A warning note before you start: this is long. Very long. Close to 7000 words. I've tried to break it up into sections to make it easier, but it's still a pretty long read.
It shouldn't have to be said, given the title, but: TRIGGER WARNING.
This piece of writing comes to you from the UK in 2005. Procedures in other countries, or in the UK at the point in time that you are reading this, may be different.
Originally posted as an answer to a question on Quora.
1) The Initial Event and Aftermath
I was imprisoned in my own bedroom and repeatedly raped all night. He finally left at 9am, after telling me that he'd be back later with an engagement ring, but if I reported it, he'd come back and kill me, and then go after my elderly mother.
I was running on near enough 48 hours with no sleep, which is the only explanation I have for why I did the worst possible thing I could have done: I took a bath. Women do this often, due to feeling dirty and violated, and it washes away a lot of the DNA evidence. I had been a crisis worker for three years at this point, l had supported several girls through their rapes, and I knew this. I just...forgot, I guess.
After he left, I was on my own in the house - Mom had left at 6 for an early shift at work, and our lodger had buggered off to wherever he went on weekdays - and I was already feeling abandoned and unloved, because I'd screamed repeatedly at the top of my lungs throughout the first half of the night, until he strangled me to keep me quiet, and neither my mom nor my lodger had rescued me. Up until maybe 4am, I'd fully expected to be rescued. It didn't seem possible that someone could hold me prisoner and rape me and strangle me in a 3-bedroom semi that I shared with two other people and a dog, all of whom were home all night. I couldn't figure out why nobody heard my loud, piercing screams, and nobody heard his roars when I bit him, and nobody heard me crying until my throat was raw, and I found myself wondering - did they hear, and just didn't care enough to investigate?
So I sat in the bathtub, absent-mindedly rinsing the sweat and semen and saliva off my body, unable to think of anything other than how my life was suddenly irrevocably changed, because now I had a fiancé, a fiancé who would repeatedly rape me and probably beat me and almost certainly murder me after I'd reached the end of my usefulness, and that there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it because I wasn't willing to report it and risk my mom's safety.
I'm assuming that the combination of shock and lack of sleep caused me to be unable to think straight.
I got out of the bath and called a friend who was a policeman to ask for advice, but he didn't answer his phone. I didn't want to leave a message, so I got into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. When my mom came home after lunch, I got up and went downstairs to talk to her. I couldn't seem to force myself to use the word rape, but I managed to tell her that the guy who hadn't shown up for our afternoon coffee date yesterday had shown up in the middle of the night instead, and he had done very bad things to me against my will.
My mom called the police.
2) Talking to the Police
When the police arrived, I was sitting on the floor in the hall, wearing old black pants with paint on them and a brown fisherman's sweater that belonged to my late brother. For some reason, I always remember the clothes I was wearing for any given event in my past. I remember thinking I should put on proper clothes and brush my teeth, but I was just so tired, telling Mom had used up the small bit of energy I had. Mom tried to talk to me, but I wasn't making a lot of sense - I sounded, and felt, drunk. The initial officer who responded to the call was named Lee. I never caught his last name, but when he asked me if I would talk to him, I said I would, because people named Lee are always nice people. I realise now that he was a rookie, fresh out of the academy, and he probably felt totally out of his depth, but he never showed it. He was patient and kind when I told him I didn't know if I wanted to report it, because I believed if I did then my rapist would kill me and my mother. He explained to me that rape was a criminal offence, and that if he took an official report now then I wouldn't be able to withdraw it later, so I should take some time to be sure about what I wanted to do.
I wasn't sure, but I knew I couldn't live with it if he raped another girl because I hadn't reported it. And there would be another girl. There would be many other girls, until someone stopped him. I knew his type well. Lee said that almost all rapists say that they'll kill the victim if s/he talks - it's how they control them - but very few attempt it. So I made the report. I don't remember much at all about this part. I know that another couple of officers showed up - Scott and Amy, as well as a bunch of crime scene techs - and that we all sat around in my living room talking while my mom made tea and coffee and finger sandwiches, as though we were having an afternoon tea party. I took a bite of a cheese sandwich, having had nothing to eat in nearly 24 hours at this point, and all three officers immediately stopped me in case there was DNA still in my mouth, so I had to spit the sandwich out and let them bag up the half-chewed bite.
After several hours - I don't remember the passage of time, but I know that it was dark outside - I was told that I needed to go to hospital for a physical exam. I was allowed to go up to my bedroom, where crime scene techs had been fingerprinting everything, and get my medication and the book I was reading. While I was there, they asked me if I could point out what I'd been wearing in the night, as well as anything that he'd touched a lot and paid particular interest to. These things they bagged up and took away with them.
- 1 cell phone (Nokia 3210)
- 1 hand-embroidered Egyptian cotton duvet cover (still pissed about losing that one!)
- 1 fitted double sheet
- 2 pillowcases
- 1 cheap IKEA duvet cover
- 2 bath towels
- 1 green fitted T-shirt
- 1 pair blue pajama shorts
- 1 bottle Durex Play lube
Lee left, and Scott and Amy drove me to a private BUPA hospital in the next town over. My mom asked to come with us, but I told her I preferred her to stay home - I knew that I didn't have the wherewithal to take care of her as well as myself. I was shown to a small room with a private bathroom while we waited for the doctor.
3) The Medical Exam
When the doctor arrived, it was clear that she was annoyed about having to be there. She was kind to me, but she'd been pulled away from a dinner party, and it was obvious that she would have preferred to be at that party.
The initial parts of the examination were fine. She and a crime scene tech combed through my pubic hair and collected any stray hairs in a bag. She noted any bruising and abrasions on the outside of my vagina, and used a speculum to open me up so she could make notes on any damage to the inside of my vagina and my cervix. A few times she used a long swab and tweezers to collect hairs from inside, as well as DNA from semen. She then did the same with my anus, noting any cuts, enlarged blood vessels, and bruising, and swabbing for hairs and semen. She swabbed the back of my throat and around my teeth. After the internal exam I was finally allowed to urinate, but I had to put the toilet paper I used in a bag to be analysed for DNA. I think that was the worst part for me. Sex is not something that embarrasses me, but toilet functions are one of the few things that I am deeply private about, and handing over my urine-soaked toilet paper was probably the most humiliating, degrading moment of the whole event.
While she was doing the exam, I read my book. Wolf-Speaker, by Tamora Pierce. I read because I needed the escape, but I regret that now, as I think it made me appear cool and unruffled, which is not a good thing when you're trying to convince the police that you've been raped. It didn't occur to me at this point that I might not be believed.
After I peed, the tech asked if she could take a DNA sample and a set of fingerprints from me, so they could be eliminated from any results. I agreed, and she swabbed the inside of my cheek and had me roll my fingers one by one on a wet sponge pad and then onto a piece of card. I was surprised to find that the chemical they used was colourless, but she told me that they'd stopped using black ink a while back. She then told me about the national fingerprint database and national DNA database, and asked if I would be willing for my prints and DNA to go on file in the database, though she emphasised that this was not mandatory. I've never been a private person, and always thought it would be cool to be able to look myself up in a database, so I agreed.
It was when the doctor had to search me for any other injuries that the problems started. The cuts on my face and lips were noted and photographed, but when she saw the bite marks and finger bruises on my throat - he'd strangled me from behind - she said that they were too old to be from the previous night, and that someone else must have strangled me a few days ago. I told her no, bruises always heal really fast on me, but she was adamant that bruises less than 24 hours old could not possibly be turning greeny-yellow at the edges already, and she refused to document them. The same went for the finger-shaped bruises on the backs and insides of my thighs. She asked if I'd been with anyone else recently - and I had. Two nights before the rape, I'd had a date that ended up in the bedroom. She said that the throat and thigh bruises must have been from him, and though I told her that my date had not been even slightly rough with me, she didn't believe me.
I don't know if I blame her for this or not. The pigments that cause the green and yellow tints that bruises sometimes get, biliverdin and bilirubin, are produced when haemoglobin in blood is broken down, and they usually come after a few days of bluey-purple bruising. Logically, she should have been right about the age of the bruises. Still, I was hurt and angered by her refusal to listen to me and believe me. I felt like she was supposed to be on my side, and she wasn't.
4) Making a Formal Report
Amy came over the next day, and for several days after, to take a formal report. I like to be in control of myself and of situations wherever possible, and I greeted her in makeup and clean hair and pretty clothes, which I think shocked her a bit. I remember that I wore clothes that made me feel clean and bright and wholesome: a lemon-yellow V-neck sweater, a knee-length white A-line skirt with lemon and orange and turquoise flowers on it, and a pair of white crochet ballerina pumps. The clothes were my way of taking back my body from my rapist, of showing that he would not control me, but in hindsight I realise that this added to the impression that nothing awful had occurred. I offered tea and cake and juice; as with the clothing, hostessing allowed me to impose order and ritual on a chaotic situation. These were all politely refused, and we got down to the hard work of preparing a statement.
There's very little I can say about this part. It took about ten hours, spread over several days, and it covered everything from my initial meeting with the man who would become my rapist, right up until the moment he left that morning, in minute detail. I had only known him for about six weeks, and had met him twice - the day we met and the night he raped me - so I shudder to think how long it would take to create a statement for someone who was raped by a person they'd known for years.
At this time, I also provided Amy with as much information as possible in the hopes that the police would be able to track him down. I didn't know his full name - I only knew him as Obie - and had no idea where he lived, but I was able to provide her with the receipts from the bar he took me to the day we met, and a fairly accurate guess at the time that he dropped me off at the Underground station afterwards, so the police were able to obtain an image of him from the CCTV cameras there. I have never been so relieved that I'm organised and tidy by nature.
I was raped on a Monday night. Monday 10th October, 2005. The police were notified Tuesday afternoon. On Friday, Amy told me that the police would probably be able to track him down by the following Monday. Sure enough, on Monday Amy called to tell me that he had been found, taken in to his local police station for a "chat" where they informed him of the charges against him, and then released on his own recognisance. That scared me. I had assumed they would arrest him, and I asked Amy why they'd let him go so easily, and what would stop him coming after me and killing me now that he knew I had reported him. Amy tried to soothe my fears, telling me that when someone has been cautioned to stay away from someone, they almost always do for fear of getting in worse trouble.
This one won't, I told her. This one believes he's untouchable, and he'll come after me.
It's unlikely, she said.
We'll see, I said.
That was around 5pm on Monday.
5) Monday Night
I had evening classes on Mondays. Every Monday from 7 until 9pm, I studied anatomy & physiology at Oaklands College in Welwyn Garden City. It was only nine miles from my home, but the route mostly involved narrow country lanes, and the buses were lousy in the evenings, and Mom was driving my car at that time as hers had packed up, so she was happy enough to drive the 50-minute round trip to drop me off, and again to pick me up, every Monday night.
Twenty minutes before the end of class, my phone rang. You need to leave class and come outside, right now, my mother told me. Graham[the lodger] just called my cell to tell me that there's a big, angry man at the house, demanding to see you and refusing to leave.
I left class. We drove to the county police headquarters, which - by happy coincidence - was right near my college, and told them what was going on. They got in touch with the St Albans branch of Hertfordshire Constabulary, and the St Albans station sent some officers to my house to investigate. We were told that we wouldn't be able to go home until he was apprehended, so we got ready to settle in for a long wait.
We waited in an office belonging to - I guess the police chief? Captain? I don't really know the British police ranking system - and he was very kind, and kept bringing me soup and tea and snacks. I asked him what the full name of my rapist was, because I didn't know it, and I knew that the police must know since they'd been able to track him down, but I was told that they couldn't release that information. So next time he went out for soup for me, I asked him if he could also hunt down a blanket, and while he was gone I looked in my own file and found my rapist's name. I still feel a little bit guilty about that, to this day. He left me alone in his office because he trusted me, and I broke that trust. But I don't fully regret it. I needed to know.
At 1am, we received a phone call from St Albans. They had approached him outside my house, and he had fled. It had taken several hours to catch him, but he'd been apprehended and arrested.
We went home, exhausted but vigilant.
6) The Next Few Weeks
Surviving the next few weeks was mostly mind over matter. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, getting through the things that needed to be done. I felt like I was sleepwalking through it all, which I would later find out was due to the brain injury that I got from being repeatedly strangled.
I saw my regular GP several times, as I was in a lot of pain. My rapist was a big man - 6'5", maybe 280 lbs - and having him on top of me for ten hours and having my body forced into unnatural positions had caused a spinal injury, where two of my lumbar vertebrae had come out of position, bruising my spinal cord. My sciatic nerve had been pinched where it exits the spine, causing pain and weakness in my legs. My larynx had been crushed, not badly enough to affect my breathing, but badly enough to make it hard to talk and to change my voice. I had a nasty case of vaginal thrush that didn't want to go away. The worst were the internal infections that I developed. My rapist had repeatedly raped me orally, vaginally and anally, without a condom, switching from one orifice to another perhaps a dozen and a half times. I developed infections in my vagina, and soon after in my uterus, due to contamination with fecal matter.
I went to the sexual health clinic and got a full screening: herpes, HPV, trichomoniasis, chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhoea, HIV, all the heps. When it was time to get the blood tests done, none of the workers at the clinic could get blood from my veins, so I had to go to the main hospital and then carry my vials of blood back to the clinic in a locked metal box with a biohazard symbol on the top. This, at least, activated my (somewhat dark) sense of humour, and it was sort of fun to see people's reactions to my box. I wish I had a box like that just to carry as a purse.
The box was a bright spot in a fairly nervewracking few weeks. My rapist was from a country with high rates of HIV, and the fact that he'd both raped me anally and caused me to bleed increased the chances that, if he did have HIV, he'd passed it to me. I was glad when my initial STI tests all came back negative within a week or so, but I didn't really breathe easily until my 6-month HIV window had passed.
My mother held it together long enough to tell my brother what had happened, to write letters to my two best friends about it, and to take a few weeks' compassionate leave from work. At first, she couldn't get the leave as she refused to tell her boss what had happened, and it was only at my urging that she did so. Her feeling was that we needed to keep my rape a secret, while mine was to talk about it openly. After she'd talked to her boss, my brother and my two best friends, she did what she always does when she can't cope with a crisis: retired to bed, sleeping all day and spending the nights reading, eating, chain-smoking and biting her fingernails.
I sound unsympathetic, and I guess I am. I shouldn't be. I can't even imagine how much it would hurt if this happened to my son. But I didn't have the energy or the emotional strength to take care of my mother. I needed it all to take care of myself.
I didn't tell my father I had been raped. My father is affected by what I sometimes refer to as "engineer brain" (or occasionally "Capricorn brain") - he is a very logical, methodical person who operates best when he can analyse and evaluate situations in order to see how you can do better in future. This is great for performing science experiments, but bad for dealing with human trauma, and I didn't feel strong enough to cope with questions about why I did X and didn't do Y. I knew I'd have to say something before the court case, so I told him I had been "attacked", and that I'd reported it. He congratulated me for doing the socially responsible thing, asked if I needed help with medical bills, and advised me to put it out of my mind until I had to appear in court.
My brother, the world's biggest pacifist, stomped around for a few weeks swearing revenge and talking about trying to find a hitman. I'm still not sure whether he was serious.
The guy I'd dated once, the one I'd slept with two nights before the rape, fell to pieces when I told him. He cried nonstop for an hour and required copious amounts of comfort. I broke up with him. I couldn't handle babysitting his emotions any more than I could handle looking after my mom's.
My best high school friend, Elle, handled it pretty well. She drove down from Bristol to stay with me for a few days - despite being back in my town bringing up her own traumatic memories - and took me out for dinner and margaritas, and said she'd come to court with me if I wanted. C, my best college friend and sort of partner, took it really hard. We'd already been through some pretty hard things that year, and his guilt over that added to his guilt over this - because he has always been the traditionalist who felt like it was his job to protect his woman - were nails in the coffin for our relationship. Years later, I found out that he blamed himself for the rape for a more substantial reason: the day I met my rapist I had had plans to meet C and his sister at the Notting Hill Carnival, and he stood me up. If he hadn't blown off our plans, I probably would never have been targeted. I didn't know what to say to this, because it was true. I never blamed him. There was no way for either of us to look into the future and see what would happen, and I told him that. But he blamed himself, and I didn't know how to comfort him. Still, like Elle, he told me he'd be there with me in court, for support.
Despite my friends, I felt very alone at this time.
7) November and December
November and December were one hammer blow after another.
In early November, I found that I was having problems thinking properly. Schoolwork didn't come as easily to me as it had previously. I frequently found myself misusing words, or forgetting what I was doing. I walked around in a "brain fog" - similar to, but much stronger than, the fog that comes with my fibromyalgia relapses.
In mid-November, the crying guy started stalking me. He'd phone me up, begging me to take him back and love him. When I refused, he'd cry and ask how I could be so cruel. Crying turned into suicide threats, suicide threats turned into angry abuse about what a horrible person I was, angry abuse circled back around to telling me how much he loved me. I ignored most of it, but occasionally he'd hit the right button to get me to respond. I probably should have changed my number, but I'd just bought a new phone after the rape - Crown Prosecution had kept my old one - and I couldn't afford to change yet again. (Changing SIM cards was not so easy in those days.)
In late November - Thanksgiving night, actually - I slept with C for the first time. It was wonderful for me, but he was uneasy with me afterwards. I'd always been a tough cookie - he had loved me for many reasons, but most of all for my steadiness and solidity and strength - and the rape had caused his view of me, and consequently of his life, to shift. No matter how much I tried to reassure him that I was not as fragile as he thought, he couldn't shake this new view of me as a broken flower instead of my former granite. Being with me was too difficult for him, and he worried constantly about hurting me. It wasn't long before he got a new girlfriend, though he remained one of my closest friends for years to come, and I remained in love with him.
In early December, I got a call from Scott, the second detective on my case, informing me that CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) had decided not to prosecute. They didn't believe they could secure a conviction, for a couple of reasons - the bruises on my neck and thighs that the doctor had attributed to another lover of mine, and the fact that I had changed the sheets on my bed the night I was raped. I told them I changed my bedsheets every five days, so there was a one in five chance that I'd have changed them that night, but apparently this was suspicious and led people to believe the sex was consensual.
In mid-December, I had a spinal X-Ray and a couple scans on my brain, both of which showed problems. My spine would probably heal with time and physiotherapy, but the lack of oxygen to my brain had caused moderate brain damage.
A few days after Christmas, I started haemorrhaging, and was eventually told I'd had a miscarriage. I hadn't even known I was pregnant - I was on the pill, and was militant about taking it correctly. The guy I'd slept with before the rape had had a vasectomy, so it was unlikely to be his, but I had no idea whether I had become pregnant by my rapist or by C, the love of my life (at that point). I was a jumbled ball of feelings - grief, disgust, anger, horror, guilt, shame. I'd always thought C and I would marry and have babies. I wasn't ready to have one at 21, but even though I hadn't known I was pregnant until I miscarried, I realised I'd wanted that baby. It almost didn't matter whether it was C's or not. It was mine. And yet I was horrified at the circumstances, and angry that I had been put in that position. And guilty and ashamed - oh yes, that too, because even though I was a medical student who was currently studying anatomy & physiology and who knew the stats about the percentage of pregnancies that end in miscarriages, I was also a girl who'd had three scans and X-Rays in the last month, and who'd blithely told the radiologists no, I couldn't be pregnant.
That moment was my Despair Event Horizon.
8) 2006-2007
On New Years Day, 2006, my mom and I went out to the supermarket to buy groceries. When we got home, we pulled into the driveway, and I got out of the car. Mom turned around to close her door, and when she turned back, I was on the ground.
To this day, I don't know what happened. Did I slip on the ice and fall? Did I trip over? Did I have a twisted ankle, or weak muscles, as I often do in extreme hot or cold weather? Did I have a seizure? Did something happen in my damaged brain that caused a blackout? Did I think, fuck it, I'm done with this life, I'm not playing anymore? I have no idea. What I do know is that my mother found me on the ground, with a bump on my head, and when I came around I started screaming and sobbing, because I had no idea what had happened, or where - or who - I was.
For the first few hours, she didn't believe me. She thought I was playing a game for attention, and told me so. She got me to call C, who also thought I was playing a game, but he was willing to play along with it. He teased me and tried to convince me that I'd agreed to give him my diaries to read: something that would have made me laugh and roll my eyes at any normal time, but on this occasion made me fly off the handle and scream at him to never try to manipulate me. He knew, then, that something was wrong, and his best friend of five years was not the person he was talking to. That evening I received another angry, bitter text message from Crazy Stalker Guy, talking about how I was the devil's daughter and how I would be responsible for his death.
These were the first impressions I got of myself. I didn't know who I was, didn't know anything about my personality - but I knew that someone felt I was the devil's daughter, and that I was selfish enough and rotten enough that the two people in the world who claimed to know me best both thought I might fake amnesia for attention.
Those first impressions have never fully left me.
The next day, my mother was still unsure whether to believe me or not. She told me about the rape, I think as sort of a test. The shock caused me to flee the room, and she found me after a while, curled up in the closet upstairs, a ball of fright and tears. She took me to the Emergency Department at that point, and we sat around for many hours. Eventually they sent us home and told us to contact our GP. I saw the GP, who referred me to a neurologist, and saw the neurologist for six months, who eventually said that there wasn't anything that could be done: the memory loss could have been psychological, or it could have been the bump on the head, or it could have been the brain damage, or a combination of any or all of those things. My memory might return in time, or it might not. I was offered a consultation with a psychiatrist, which I accepted, but they warned me there was a waiting list. I thought they meant days, maybe weeks. My appointment came through more than a year later. Fucking NHS.
A year after my amnesia, I started getting memories back. Two years after, I had perhaps 80% of them back.
I found my own psychiatrist, who helped a lot. Somewhere during that year, I forget when, I got diagnosed with PTSD. A decade later I still sometimes query that diagnosis. Some days I feel like it doesn't fit me at all, and other days I appear to be a textbook case.
9) 2008 Until Now
Life moved on.
Sometimes, I did too.
I saw the psychiatrist that the NHS offered me on one occasion. She was a nice lady, and maybe for some people she was a good psychiatrist, but she didn't understand me at all. She kept insisting that I must have felt debased, degraded, violated, dirty. That I must have blamed myself (and, of course, that I would be wrong to do so). Nope, never, I told her. His behaviour was on him.
Aren't you frightened of men now? Of sex?
Nah, I told her. Most men are great, and I like sex. Sex is grand.
Do you think you'll ever forgive your rapist?
No. There's nothing to forgive. He is devoid of humanity and absolutely incapable of empathy or compassion. You don't hate a shark for being a shark, nor do you forgive it for biting you. It's life.
But you must be angry at him?
Not especially.
At the end of the session, she advised me that I wouldn't be able to move on with my life until I dealt with my fear and anger and my feelings of impotence and degradation, and stopped trying to control everything. I shrugged, and didn't go back to her. I sometimes see a therapist who I used to work with, when I feel like I need to.
I hate saying it, because it arouses a lot of anger in people, but for me, getting raped was, by itself, not that big of a deal. Oh, while it was happening it was scary and painful and I thought I was going to die, but it was all the other stuff that came along with it that was really hard.
Losing my intelligence was the worst thing. I was what was, back in the eighties and early nineties, called a "profoundly gifted child". I don't know what my IQ was, because tests didn't work for me. I lost a little of that to the fibromyalgia brain fog that I mentioned earlier, but the majority of it I lost to the brain damage. I went from almost inevitably being the smartest person in the room to being solidly average. There's nothing wrong with average, but it hurts to lose an integral part of yourself. We all have to deal with declining grey matter as we age, of course, but not usually at 21, and not overnight. I haven't fully dealt with this loss. Maybe I never will. I was raised to believe that intelligence and kindness are the only important things, and when I lost my intelligence, I doubled up on the self-sacrifice, because I felt that my ability to help people was the only worthwhile thing about me. There are times when I still feel that way.
The second big thing I lost was a potential career in surgery. With the brain damage, I developed a tremor in my hands, and you can't be a surgeon without a steady hand. With the tremor, I also lost three of my hobbies: photography, embroidery and jewellery-making. I cross-stitch occasionally, though it takes much longer than it did when my hands were steady, and I take quick snaps with my iPhone camera since the phone is light enough to not make my hands shake too much, but if I'm using a decent Canon or Nikon with changeable lenses, I'm lost unless I can use a tripod. I simply can't hold the camera, and all my shots come out blurred.
My coordination has gone, for the most part. I have never relearned how to walk in high heels, play guitar or piano, waterski or drive a car. Occasionally I'll manage to reacquire a minor skill, like eating with chopsticks, and then I feel all smug and self-satisfied for days.
I'll never sing again. I was no great diva, but I could entertain people at karaoke or around a campfire, and I'll never be able to do that again - the damage to my throat was too severe, the scar tissue too thick. Pineapple juice gets me through Christmas church services, weddings, and funerals. My new speaking voice is low, husky. At least my Beloved finds it sexy. :)
I still get sciatica flare-ups. Walking up stairs is always hard, though hiking keeps my legs in good condition. I try to hike over all kinds of terrain; I seem to handle stairs better when I'm practicing on hills and boulder fields.
Some academic knowledge stayed with me - I kept English, Geography, most medicine, some science, and some languages. I lost math, music, physics, and other languages. I'm hoping that I'll be able to relearn the math and physics in the next few years. I miss the logical beauty of equations. I can still learn, but I learn like an average person now. Old Sati used to be able to pick up most languages in days, and become fluent within a month or two. New Sati has been learning Japanese for five years and feels like she knows very little.
The brain damage was such that my neurologist warned me that I might never age, emotionally and mentally. To some extent, this has proven to be true. In many ways I still feel like a 21-year-old, and an immature one at that. The books and movies and TV shows that really call to my heart are ones that are intended for teenagers. I've chosen not to have children for a number of reasons, but this is one of the big ones. I don't think it's fair for a child to grow up with a mother who they will eventually age past. Still, the last year has seen more emotional growth than the previous ten, so there's hope.
I'm not sure I'd be able to have kids, even if I wanted them. I'm pretty messed up inside. I have a lot of internal scars from the infections, which has manifested as scars called adhesions. Adhesions are bands of scar tissue that stick to one another. Sometimes, usually the week before my period, some of my organs stick together. The tugging sensation is unpleasant, and it makes peeing and pooping really difficult and very painful, because bits get sort of pulled out of place. If they get bad enough, I can have surgery to have the adhesions removed...except sometimes the surgery causes new adhesions to form. For now, I'm letting things stay as they are. They don't bother me too often.
I date. I sometimes fall in love. I enjoy sex, a lot, the vast majority of the time. However, sometimes it's painful, and sometimes my scars tear and I bleed. Some men cope with this gracefully, some don't. That's OK. It's a good filter.
From time I time, I struggle with what I call The Void. The Void is depression and anger and despondency, but it's also me. I am The Void. Because amnesia left me a blank slate and I had to rebuild myself from scratch, there are times when I feel like nothing in my personality is real; like I am not a real person but a hollow shell covered in a veneer of intelligence and charm, and I am deathly afraid that the people who know and like me will eventually realise that none of what they see has any substance to it.
Still, for the most part I enjoy my life. It's an interesting world, and I am lucky enough to have a bucketload of resilience, as well as the personality of a golden retriever or a Disney Princess, that causes me to be both naturally cheerful and full of wonder.
Rape's terrible. There's no denying that. Brain damage is terrible. PTSD is terrible.
Life's not.
