The return of the screaming

It's 00.28, I'm lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I think the best thing to write about right now is the nightmares and flashbacks. I thought only soldiers in war only experienced trauma but I experienced a trauma of falling. When someone has a trauma of this kind, it takes them two years to fully recover. I'm only on week 5 of 104 of recovery so my accident is still very prominent in my mind, which in turn has taken a toll on my mental health. I suffer from flashbacks and nightmares as a result of my injury.

The nightmares are definitely the worst and very night I have an anxiety attack about sleeping. In my dreams, I relive the experience of having my leg reset over and over and over. The background to my dreams are the shouts of the lady who was next to me in the ward. Her shouts were always the same; "mamma help me, mamma save me, what are you doing to me? Somebody help me, they are trying to kill me". There's nothing else to the dream, it simply repeats until my mind moves onto something else. I don't normally wake until noon and when I do, I'm exhausted from the night.

The flashbacks, whilst not as bad, still take me by surprise. When my ice skate was removed by paramedics the day I fell, I let out a scream (and my friends will testify that it was a piercing scream) because I was in so much pain. Sometimes, I'll be watching tv or eating my dinner or doing anything when my mind will take me back to that point and for a few seconds, all I can hear is that scream. I'm helpless until its over and it's terrifying.

It's possibly that I'll need Cognitive behavioural therapy but the medication I'm on does increase anxiety and nightmares so I'm hoping my mind will settle down.

The cage. A metal burden.

When I recovered properly from the operation, the Physiotherapists came to see me and asked to lift back the covers. I agreed that they could life the covers but I did not want to see the cage. I wasn't ready and to be honest, it scared the hell out of me to think that there was metal going through my leg.

My cage after the operation.

It wasn't until the next day, my mother encouraged me to look at the cage. I pulled back the covers and looked at my leg. I wasn't shocked, I wasn't horrified, I wasn't anything. I covered it up again. At the time I didn't realise what I was doing, but I was actually pretending it wasn't my leg. Physio would come and press on my foot and I'd press back, wiggle my toes and flex my leg but still, I couldn't accept that this metal cage would be attached to me for a short period of my life.

I ignored my cage completely.

Ward with the screaming ladies

After my x-rays and resetting, I was put in a hard cast and put on a ward until it was clearer whether I needed surgery or not. I am very frightened of hospitals and the past 24 hours seemed like something out of a horror film, but my situation did not get better. I was put on a ward normally reserved for ladies with dementia. I understand the illness of dementia, I have even wrote a paper on it but nothing could have braced me for the screaming in the nights. The elderly ladies would scream for hours on end, shout the most terrible things and call for their mothers. I'm not afraid to admit that for the first night on the ward, I sat and sobbed.

Eventually, the women were moved or taken home and while the ward grew quieter, it still remained hostile. Visiting hours were strict and not all my friends came to visit. I was 200 miles from my family and frightened. My partners job, while understanding of his situation, was a huge demand and my best friend could only make the morning visiting hours. I was lucky when my father, and later my mother, drove from Wales to see me and stayed past the visiting hours to calm me down.