation in meditation.

52:20

The type that I do, it's about simply cultivating nonjudgmental awareness in some practices, they call it the witness like that piece of you.

52:34

That's able to witness from a neutral standpoint, it's like a muscle and the stronger that muscle became now, when I encounter these mysteries and these paradoxes, I can anchor myself into that neutral awareness and the uncertainty and the ambiguity becomes so much less jarring the last year and a half part of my practice now is a lot of exercising while I do the typical, you know, going to the gym.

53:06

But then I've also started rock climbing, which has been life-changing for me.

53:13

It's gotten me comfortable in my body and I feel like it's starting to actually heal my nervous system.

53:20

I

53:20

think

53:20

the

53:20

hardest

53:20

part

53:20

of

53:20

that

53:20

experience

53:20

was

53:20

losing

53:20

the

53:20

life

53:20

that

53:20

I

53:20

had

53:20

known

53:20

before

53:20

and

53:20

not

53:20

knowing

53:20

when

53:20

the

53:20

suffering

53:20

was

53:20

going

53:20

to

53:20

end

53:20

and

53:20

having

53:20

to

53:20

grapple

53:20

with

53:20

my

53:20

idea

53:20

of

53:20

there

53:20

being

53:20

a

53:20

loving

53:20

God,

53:20

the

53:20

idea

53:20

that

53:20

there

53:20

is

53:20

a

53:20

loving

53:20

God

53:20

underlined

53:20

so

53:20

much

53:20

of

53:20

my

53:20

identity

53:20

and

53:20

so

53:20

much

53:20

of

53:20

my

53:20

spiritual

53:20

beliefs,

53:20

but

53:20

I

53:20

could

53:20

not

53:20

in

53:20

my

53:20

mind,

53:20

except

53:20

that

53:20

level

53:20

of

53:20

chaos

53:20

and

53:20

loss

53:20

with

53:20

a

53:20

God

53:20

that

53:20

cared

53:20

at

53:20

all

53:20

the

53:20

universe

53:20

in,

53:20

in

53:20

reality

53:20

is

53:20

fucking

53:20

insane

53:20

and

53:20

incredible

53:20

and

54:05

terrifying. And what's important to me is that love and enjoy and caring, and truth are things that exist.

54:12

So I don't try to bother myself with whether or not there's a loving God anymore.

54:17

I

54:17

was

54:17

always

54:17

scared

54:17

of

54:20

suffering. And so I was always scared that somehow I was going to lose control of my mood and my regulation.

54:27

It was easy for me to be like, oh my God, I've been through so much to feel sorry for myself and be like, I never even had a chance to be a well-balanced person, but it helps me to look back on my life, up to this point and see how everything I went through, led me up to that six week thing that happened to me.

54:56

And I have appreciation for it.

54:59

Now I'm not mad at it.

55:01

I'm not anything towards it.

55:03

It made me realize like I am not strong and resilient because of those things I went through.

55:11

I was those things anyway.

55:13

And so it led me to a place of, I don't want to keep hurting.

55:19

I don't want to keep wallowing in these memories.

55:21

It happened, it changed me.

55:24

And that's it.

55:26

When

55:26

you're

55:26

experiencing

55:26

something

55:26

that

55:26

can

55:26

not

55:26

be

55:26

captured

55:26

by

55:26

words,

55:26

it

55:26

is

55:26

incredibly

55:26

lonely

55:26

because

55:26

you

55:26

don't

55:26

know

55:26

if

55:26

someone

55:26

else

55:26

has

55:26

ever

55:26

felt

55:41

that. And when you encounter someone else that has experienced that, you can feel it.

55:46

And it's a little tiny nugget of hope.

55:48

I think what I want to take forward is being that for someone else as well.

55:54

And I don't know in what capacity, but I don't want anyone out there to ever feel like they're alone in something Today's

56:15

episode featured Kim console.

56:16

You can find out more about her and her [email protected] slash myth and medicine From Wondery.

56:32

Your listening to this is actually happening.

56:35

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show.

56:38

You can subscribe on apple podcasts, Amazon music, or on the Wondery app to listen, to ad free and get access to the entire back catalog.

56:45

In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors by supporting them.

56:50

You help us bring you our show for free I'm your host witnesses.

56:53

Today's episode was co-produced by me and Andrew waits with special.

56:58

Thanks to the, this is actually happening team, including Ellen Westberg.

57:01

The intro music features the song alibi by tipper.

57:04

You can join the community on the, this is actually happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at actually happening on the show's website.

57:13

This is actually happening.com.

57:14

You can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store where you can find this is actually happening.

57:24

Designs on stickers t-shirts while our hoodies and more that's.

57:28

This is actually happening.com.

57:29

And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do go to patrion.com/happening even two to $5 a month, it goes a long way to support our vision.

57:40

Thank you for listening. This is actually happening, features real experiences that often include traumatic is actually happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Once I went through this because it shattered all of my beliefs, I am more aware that we are not necessarily who we think we are. There's more paradoxes in life than there are Things that make sense. From wondering I'm Whit missile wondering, I'm with Missildine. You are listening to this is actually happening. Episode two seventeen. What if you saw the face of death? The new year is a great time to plan for the New Year is a great time to plan for the future, like the one you can have with a degree from University of Maryland to Global Campus, and Accredited State University, UMG, C has been online for over twenty years, helping working adults and service members learn the skills they need for the careers they want. And with no application fee through February fourteenth, there's no better time start. UMGC offers online courses, more than ninety degrees, specializations, and certificates in career relevant fields and no cost digital resources replacing most textbooks. Glasses start soon. Get started today with no application fee through February fourteenth. Learn more at UMGC dot edu slash podcast. Hey, everyone. Jake Brennan here, hosted disgrace. A music and true crime podcast about musicians getting away with murder and behaving very badly. With episodes on the Rolling Stones, Cardi B, Nirvana, Nipsey Hussle, The Grateful Dead, and More streaming now on Amazon Music. Find and follow this Grey Sand in Amazon Music. I have a great grandmother whose name was Florence. Before my grandmother was born, Florence had a baby girl and she died. The baby girl died when she was two. And after that, Florence just went insane. And after that event from what I could piece together is kind of this generational. It was like a tsunami on the family. When my grandma was born, She was named after the dead baby, and she wasn't from what I understand, wasn't necessarily wanted. And was not treated well. So my grandmother grew up and was extremely abusive. My grandma was a heavy alcoholic. She would lock my uncle in, like, the cellar with the lights off for punishment. I know that she would keep my mom and my aunt inside for like a couple weeks at a time. One of their cats had babies and then taught my my aunt, like, how to kill the baby cats by drowning them in the bathtub. And so I know for for my mom. It was a very confusing home life. My dad, his family, is mostly immigrants. His dad's or immigrants from Poland. My dad's mom was an immigrant from Portugal. And they were very, you know, the American dream, white picket fence type the other hand, my mom's side of the family is like almost exactly the opposite. She grew up in almost object poverty. There was kinda like this dark, heavy cloud hanging over the last couple generations on that side. So my mom was very very eager to get out of that environment. And so she met my dad who is the exact opposite of everything that she grew up with and she married out of poverty, and my dad kind of just taught her how to be an adult. And she really desperately wanted, like, this very happy wholesome family. But it kinda reminds me of the idea that if you want something so bad, you almost scare it off. And so I think in some aspects that's what happened for a few years in my family. I am the youngest of three kids. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Since I was the youngest of three, I was extremely self sufficient. My mom likes to tell the story that when I was one and a half or two, I potty trained myself. So from the very beginning, I was very head strong and confident and curious, and I wanted to be friends with everyone. I had this intense joy for life, and I was just full of life. My parents raised us very Catholic. My mom is very extroverted, outgoing, life of the party, very bubbly, always has something to say. My dad is very artsy and stoic and pretty quiet. areThere was in those early years a really strong sense of stability and balance and so filled with love But when we moved to San Antonio, when I was six, was when I remembered things just changing. My dad's company had moved us to San Antonio with the promise of, you know, we'll move you back to Birmingham or Atlanta. And we bought property and built this this house on it. Well, after a couple years, there was this big shopping center built behind the house that we had just built. And the property value plummeted and then my dad lost his job. So we were stuck with this house that no one would buy I think the stress of that on top of a lot of behavioral issues from that we're starting in my siblings is where I can really pinpoint when the chaos started. Something was off when one day there were construction workers behind my, like, the fence in my backyard, a few feet away and my mother in a complete, like, historical rage took our garden hose and started screaming at the construction workers and spraying them with water over the fence. And I had never seen that much rage. After that was when these episodes these unexpected episodes of rage started happening in my house. And they weren't just from her. The tension in my house build up so much. Everyone was always screaming at each other. And not just raising their voices, but on bridal fits of rage, screaming, throwing things, violence. So what started is just kind of increased stress from life over a couple years turned into I don't know when I'm going to be subjected to someone's total fucking emotional historical breakdown. And so the pattern was I tried to make myself as small as possible. I tried to never have any needs I very much took on the role of being the peacemaker and the caretaker. And a lot of times, hide in my room and try to stay out of the line of fire. My mom used to use this analogy. Like you're like my clean little like you're like my clean little room. I'm always worried about other rooms in the house being messy, but I can always expect that your room's gonna be clean. She had no idea what I was doing to myself in terms of not making any of my needs known ever. And I felt like this empty cup that they were pouring their rage into, even though I I didn't understand what the hell was going on. After the explosions would calm down, there would be, like, these talks of something's gotta change. We can't function like this as a family. And then I would always be so hopeful that something was gonna give And then these big explosions would just pass over, and it felt like everything just went back to normal. It was very confusing for me. And it made me feel like I was crazy. And so it created in me this sense of impending doom. Very, very intense sense of impending doom that I still have to this day. It's gotten better, but even in my dreams almost every night. My dreams are about something bad is about to happen, and I'm not quite sure what. Growing up, I was very well behaved, but when I turned twelve, everything changed. I became very, very, very sad, whereas I used to be able to self regulate my emotions really, really well. I I felt like I was I was stuck in this emotional rut. Then when I was thirteen and we moved from San Antonio to Atlanta is when it was like I stepped through a trapdoor, and I completely changed. I didn't wanna kill myself, but I just wasn't interesting in being a conscious human being. The feeling of not wanting to be conscious, but not being suicidal very much feels like I want to want to live. I remember a time when I was happy. I remember a time when I was safe, and I want that again. But I don't see myself ever feeling like that. So in the meantime, I just wanna numb out or sleep, and then hopefully, someday comes back. I started self harming. I would cut my wrists in my hips. It started out as like, I don't wanna kill myself. I just don't wanna be conscious, but escalated into, I wanna die. I would do things like wrap fabric or bed sheets or something around my neck and just feel what it would feel like to hang myself. My parents thank God have always been very open minded and receptive to mental health because right after my mom had my brother, she fell into a horrific postpartum depression. So my parents were very willing to get me help. And when they took me to a therapist and a psychiatrist, they put me on an antidepressant and that started the whole medication dance for a couple years. My cutting got worse. And so my therapist recommended that I go to an outpatient psychiatric program. So I went there for a week and that's where I learned how to do drugs when I was thirteen. I would binge drink with my friends I started moving to prescription drugs. I would find pain killers and I became violently angry towards my parents and my siblings. It turned me into a different kid so quickly I would look in the mirror and be like what the fuck is happening to me. I don't like this and this is scaring me. But no matter how many times I got in trouble, I have to get high. I have to get drunk because I cannot stand being conscious. During that time, I went through some experiences. I experienced sexual assault, And also shortly after that, my first consensual sexual experience was overwhelmingly dramatic and I still have flashbacks to this day from it. So after that, I became actively suicidal again and knew that if I continued to blackout I would kill myself. And it escalated. One one night. One of the drugs I was abusing at that time was ambience. If you abuse it, you hallucinate, like crazy, but then you also black out. So you're just, like, on another level fucked up. I finished shorting what had. And then the next thing I remember, I'm standing in my kitchen and My parents asked me a question and I said something really bizarre. And then I remember running upstairs been sitting on my bed and my dad came up to try to sit with me and I and I said, I need help. And he said, Kim, we used your entire college tuition to send you to rehab. I don't know what else to do for you. You can't live here anymore. This is it. And that's when I open my window and try to jump off my roof. But my dad was there and picked me up and threw me over his shoulder. I woke up on the couch the next day and that was actually the last time I have touched any substance. I was fifteen. That's when I was kind of rescued. I found this recovery community and everyone was so supportive and they became my second family. When I was sixteen, my parents split up. And and they're still married today, but at the time they they split up for a while. Both of them were so engrossed in the separation that they were just in way too much pain to really pay attention to me. Two months after I turned eighteen, I showed up with a UHA! I packed my shit up, and I moved. I worked three jobs, went to a community college at night, slept in my car before class, went to class, went back home and did it all over again five days a week. I noticed these patterns where I would feel a shit ton of energy and then I would crash from it. I would be going a hundred miles per hour And then by the end of the day, I'm curled up on a ball crying hysterically and feeling this, like, existential despair despair. So when I was 21, I moved to downtown Atlanta and started to going to Georgia state So when I was twenty one, I moved to downtown Atlanta and started to go into Georgia State University, to nursing school. This guy kind of started coming around the periphery of my friend group. We got to know each other a little bit more and instantly became like two halves of a hole. Because of our backgrounds, there was a lot of codependency there, but there was still like this genuine love. The only man I let see me. The only man I ever expressed needs to he had been a heroin addict. And so when we met, we both were clean. After about a year and a half, one day, I get a call from him, and he's crying. And he said, can you come to my old house? Immediately, my stomach sank. And I said, did you relapse? And he started crying and he said yes. I told him, I will stand behind you this once, but if this happens again, I have to leave. After that, he didn't relapse again. And I was happy A few months later, he came to my home and completely unexpectedly broke up with me. And I was hysterical, what the hell is wrong with you? Why would you leave? And he said, I don't know how to be happy without you. And if I keep feeling like this, I will not be able to stay sober. And I couldn't argue with that. It rocked both of our worlds. I mean, not only did we love each other so deeply, We were part of each other's families. It felt like a divorce. After a couple months, he was like, that was the biggest mistake I made of my life. Please take me back and I said no. It was gut wrenching to watch, and he never believed that he was as loved as he was. My whole world kinda fell apart. This podcast is sponsored by better help online podcast is sponsored by Better Health Online Therapy. We talk about Better Health a lot on this show. And this month we're discussing some of the stigmas around mental this month, we're discussing some of the stigmas around mental health. For example, some people think you should wait until things are unbearable to go to therapy, but that isn't true. Therapy is a tool to utilize before things get worse and it can help you avoid those a tool to utilize before things get worse, and it can help you avoid those lows. And we've been taught that mental health shouldn't be a part of normal life, but that's wrong And we've been taught that mental health shouldn't be a part of normal life. But that's wrong too. We take care of our bodies with the gym, the doctor, and good We take care of our bodies with the gym, the doctor, and good nutrition. We should be focusing on our minds just as much. I've been going to therapy on and off for years. And it's been helpful in my and it's been helpful in my life. Not only in times of crisis grief or tragedy, but in the routine times as not only in times of crisis, grief, or tragedy, but in the routine times as well. When I just need a space to clear my head and talk better help is customized online therapy that offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your When I just need a space to clear my head and talk. Better help is customized online therapy that offers video, phone, and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. This podcast is sponsored by Better help. And this is actually this is actually happening listeners get ten percent off their first month at Better Help dot com slash happening. That's better help dot com slash happening. Today's episode is brought to you by the episode is brought to you by zebra. If you resolve to run a marathon or learn a language, you probably don't have time to shop for If you resolve to run marathon or learn a language, you probably don't have time to shop for insurance. The good news is that our friends at the Zebra can do it for you. And you can save hundreds doing it. Searching online to find the right policy for your car or home can take hours. It's a cumbersome annoying process. And in the end, I just want someone to simplify the options and clarify what will work best for me, the zebra compares car and home quotes from every major insurance company side by side, giving you all the facts you need to make the right in the end, I just want someone simplify the options, and clarify what will work best for me. The zebra compares car and home quotes from every major insurance company. Side by side, giving you all the facts you need to make the right decision. It's the fastest way to find the right coverage at the right price. All from a provider you can all from a provider you can trust. In the last year, I did a deep dive on all of my spending and insurance was one of the last items on my the last year, I did a deep dive on all of my spending, and insurance was one of the last items on my list. But when I went to the zebra, I was shocked to find out how much I was overpaying on several policies, save time and money in But when I went to the zebra, I was shocked to find out how much I was overpaying on several policies. Save time and money in minutes. Get your free quote today by going to our special URL. The zebra dot com slash happening. That's the zebra dot com slash happening. So three months before I got sober, I was put on effector. When I was put on effects or something clicked and I didn't wanna kill myself anymore. But the thing with effects or is if you stopped taking it for a day or two, you start to withdraw really bad. Your neurons are misfiring. So it's like the electrical grid in your brain just starts to go crazy. My highs and lows were at that point pretty moderate. And I was in a really good place, but the effects always given me migrants. And it was at the point where I I talked to my doctor. And she said, you know what? We can wean you off of a fax, sir. I weaned off of it with my doctor. The withdrawals were pretty bad, but I had a few months where I was feeling really good. And then I was feeling really really good. I felt like I was on fire and I felt like I could do anything and take on the world And then one day, I was like, I stepped through a trap door and I could not get out of it. It wasn't like I was just sad. It was like I went into a different reality. I had this overwhelming panic attack. The next morning, I wake up and before I even open my eyes, I feel the panic in my body still there, and I hear this voice in my head, that says, we now notice the protective layers of sleep beginning to lift. And my eyes shot open and I thought what the fuck was that? And I have a full blown panic attack. When I heard that voice in my head, it felt like it was coming from a couple other people and It felt like a third party's observation of me, but I could just hear it in my head. In the panic attack, I felt shaky. It's like a trembling, and it's like a trembling that is from such a place of fear. It feels like its origin is coming from the core of my body. And it feels like there's a fist around my stomach, squeezing my stomach. So when I try to eat, it feels like I'm eating sand. And so I just feel raw I actually was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but I think I am going to increase my ideation. I'm gonna increase exercise. I'm gonna go to more meetings. I'm gonna surround myself by people I love. I'm gonna do all the things and we're not gonna get back on a fixer. So I was under a ton of stress, And on top of that, I was starting my first job as a nurse. I just graduated nursing school, and I was determined to be like, people have gone through worse. I'm gonna get up every day, show up to my job. But on the other hand, I was still waking up in a state of panic. Every single morning. I'm trying to force myself to eat breakfast almost every day I'm throwing up from panic. But still, I was like, I don't care If I feel like I'm gonna die, I'm gonna do this job. After couple weeks, I am in a state of anxiety, fear, panic, And it's not going away. It's like being stuck in the same moment. Then I stopped being able to go to sleep. You know the feeling when someone pops out and scares you or something startling me, you get a rush of, like, feels like electricity through your body and your stomach drops and your heart races. I'm laying in bed and I notice I'm having this sensation every three minutes. One of those times I feel myself start to drift off and I hear that same, like, narrative voice in my head that said one day, Kim, you will die. And I got this fear like I've never known in my life. was not just logically facing the fact that I was gonna die someday, but in my gut, I felt my own mortality. And every night was getting worse and worse. One night, I was laying on my parents' couch, And I start to get these I guess you could call them visions in in my mind. I know they're not actuallyhappeningThis there are these scenarios playing out before me. And three of them happened. The first one was of a soldier in World War one. In a trench. I have never been in a war. I've never been scared. Someone is going to kill me, but this felt so is gonna kill me, but this felt so realistic. It felt like I wasn't observing him. I felt like I was him and I was watching this person, feeling what this person felt in this trench and being absolutely uncontrollably terrified that my life or death depended on whether or not someone was gonna blow me up. And I had no idea when it was gonna be, and I just had to lay there and take it until I got help. And then the scene changed to this middle aged woman. And someone called me and said, that my son died in a car accident, and it felt like the bottom of my soul opened up and that grief, that this woman felt, that for some reason, I could also feel was almost like this disgusting spiraling, indescribable feeling. It was, like, nothing I had ever experience. It was nothing I could ever even imagine. It was such a foreign feeling. It felt like I was seeing a new color for the first time. was like, what the hell, what is this? The last scene was this woman in a basement. And she was on a concrete floor and she was chained to a pole. She was abducted and being held in the gunman's basement. And she had lost sense of the day's passing, of the week's passing, she was in the state where she didn't know when he was gonna come back and she was being beaten and raped by this person. And she had no sense of time of when it was gonna be over. She had no sense of being anywhere else except in that moment and suffering. And then the vision stopped. And I was just laying there helpless because all of these unexplainable feelings and visions in my head and physical symptoms are just wrecking me. I couldn't do any activity that was soothing it. I was just stuck in this same mental and physical anguish. I didn't sleep that night. I don't remember the next day. My days were spent, curled in a ball, or my mother trying to get me to eat, the other thing I would do is sit on the back porch because the sun helped my body some. And when the sun went down again, I I laid back on the couch. I took that new mood stabilizer. And as soon as I laid down, I started feeling my legs like I felt like they were ants crawling in my legs. With some mood stabilizers and SSRIs and especially antipsychotics, you can get a side effect called Acathymia. It feels like your skin is gonna burst open, and it feels like someone is taking the panic and restless nerve pathway in your brain and cranking it up. And so you cannot sit still. You have to move. And so I'm laying on the couch and I'm basically riding in the sheets and I feel like an animal stuck in a cage and I'm almost, like, about to gnaw my arm off just to get out and I hear in my head this chattering of, like, people, it felt like a small crowd talking. And then I heard this laugh and it was this booming deep metallic sounding laugh. I don't know if this makes sense, but I could see and feel the colors black and blood red. And I thought to myself that is a devil and this is hell. In that moment, I was reduced to nothing. There were no options left to self soothe. There were no options. To regulate, there was nothing to do, but feel everything. I don't know what I did after that. But I do know when the sun came up, a twenty five year old woman crawled into bed with my mother, and Oscar to hold me. I don't even know what I thought or felt I was, like, an infant. My doctor prescribed to me ativan. So I took it and I finally slept. And I slept 889 hours and I was like that saved my life. And so that's when I decided, like, Maybe I can get back on the Infector and get my life back and just continue to deal with the migraines. I had exhausted every option and I had to get back on this thing I did not want And I got back on the effects or ensure enough two weeks later, my panic stopped. When I got back on the effects or after so several months, I noticed like, hey, I'm I'm not getting these migraines anymore. And I would say my migraines went down from thirteen fourteen times a month to maybe three To me, that was a life changing victory for me. But it terrified me because the only thing between me and my life being destroyed as this pill and I hate that feeling. What if I can't get that pill? The day is following the panic going away, seeing those visions that I had, and feeling all those things I felt sent me into kind of an existential questioning because I believed in a god or a something, but what I had seen during those six weeks was a reality that I didn't know existed at all. I saw and experienced a level of anguish, that I never could have imagined. I saw the power of the subconscious mind. I didn't know if it was spirits. I didn't know if it was my brain doing crazy shit. I realized I didn't know shit anymore. I was just cracked open to an entirely different way of existing, and it challenged everything I thought I knew about anything ever. I could not understand. How this suffering, not just in myself, but seeing this suffering in others. I could not reconcile that with the idea of good or love I saw how deep the human psyche goes and I saw how deep we can get pulled into it And so if you were to come to me and disclose to me, every terrible thing you had done, I wouldn't be shaken at all. I wouldn't be scared. I wouldn't judge it. The human experience goes to that depth, but there is no judgment. There was just it was total neutrality. All the sudden scary things didn't scare me anymore. Death didn't scare me anymore. Would I found in myself to be character flaws or something didn't scare me anymore. I was just in a place of total acceptance because I knew I didn't know shit. And at the end of the day, whatever greater reality there is behind what we can consciously see and feel is so powerful and so huge. Like, we're living in a delusion. I wanted as little stimulus as possible. I didn't wanna see a lot of people. I didn't really know who I was, and so I wanted to sit with this new person that was starting to form, and I really was in a place of deep solitude I had that experience. III lived with my parents for a year afterwards, and I kept thinking, like, I wanna go back to my old neighborhood in Atlanta. I wanna slip back into the life that I used to have. But when I move back to Atlanta that life wasn't there anymore. Because I had changed on the inside, everything on the outside was different. It felt like I was returning to a chapter that was just done. Up until then, different phases kinda happened slowly and over time, but this one happened like a bomb in my life. It was like III revisited the bomb site and my home wasn't there anymore. And I was surrounded by also everywhere that James and I used to go and and he was really struggling and I just had to accept like it's done. You have to move on. You have to move on to the next phase. Prior to this episode that I had, I was really confident in some ways, but in other ways, I was very, very, very self conscious. I I felt like I don't know if I'm gonna be able to be a nurse. Like, What if I give a wrong medication? What if I accidentally like kill someone somehow? What if I look at a patient the wrong way? And then they die. I was like, I was really scared before this episode. But after that episode, I was like, I can survive and unimaginably painful experience and feel like I'm being tortured, I can learn how to do this. I made it through nursing school. I passed my boards. I'm ready to learn. And I felt like I had come into my element because In healthcare, you see people at their absolute worst. It takes a certain amount of resilience to show up in that job and not have it really really wear on you. I knew that I could do it. I knew I could do all of it. I knew that I had me a resilience and in a determination that I previously, grossly underestimated, and that experience got me in touch with it. I'm Aricia Skidmer Williams. And Brooks Differn, and we host the show even the rich. And now, we're bringing you a brand new podcast from wondering, called Rich and Daily, that will have you sipping on that hotceleb tea. And then doing a spit take because according to our parents, we're super funny. In a way that only best friends can, we give our take on the stories that have the entertainment world a buzz. And sometimes, we'll even finish each other's sausages. Yep. Rich and Daily will keep you up to speed on all of the secrets, scandals, and celeb news. Is that rumor you heard about Rihanna True? If it is, you better believe we'll have something to say about it. Listen to Richard Daily on Apple Podcast Amazon Music, or you can listen to episodes ad free by joining Wonderry Plus in the Wonderry app. With Rich and Daily, feel the gossip. Wonderry, feel the story. I have a friend that's living in Singapore and in January of 2020, he was supposed to come over on a business have a friend that's living in Singapore. And in January of twenty twenty, he was supposed to come over on a business trip. And he said it had got canceled because of what he said was this new flu that's getting pretty bad in China. And it it's starting to spread. I was not too concerned about it. I thought that it was weird he would skip business trip because of it, but I just didn't give it a second thought. So then we get the first few cases in the US. And then a couple weeks later, I guess, the lockdown happened, and that's when it became very real. And what happened at my hospital was our patient census dropped because everyone was too scared to come to the hospital. Even people who needed to come, like, I eventually had a man who had had a stroke and waited seven days to come to the hospital because he was scared. Meanwhile, our fifth floor starts filling up with COVID Because the patient census was low, they started cutting our shifts for the people who didn't work on the COVID unit, and I was furious. I was very ready to leave Atlanta because after losing James and then shortly after that, after losing everything in my life, I felt like I was living in a graveyard. I kept thinking to myself, I feel like I'm a stranger living in my own life. So that's when I started travel nursing. And I put everything I owned in a storage unit, got rid of a lot of it, and took an assignment taking care of patients in a long term care facility who had had COVID, but we're having difficult time coming off of the ventilator. And that's when I saw face to face, how how fucked up it is. I was at the Long Term Care Hospital from May of twenty twenty to October of twenty twenty. And then I went to a small town in southern New Mexico and took a night shift COVID assignment there. And I will never forget some of the things that I I will never forget some of the things that I saw. I always wanted to be a nurse. I always wanted to work in, like, emergency scenarios, but there's nothing that you can learn in school to prepare you to stand in a hallway of twenty dying people at once. There's nothing that can prepare you for that. There were people who were on the vent for three months and we're just not getting better. There was this one patient in particular, but I still think about him he had gotten COVID and had a tracheostomy, which is a hole that they put in your throat and attach the ventilator to that. He had, I'm assuming, permanent brain damage and kept pulling his tracheostomy off. Which when you do that, you die. So when all else fails, you have to put patients in restraints to keep them from killing One of the times before he was restrained, he pulled off his tracheostomy. Someone called it a code blue, And I went in there and that was the first time I I had seen someone blue head to toe. They were able to revive him and that's what he got in. Put on restraints. Unfortunately, the man never oriented. And so that poor man stayed on restraints for months don't know where a family was. I my contract was done before I saw what happened to him. One night in particular, I was sitting at the nurses' station. I hear a nurse aide calling out for help. And I see this nurse aide standing in a room, like, totally pale. And I walk in, and then I see this man laying on the floor and he is blue from the chest up and this had been a man who had previously an independent patient And now he was on the floor. And so I told her to call a coat and I get on top of him. And his eyes twitch up towards me and I start doing compressions and then his head falls to the side. He starts foaming at the mouth. I start doing these compressions, then I followed his start and break, and I set out loud. Holy fuck. I just broke his ribs. The ribs break early in compressions, and so that was my first experience. Being the one to break someone else's ribs and the popping over and over again made me feel so sick. And I remember the nurse aide next to me saying, it's okay, sweetie. You're doing great. Just keep going. You know, the whole coach team comes in, get them back on the bed. We work on them. And then they call it. They can't get them back, you know. And then everyone leaves and it's just me and and the charge nurse. What went from chaos was all of sudden totally silent, and we just zip them up in body bag and write his name and date of birth on areThere, and then that's that's the end of an entire life. And it was the first very chaotic code I had been in, and I realized that I was the last thing he saw before he died. The gravity of the career in the assignments that I had gotten myself into really hit me then. The fear of death is the driving factor to so many aspects of human existence. And I was there in the final moments of someone's entire and I was there in the final moments of someone's entire life. And then it just feels like, alright, the credits start rolling after that. Touching someone in their last moments and like being on top of them is this strangely intimate experience you're there to witness this person's last moment on Earth. I get goosebumps thinking about it because there is no other feeling like that. From that moment, for some reason, it opened me up even more. It gave me even more of capacity to love people. I feel like nurturing people areThere it's in my personal life or in a career is my ideation. And sometimes you have to go between, you know, kinda tough love and also, like, tender love. And it opened me up to more gentle tender love. About a week after that, I was drinking orange juice and I was like, oh, this orange juice is like watery. And then I went to drink my coffee. I was like, this is watery too. And then I was like, oh, shit. I have pretty bad asthma, so my roommate and I at the time both got COVID. We actuallyhappeningThis on that floor. It was horrible. I felt like I had been drugged. It moved to my stomach over the next few days, and then after that was when I felt like I couldn't breathe, one day when I had enough energy I stood up to cook. And about ten minutes after standing, I got really dizzy and really winded, and I laid down on my stomach. And I didn't catch my breath for three hours. I couldn't breathe. And I felt like there was something physically, like, sitting in my lungs. It was very uncomfortable and I couldn't cough anything up. And it took me a month and a half to be able to work out again because I would get heart palpitations when I would start to work out. After I recovered from COVID, I went back to work and there was a night, we get a huge influx of patients and we have to move the entire second wing upstairs to make room for all the COVID patients coming in On top of that, everyone on the COVID side was unstable. There's like a screen that measures Everyone's heart rate and oxygen saturation level and I walk out of the hallway and everyone's de saturating. All of us were going room to room. It's like playing whack and wall, like, trying to keep these people from dying. At a certain point, all of this just stood there for a second trying to, like, calm down. And I just remember feeling a single bead of sweat, like, slowly dripping down my back and being like, but this feels almost like a mass casualty event. Everyone's dying and there's nothing we can do. The ICU beds are taken up. We don't have any more beds. When you see people at their worst, it's really easy to pass all kinds of judgment on them, but what my experience drilled into my mind is that, first of all, you don't know what someone else is going through. You don't know the depths of suffering that anyone around you has been to. During that time, death became certain to me and death became much less scary for me. I truly think that being able to face death and suffering and bounce back from it couple years prior helped me continue to show up and work with with these people. The experience that I had made me able to face seeing so much death and so much suffering without totally imploding. I'm able to walk through it with more grace, I think. And I think I can take better care of myself outside of work in a way that I wouldn't have been able to before. Shortly after I started nursing, I was sitting on my parents back porch, and it it was springtime, and they have these beautiful trees in their backyard. And and these trees have flowers on them. It was at the peak of spring, and I saw one of these big beautiful pink flowers fall off the tree. And I got sad. And I thought, no. Like, the flowers are starting to die. And there was this voice in my head that said, Kim, the flowers are supposed to die, but they're gonna come back. And I was like, oh my god. I'm always gonna face suffering. But then it goes away and and then I'm gonna feel joy and then I'm not gonna feel joy. It's a cycle and accepting the fact that the joy is gonna go away and the pain will come back. It absolutely will come back. And I will continue to face loss It is so freeing. It opens you up to cherishing into loving in a way that I just didn't before. After James and I broke up and I moved, I I had to don't have contact with them because he kept relapsing, and he did finally get clarity that he had complex PTSD, which is a bit trickier to treat than PTSD. But I believe that by the time he received that diagnosis, he was just to stuck in the cycle of relapse. And I always kept tabs on him because he was still very good friends with my family and I was always checking on him through someone else. And two weeks ago, I got a call from an old friend and she said, something happened last night, James relapsed, and he died. Four of his family members, and I don't know, a handful of our friends all reached shop me inset, you know, like, you need to know that he still loved you all the way up until the end. And I never got a chance to tell him that that I feel the same because I didn't wanna contribute to his relapse cycle. But that man loved to me in a way that few people are capable of loving. And I will never not love him, and I never stopped loving him. And even if I had known exactly how it ended, I wouldn't have changed anything. And I hope now that he has relief from the horrible battle that he had for many years. I hope he can see how special of a human he was that he was never able to see when he was here. And in a weird way, I still I almost feel closer to him right now. I feel like he's standing right next to me. I guess his passing reminds me a gun of impermanent Even though it did in this way, there is value in experiencing the life we had together. Regardless of how it ended. And that's how I am continuing to try to live. Flowers die and then but then they come back and there will never be another James, but that's okay. And there's more in life to experience, you know. And and just having the experience is where the value lies. What I realized during my episode was that because I felt like my pain was never going to end, yet it did end, I realized that literally everything is temporary. And it it sounds scary because that means, like, I'm gonna lose everything, but it's true. We're we're all gonna lose everything at some point. But the thing is, is that it's cyclical like you lose something and then something else comes into your life to make it full and and beautiful. Before I went through this experience, I had a pretty solid understanding of who I thought I was. And once I went through this, because it shattered all of my beliefs, I am more aware that we are not necessarily who we think we areThere days, I see how there's more paradoxes in life than there are things that make sense. Our ideas of of who we are oftentimes die. And because I was connected with that reality of impermanence letting go of old ideas is is less scary. I'm not saying it's not scary at all, but it's less jarring. Being thrown into mystery and and and the unknown and and the unseen and the paradox of things opens you up to whether or not I want it to be like this, this is how it is. And so for me, it drove me even more into my practice of meditation. In meditation, the type that I do, it's about simply cultivating non judgmental awareness. In some practices, they call it the witness, like that piece of view that's able to witness from a neutral standpoint. It's like a muscle and the stronger that muscle became. Now when I encounter these mysteries and and these paradoxes, I can anchor myself into that neutral awareness and the un certainty and the ambiguity becomes so much less jarring. The last year and half part of my practice now is a lot of exercising. I do the typical, you know, going to the gym, but then I've also started rock climbing, which has been life changing for me. It it's gotten me comfortable in my body and I feel like it's starting to actually heal my nervous system. I think the hardest part of that experience was losing the life that I had known before and not knowing when the suffering was going to end and having to grapple with my idea of there being a loving god. The idea that there is a loving god underlined so much of my identity and so much of my spiritual beliefs, but I could not in my mind except that level of chaos and loss with a god that cared at all. The universe in in reality is fucking insane and incredible and terrifying and what's important to me is that love and enjoying and caring and truth are things that exist. So I don't try to bother myself with whether or not there's a loving god anymore. I was always scared of was always scared of suffering and so I was always scared that somehow I I was gonna lose control of my mood and and my regulation. It was easy for me to be like Oh my god. I've been through so much. Feel sorry for myself and be like I never even had a chance to be a well balanced person. But it helps me to look back on my life up to this point and see how everything I went through led me up to that six week thing that happened to me and I have appreciation for it. Now I'm not mad at now. I'm not mad at it. I'm not anything towards it. It made me realize like, I am not strong and and and resilient because of those things I went through. I was those things anyway. And so It led me to a place of I don't wanna keep herding. I don't wanna keep wallowing in these memories. It happened. It changed me. And that's it. When you're experiencing something that cannot be captured by words, it is incredibly lonely because you don't know if someone else has ever felt that and when you encounter someone else that has experience that you can feel it and it's a little tiny nugget of hope. I think what I wanna take forward is being that for someone else as well. And and I don't know in what capacity, but I don't want anyone out there to ever feel like they're alone in something. Today's episode featured Kim Consul. You can find out more about her and her writings at her myth and medicine blog on her Patreon page at patreon dot com slash myth and MediaInstagram you are listening to this is actually happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wandry app to listen ad free. And get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Whit Missildine. Today's episode was coproduced by me and Andrew Waits. With special. Thanks to the, this is actually happening team, including Ellen thanks to the this is actually happening team, including Ellen Wester. The intro music features the song Illoby by Tipper. You can join the community on that this is actuallyhappeningThis group on face book or follow us on Instagram at actually happening. On the show's website, this is actually happening dot com. You can find out more about the podcast contact us with any questions. Submit your own story or visit the store, where you can find this is actually happening designs on stickers, t shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's this is actually happening dot com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to Patreon dot com slash happening. Even two to five dollars a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening.