I am constantly aware of the imminent possibility of death.
I understand the melodrama of this statement, but it’s something I’ve been considering frequently as of late. These thoughts aren’t necessarily fear-based, but more of an acknowledgement that death could strike any day.
Nothing gets that awareness buzzing like a nice long drive, which is something I embark on at least every other week as I travel from my temporary home in north Georgia to Nashville, Tennessee. With every hairpin curve and semi-truck I pass, visions of my inevitable death flash behind my eyes. It’s indulgent, in a weird way. In my head, if I imagine my body being ejected through the windshield and onto the pavement, it simply won’t happen!
It’s not just while driving, too. A perfectly delicious meal can be ruined with the cartoonish thought of me gasping for air on my kitchen floor with a particularly difficult piece of steak lodged in my trachea. That could happen, right? The ceiling could give in, the earth could open up and bury me, or God’s wrath might strike me down at any moment. I chalk it up to “intrusive thoughts,” and try to push them out of my head when they show up unwanted.
These thoughts began bombarding my psyche after a bloody, freak accident that left me with 7 staples in my head and a cocktail of cognitive issues. A therapist I was seeing told me these thoughts are not standard for a twenty-something. In fact he told me that awareness of death usually doesn’t hit an individual until they reach middle age, unless that individual experiences something akin to a “brush with death” earlier in life. In my experience, this has been a tough issue to relate to my fellow Gen Z/millennial cusps on. This was especially prevalent not too long ago, as my boyfriend announced to me that he was to be climbing the roof of his nearly 150 year old house to film a TikTok. I thought this was absolutely absurd, and told him of all the ways he could end up dead or mangled. He does not fear death, or even acknowledge its ever-lurking presence. He unabashedly laughed in death’s face and made a TikTok. I dream of the day I can do the same.
Did you think I was going to leave you hanging with the “freak accident” bit? Absolutely not. I have been waiting nearly six years to flesh out this trauma porn, and finally can. I may have to leave out some details due to legal complications, but let’s get into it.
Fresh out of our first year of college, my friend Ali and I were about five hours into the first night of a small music festival in Tampa. We had roughed the first acts of the festival, which mostly consisted of various groups of dudes in skinny jeans and pompadour hairstyles scream-singing into microphones. So naturally, we were thrilled when we settled in the pit for a more popular dude in skinny jeans to moodily sing over something synthier. (10 points if you guess who the Artist Who Must Not Be Named Due To Legal Reasons is). Everything was peachy until about 10 seconds into the first song, when something hard hit the crown of my head. The room was spinning, and I didn’t know where the ground was. A rush of pain hit me, the worst I had ever felt in my life, and I felt sick. A curtain of warm, sticky blood fell from my head, covered my face, and ran down my back. I felt like Carrie.
At this point I had no idea what had hit me, and I had never tasted that much blood before, so my first assumption was that someone had stabbed me in the skull with a knife and then dumped a vat of warm, spoiled milk on me. After realizing that the mystery substance was in fact blood, my dear friend Ali grabbed my hand and led me through the crowd of smelly Urban Outfitters clad kids to a florescent-lit room.
This is where things get hazy for me, my memory of that night is abstract, pieced together hap hazardously in a bloody, non-sensical montage. The one string holding that night together is the taste of blood that I couldn’t get out of my mouth. It hung at the back of my throat for weeks after the accident.
Aside from the blood I remember pushing through the crowd, holding my head together, and passing a lanky mostly nude man wearing nothing but a speedo and a rubber ducky inner tube around his waist.
Other Things I Do Remember From That Night:
There was this fluorescent room, I think it was an office, and I had somehow acquired a red and white striped rag to press to my open wound.
Two medics, standing above me, arguing whether or not they should flush out the wound. One thought they would find brain matter.
I took an ambulance, and I remember feeling embarrassed because I was desperately trying to hold a conversation with the EMTs, but could only babble absolute nonsense.
At the hospital, my nurse was a short Italian-looking man covered in tattoos. He told me that I was incredibly lucky to be alive, much less walking.
They injected me with lidocaine and stapled my head together. Seven staples.
That’s all I got.
I am told I had a CT scan and some other tests done ensure my brain wasn’t exploding that night.
Friends came to visit (thank you, if any of you read this. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on at the time and would like to properly thank you now) the days following, and my poor mother was desperately trying to stay sane.
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I continued to undergo tests of all sorts, and began seeing three different kinds of brain-related doctors. I was prescribed medications for all sorts of cognitive/mental problems that cropped up. A landslide of depression swallowed me up, as I was told by one of these brain doctors that I couldn’t possibly go back to school in the fall. I wanted to sleep during the day and spend the night out, just to get out from under the landslide.
And the anxiety. It was PTSD and anxiety rolled into one, and I was terrified. I was afraid of things falling on me out of nowhere, which is warranted I suppose, and thus began my tendency to indulge in intrusive thoughts.
But there were cognitive issues too. I forgot chunks of my life surrounding that event, which I cannot recall to this day. I would begin talking, and completely forget what I was saying. I couldn’t remember words, and faces, and struggled to read paragraphs or even get through a musical piece.
I hated myself. I hated the way I looked. I felt slow. My brain was impossible, it wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to.
The issue with traumatic brain injuries is that there is not much research done on the brain, in comparison to other parts of the human body. This is because in order to accurately study the brain, the brain must be active. Obviously, tests on the human brain were shut down in the last century due to the, uh, lack of ethics surrounding lobotomies.
I tried to keep the fear away, but the looming possibility of having an aneurism or seizure constantly hung above me.
I was 19 years old at the time of the injury, on the edge of entering my 20’s, the “best years of my life,” or something. I stopped everything, including the music career I was about to embark on.
I won’t dive into what’s happened between then and now quite yet, but I will say that it’s been a weird past few years. A lot of healing has taken place, thanks to my family, friends, and some amazing doctors. I still deal with these emotional and cognitive problems, but I’ve learned to cope. Healing is a constant effort, it requires one to really get to know oneself. And it’s a process. Whether the initial wound is physical or emotional, healing is a difficult process.
I’ll save that for another newsletter.
I’m sorry for getting so…into it? toward the end? If you made it this far, thank you. It feels good to get this out of my head.
I can still taste the blood, it’s metallic and horrible. Sorry, Armie Hammer, I don’t get the appeal.
Gabrielle - you have a great gift to write. I read this post as if I was just listening to a friend speak. Horrified by what I heard, justly turning to sympathy and then compassion for what you went through and go through daily. I subscribed. Keep the lecture going.
Gabrielle so sorry you went through this so young. I just am kinda going through some of the same fears of unforeseen scares. You are so correct that I never really thought about death or fears until something happened to bring pain and anxiety even though my body failed me and I was helpless and in so much pain even with the meds. I had been luck and never had a broken bone, stitches or been admitted to the hospital. I recently traveled to Atlanta and had horrible anxiety about passing vehicles and my father and husband behind the wheel. It was so hard I felt bad that I was in tears I was so scared on the interstate. I hope it will get better for us both with time. I know my life was not really at danger as wooth your experience. I know it must be more difficult for you and I am praying your PTSD will pass as time goes by. Thanks for sharing! Hope to see you soon!