The Night Writing Saved My Life

That’s a pretty melodramatic title for a blog, isn’t it?  In all honesty, it kind of makes me laugh and roll my eyes at myself.  What a drama queen!  However, I am comfortable saying that writing ... or the desire to write ... truly did keep me among the living about 24 years ago.  Such is the power of books, whether reading or creating them.

Books have long been my salvation.  A difficult childhood with a mentally ill parent, a neglectful parent, and a drug abusing stepparent was alleviated to some degree by reading.  Escaping into other worlds chock full of fairy godmothers and damsel-saving heroes kept me hopeful and offered glimpses of happiness.  I daydreamed of my own magical rescuers, often surrounding myself in fantasy because reality was much too grim to live through day in and day out.

Reading helped me survive.  Yet it was writing that kept me alive.

The event that led to my descent into a real hell took place on January 13, 1988.  I was only 20 years old and attending college in Wilmington, Delaware.  On that fateful morning, I took to the icy roads to get to my part time job as a secretary in a chemical plant. 

Long story short, I was involved in a fender-bender along with half a dozen other people.  There we stood in the median, waiting for the cops so we could file our police reports.  I was feeling a bit sick looking at the cute little Thunderbird I had bought from my dad only three months prior.  Its grill was all smashed out, the hood crumpled like tissue paper, and I spied one of the headlights at my feet.  I picked the headlight up and tried not to cry.

That was the last thing I remember, fortunately.  I was told later about the Cadillac approaching our position and losing control.  It slammed right into our little group, tossing us all over the place.

When I regained my senses, I had been drug from the median across the lane to the side of the road.  Passing cars had begun sliding all over the median, having found a particularly bad patch of ice.  Those of us who could be moved were, to avoid getting hit again.

Seeing I was covered in blood was a terrifying thing.  The snow all around me was drenched in it.  Yet, after a few panic-filled seconds, I felt that I wasn’t in imminent danger.  It turned out I was right.  The only thing broken on me was my nose.  I was covered in lacerations and I’d been pounded pretty righteously, but I wasn’t dying.

The 18-year-old girl who had been standing next to me in the median wasn’t so fortunate.  A matter of inches had separated us, and apparently a few inches was all that stood between life and death.  They shut off the machines on her the next day.  I kept her obituary for six months, awash in survivor’s guilt.  I couldn’t return to work or school for three weeks due to my injuries, but at least I returned.  I’d gotten off lucky.

Fast forward approximately two years later.  I’d graduated college with my degree, a member of the honor society.  I had landed a plum job making almost as much money as my dad was after two decades of him being with the same employer.  The T-bird had almost been totaled, but in the end it was saved.

Life should have been great.  Instead, it was an awful nightmare.  I hadn’t walked away from that accident so lucky after all.  I’d taken extensive nerve damage to my neck and shoulders, which spread down to my arms and hands.  I was hurting, in so much pain that I was forced to take a leave of absence from my job.

If you’ve read Alien Embrace, you’ll remember the horrific pain Amelia suffered from her nerve-damaged hands, arms, and shoulders.  That was actually my world ... and I didn’t have a talented Kalquorian doctor to make it better.  For months I battled pain so vicious that I couldn’t stand the weight of my own arms hanging at my sides.  I couldn’t sleep lying down, because any pressure on my shoulders brought raw agony raging.  I could barely sleep at all no matter my position.  My body had become a torture chamber, and I had no escape.  Even when exhaustion finally made me unconscious, the pain was in my nightmares.

The nerve damage was inoperable.  The neurosurgeon in charge of my case kept switching my medications.  If there was an anti-inflammatory prescription out there, we tried it.  I sampled a lot of painkillers too, but I drew the line at the addictive ones, remembering all too well that stepparent and the damage addiction wrought.  I decided I’d rather die than become a drug addict.  Unfortunately, the few meds that worked on the pain made hamburger out of my guts.  When I wasn’t huddled in agony, I was too sick to stand.  One medication even gave me a nasty case of heart arrhythmia. 

I cried every waking moment.  My life shrank to being curled on my sofa when I wasn’t sitting in the doctor’s office.

“Will it ever stop hurting?” I asked one day, desperate for something to hang onto.

The doctor could only shrug.  “I wish I could tell you that, but I can’t.  We’ll just have to find a way to manage the pain.”

I’ve got news for you:  there is no managing constant pain of that stripe.  It was relentless in its brutal constancy.  I kept searching for the light at the end of the fathomless tunnel I had entered, but it was looking more and more like a bottomless ravine from which I would never emerge.

Hearing that I may never feel better was the last straw for me.  Was this my life from now on?  Was this all there would ever be?  I couldn’t stand the idea.

One night soon after that conversation with my doctor, I went into my kitchen, weary desperation making my head pound.  I wasn’t sure when I had last slept.  It felt like it had been an eternity.  In this state, I opened the cabinet that held my meds.

I am a packrat.  I hate throwing anything away that isn’t broken or worn out.  So instead of getting rid of the painkillers and anti-inflammatories that didn’t work or made me so phenomenally sick, I had kept them.  They sat filling that cabinet, mocking me with false promises of relief.

I’m not sure why I did this, but I started to take them all out, each and every bottle, lining them along the edge of the kitchen counter.  I had a monstrously huge kitchen, and the counter ran almost ten feet long.  When I had finished lining up the bottles of pills, they stretched down two-thirds of that counter.

As I stood there, looking at all this medicine that hadn’t helped me one bit, a thought came through my head:  I wonder how many of these I can take before I drop?

The funny thing about that notion was the lack of emotion I felt.  It was a cold, hard thought that elicited no feeling whatsoever; no remorse, no horror, no shrinking away.  If there was anything I came close to feeling, it was relief.

There was a way out.  I didn’t have to go on one more awful hour of this horror that my life had become.

I’d often heard of those who had committed suicide referred to as cowards for running away from their problems.  I’d heard them called selfish for leaving people behind to grieve.  I can tell you from facing this dilemma the truth of it:  I honestly felt this would be the solution to the problem, not running away.  I would also be sparing my family the need to take care of me as I became more and more dependent on them.  No one would be financially ruined over my medical care.  As far as I could tell, finishing it would be doing all a huge favor.

I’ve asked would-be suicides about this, and found almost all of them had come to the same conclusion – that their deaths would actually be a relief for their loved ones, a kindness.  When you’ve reached that point, it really does seem to be the only answer left.

Still feeling absolutely nothing, I walked to the end of the counter where the first nearly-full bottle of pills waited.  I picked it up and eyed it for a few minutes.  I opened it.  I took the first pill out.

“Do you really want to do this?” a voice asked me.

I was alone in my house.  Neither TV nor stereo were on.  Yet the voice had been as clear as someone standing right next to me.  I have no idea where it came from.  A guardian angel?  Spirit guide?  Base survival instinct?  An imagination so sleep deprived it conjured a hallucination?  I can’t even begin to hazard a guess.

It was enough to make me hesitate.  That made me mad at myself.  Was I such a coward after all that I would watch myself fall apart and ruin my family by continuing on?  Why was I waiting to take this step that seemed more than ever the right thing to do?  I couldn’t face another day in the agony I was in.  There was no reason to go on.

Yet, as if guided, my eyes went to the kitchen table.  This was where I sat and wrote before the pain in my hands had made it nearly impossible to hold a pen or hammer at the typewriter.  My first serious attempt at a book, at least one hundred typed pages, lay there.  Writing had always been my dream, the one thing I wanted to accomplish more than anything else:  more than finding love, more than having children, more than anything I could imagine – I wanted to finish at least one book and call myself a writer.

I hadn’t finished my book yet.  I hadn’t achieved the one thing I felt I’d been put on this earth to do.

A tug of war ensued.  Live and write and prolong the hell I lived in; or die and find peace and never finish the most important thing to me?  Enduring another single moment of what my life had become was impossible to contemplate – yet bowing out with that book unfinished was just as unthinkable.

It occurred to me that I could end things at any time, if I could just hold out against the pain.  However, once I was gone, everything was done.  My book would not be finished.  If there was the slightest chance the pain would recede, that chance would not be realized.  When I closed the book of my life, so to speak, there would be no re-edits.  That would be it.

Yet the pain ... God, the pain was just so incredible.  A large part of me begged to be done with it. I had already held out longer than any reasonable person would expect had they lived in my tortured body just one minute.  I wanted out so damned bad.

Still, the siren song played on:  write the book.  It wouldn’t take longer than another three months at the most, even if I had to peck at my typewriter with just one spasming finger.  When it was done I could leave, knowing I had done the one thing I always wanted to do.  Just three months – that’s all I needed.

I let the muse talk me into it.  I slowly put the medications back in the cabinet, saving them for the day when I could use them without regret.  Then I sat down at my typewriter, my wrecked arms curled close to my chest, my clawed hands picking at the keys.  I wrote.

By the time the book was finished, I had found another doctor.  This pint-sized hellion from the Philippines put me on one of those addictive painkillers, shutting down my protests with the heavily accented, “I not let you get addicted.  I watch you.  You take only to sleep or no more for you.”  She gave me no refills, forcing me to see her each time I wanted more drugs.  Our combined vigilance kept me from the horror of drug dependency I had watched my stepparent succumb to.

As the weeks went past, the pain began to abate on its own.  The nerve damage was progressing, moving from overactive sensitivity to numbness.  There is the possibility I will eventually lose the use of my hands due to the damage.  I already drop and fumble things and don’t feel some of the injuries dealt to my hands and arms.  It’s a small price to pay, in my opinion.  I would rather be an absolute klutz than lost in that mire of torment I knew in those awful months.

I’ve heard of people who have said a book inspired them and changed their lives.  I’ve even heard of people who said they read a book that saved their life.  So far, I am the only person I know of who wrote the book that saved her life. 

As for that particular story that was written one halting keystroke at a time, well ... it was pretty awful, as books go.  The best that can be said about it was that it contained the germ of an idea that went into a much better book.  However, it was the book that snatched me away from the abyss.  It kept me alive to write other books, as I was meant to do.  It kept me from dying with regrets.  For that reason alone, it was the most important and best thing I ever wrote.

May your own dreams guide you through the fathomless and seemingly endless tunnels life sometimes places in your path.  No matter what you do, don’t let yourself leave with regrets, with your purpose in life unfinished.  Take it from one who made the journey; there is light on the other side and it is brighter than you imagined.