part 25

                                      

28

I begin to question God a lot. The God that has been presented to me seems to be quite spiteful. The idea of him just sitting somewhere up there throwing out punishments left and right leaves me feeling very uncomfortable. I also have a lot of time on my hands now to think about things of this nature.

I feel that I need some answers, so I begin to put holds on books in the library over the computer, then I send my mother to go pick them up and bring them back. I put a hold on two books written by different psychics. My mother will frown and tell me I shouldn’t fill my head with crap. I tell her I am just reading them for amusement. She grudgingly makes the trip to the library.

I flip through the books to see if there is a section on God’s punishments for our sins. As expected, the two physics contradict each other. They do however agree on one thing that I find most important. I have no idea if this is made up, I am skeptical, but it is very comforting, so I’ll take it. The thing that both psychics agree on, is that we as humans reincarnate over and over. Everyone lives on the ‘other side’ which is home for us. Sometimes individuals decide to return back to Earth which is simply a school. We first work out a time line, and the struggles we plan to face, so that we can learn from them. This time line chart is very detailed. We come back to Earth to learn lessons, so that our soul can grow. Once we feel that we have accomplished learning the lesson we came to Earth for, we die and return to the other side, or ‘home’, and in time do it all over again to learn a new lesson in an attempt to perfect our soul. I’m skeptical. It does contradict what I have been taught, but it is extremely comforting to know that God is not a cruel God dishing out punishments. Since we all write out a ‘chart’ of what we are to do on Earth to better ourselves, it looks like I am the one responsible for writing this s**t festival for myself, not God. I prefer to believe in a merciful God. Karma is also mentioned. So maybe I am paying for something incredibly horrible that I did in some past life. If it’s true, and what goes around does come around, I do not want to know what is in store for the police officer. In any case, these theories will help me sleep at night.

I already feel like I have been through some of this before. I must have loved Travis in another life, because in this one he has done the complete opposite of earning any affection from me. Maybe in another lifetime he was kind and treated me well, and I had loved him then. I knew I loved him right away when I saw him in grade 8 on the first day of school. I doubt what is written in the books is true, but they do provide answers that I am looking for.

There is mention that only about 1% of what we worry about, will actually come true. I suppose the authors are trying to convey that there really is no point in worrying about things. There is a very good chance that those things will not happen. All this tells me however, is that 99% of the crap that life does throw at us is not expected. We cannot prepare for what we do not expect.

 

 

29

I check the mail every day. I am waiting for my disability check. They really are taking their time looking over my non existent assets. After all I have a grand total of 0. They also have to take into account my income. That is also another 0. So those 0's have to be added then subtracted from the maximum payment they can offer. They will get to it after they finish with other clients, so I wait. It has been explained to me that several people have to mull over my case. After all I could be telling them one thing, but hiding more zeros. I become impatient. My father’s income at work, and all of his fellow coworkers has been cut. The company isn’t doing well. Everyone’s pay decreases by $1.50 an hour. Permanently . I visit the mailbox often.

It is March. I go to the mailbox as I do every weekday, and I find an official looking letter. I claw it open right away. I am stunned to see it is a check for $30. I look it over. It is not a check but an invoice for the crutches that were given to me as a gift after my last surgery. The hospital would now like to be paid.

I return back to my room and call the number on the invoice. A woman answers and I explain my case. I tell her that the crutches were a gift, because I do not have money and could not afford them.

"I have no note of them being a gift." I ask her to look around, and she asks me for the names of the people who gave them to me as a ‘present’. I tell her I do not know, it was a young man and a woman working in the hospital.

"Well you really should have thought about asking their names."

I hadn’t even considered this for a second. I guess I didn’t think to do the very obvious because I am stupider than I used to be, and ready to put a lot of faith in hospital staff. I had really trusted them. I realize now this was extremely naive of me. I didn’t think to ask, so I’ll blame it on my brain injury, that... and the fact that I was really high on the pain medication. Acquiring their names was the last thing on my mind. I stupidly thought they would keep track of paperwork. I tell her I can not pay this. I have absolutely no money.

"It’s only $30."

ONLY $30. Then you f*****g pay it, if to you it is ‘ONLY’.

She tells me she will send paperwork for me to fill out and they will decide on affordable monthly payments. I tell her she can have the crutches back. She tells me they cannot do that.

A couple of days have passed and I receive a thick envelope in the mail. It is from the hospital. I have to state my assets ($0), my income ($0) and my loans ($39, 562 for that wonderful university education). I am also asked what the make an model of my first car is. Then my second car. This makes me roll my eyes. I have absolutely no assets.

I decide to clean up my room a little bit. It was good timing on my part. I come across the hospital receipt for the crutches. On the bottom of the page the total is, $30. On the top of the page, the woman who gave them to me wrote, ‘compassionate care please,’ after I had explained to her that I had to use the $30 for something more important, like food. She was compassionate. She told me the hospital will cover the cost. Then I receive the bill. The woman who I spoke to on the phone may as well have said,

"We had no problem covering the several month supply of antipsychotic pills, then paying Dr. Hill to perform an unnecessary surgery that you needed some time to recover from, and on top of that Karina, we covered the cost of one of the strongest antibiotics to be administered into your body, and have a nurse come to your home to do so every day. This all cost several thousands of dollars and we had no problem whatsoever covering the cost, considering it brought you much more harm than good... but the $30 for crutches? Well you actually need those ... so you’re on your own."

I pack the receipt into the envelope provided, along with a list of my assets that calculate to a grand total of $0 and write her a letter asking her to look into what ‘compassionate care’ means, because I had not become creative deciding to write that for myself.

I get my mother to send off the letter, and am deeply annoyed that I have to pay postage because of someone’s inability to communicate. Postage isn’t expensive, but it is for me. I will never receive a response, and I am happy about this. I see this as incompetence on someone else’s part that I have to pay for.

I now have rehab two times a week, and once a week I have to take my beloved ‘speech’ therapy class. The woman who conducts this one, looks to be about 11 months pregnant. My mother asks her how long she has been expecting. She replies that she is five months pregnant.

"Wow, you are big," my mom says, and the speech therapist nods and smiles. Her name is Lisa and from the very start I dislike her. I cannot put my finger on it, but for some reason she bothers me. My mother tells me that she does not like her either.

"Only 5 months pregnant?" My mom says. "It’s gonna be a long wait for her to finally go into labor."

"I know. There is something about her I really don’t like."

I finally meet Gwen. The nurse who has been assigned to me in this rehabilitation. We introduce ourselves and she begins by telling me she felt a little overwhelmed looking at my list of injuries. She asks me if I am familiar with all of them, and if I have the card I have to carry around with me now, at all times. I tell her that the card I have is to let others know that I have developed an ‘extremely’ rare antibody in my blood now.

"What about the injuries? The surgeries?"

"I was given a list of those when I was in the Toronto rehab. All of them were written in medical terms that I do not understand. On the list there are things like ‘fractured adjacent B2 paralleled to Z13. I’m just making this up, but there are several pages written in this manner. They were all in medical terms that I simply can not understand, and no one went into detail with me to explain what happened."

It is Wednesday and the days that I am scheduled to come into rehab are Mondays and Wednesdays, so Gwen tells me that she will try to have everything ready by Monday. Basically translate all of this medical terminology into layman’s terms for me. I thank her.

I arrive on Monday and look at me schedule. I do not see Gwen today. I will on Wednesday, and that is fine. I do see Lisa for some reason, every day. She does the exact same thing that I had to go through in the last rehab. She shows me photographs of people and I have to spot the differences, or to describe them, or something of that nature that I do not feel like doing. She tells me she can give me some homework. She gives me a piece of paper with sequences of letters and numbers. She tells me to ask someone to read the numbers and letters, and I have to repeat them to train my memory. She says she will do one with me as practice so I will know what to do at home. She reads,

"C, J, K, O".

I repeat,

"C, J, K, O."

"Okay good. Just get someone to practice these at home with you."

"Okay I’ll try"

"Do you have someone at home you can do this exercise with?"

"No, not really. The only person who will be at home with me is my mom. She may have trouble pronouncing the letters. Maybe she can do an okay job. She doesn’t speak English too well. We speak Russian."

"Well then tell her to say the letters in Russian."

"What?"

"You do speak Russian right? Just have her read the letters in Russian."

I sit confused. Confusing me is a simple task. I am not sure if she actually thinks the Russian alphabet is the same as the one used in Canada. I wonder if she knows that in Russia we have a different alphabet. So some of the letters look different.

After this I have a meeting with a therapist who has me perform cognitive tasks. I read a story, summarize it, then answer questions about it. The therapist sits by the computer clicking away as I busy myself. I finish and she says that she will grade my assignment and we will go over it later.

I then move into physiotherapy. We do the same thing. The physiotherapist massages my foot. My ankle cracks. She looks surprised, and carries on massaging it with less pressure. I then walk with the help of a cane. She tells me to look into getting a walker. I tell her that I am absolutely not going to do that. I am 26 years old and not a geriatric . I can walk with a cane just fine, and doing even this makes me feel slightly embarrassed. Every step I take hurts my left ankle. I am happy I did lose that 12 lbs. It puts less weight on my joints, even though none of my pants fit me properly anymore. I am happy I left a few pairs from high school that I really liked. 9 years later, they now fit perfectly. After my physiotherapy, I find my ankle to be in severe pain. Over the counter pain pills do absolutely nothing for me. I wonder why it didn’t hurt so badly before. Then again, when I lived in that rehab in Toronto, they did whatever they could to prevent me from walking. Now I walk constantly, and at home I walk up and down the stairs. The more strain I put on my ankle, the more it hurts, and the more it begins to crack. This is how I was fooled into going through with the surgery and antibiotic treatments. If anything, my ankle is in more pain than it was before the surgery. At home, my parents will comment on how loudly it cracks as a limp past them.

 

 

30

 

My whole life now is spent at home. 2 days a week I go to rehab. Well, supposed to go to rehab. I can only handle one day a week. I am in too much pain afterwards. Other than that, I am always at home. It is cold outside anyways. Loupe comes by once a week to see me. She’s busy working most of the time, or sleeping and adjusting to her new home. Renting a family’s basement. But when she comes by, we lie in bed and watch TV.

My mother is worried that I put pressure on my friends to come by to see me. That I guilt them. I don’t, but as time goes by, I begin to come up with excuses not to see anyone when someone asks me if they can come over. Just in case they only want to come by out of pity. I just tell them that I am not feeling well.

I can tell the stress gets the better of my parents. Sometimes they become snappy. They want me to realize how careless my actions were, and the price I will now have to pay for my bad decisions. Not just me though. They have to pay for them as well. They have sacrificed so much for me, and for what? So I can go out one night and carelessly give a man a perfect opportunity to attempt to kill me. My takeaway; I have not only destroyed my own life, but my parents’ lives as well. My mother tells me she hopes that when I have children, I will finally realize what my actions have put her and my father through. I do not tell her that I will do absolutely everything, and anything in my power to never have a child. Why would I? So I could put another human being on this planet so that he or she can have a chance to be as happy as I am? There is of course a chance that I’ll have a child who can find happiness in life. But what if my child does not? What if someone attempts to harm the kid, and she or he will have to pay for it for the rest of their lives. I do not want to chance that. What if my child is born with a very dark soul, like the police officer who is responsible for bringing me so much misery? We can blame it on parents’ upbringing all we want. People believe that if the child was raised ‘right’ they would never end up doing such horrible things. I however believe that parenting stops somewhere. I think that some people are just born evil. After all, Hitler had a mother too. I think the majority of us are familiar with his work. Parents can only be blamed so far for children’s life choices. Not everyone will better the world like Gandhi or Mother Teresa .

I am only able to attend rehab once a week simply because after being there I feel a lot worse. I feel like I need rehab from rehab. My left ankle swells up even more and begins to hurt badly. For three days after rehab, I have to use crutches just to be able to walk to the washroom.

After some time, Gwen finishes creating a list of all of my injuries. She tells me that along with my ‘extremely rare’ antibody blood card, I’ll have to carry a card she made, listing all of the trauma my body sustained.

"Well... actually it’s more like 4 cards, but I used very small printing." She hands me the cards.

"Here you go. Just keep it in your wallet." I thank her. Our appointment is scheduled for an hour and a half. It is not enough time to go over all of my injuries. I will come back next week and she will continue. The therapist who works with me on my cognitive thinking, says that she has seen Gwen for several days, flipping through medical books, working on my situation.

To this day, no one has taken the time to discuss what went wrong with my body. In rehab as mentioned, I was given a list of my injuries, that stated things like, ‘Left C6-C7 transverse process fractures.’ But the day I was given this list my mind was on one thing only. My release date from rehab. Plus my thinking was slightly contaminated by that antipsychotic medication they so kindly insisted on giving me. At that time I was concerned with very little. Just my release date. I hardly questioned anything, but now I become curious, and I am very thankful that Gwen took time to write an entire report, that will take us almost 3 hours to go through. To sum it all up, this is what I remember her saying;

"Your nose was broken in two places. You were in danger of losing your left eye because the left cheekbone was broken in such a way that it began to impale the eye. Both of your eyes were severely damaged and began to hemorrhage blood. Because of this you had a 100% chance to lose your eyesight. The part of your brain that sends signals to your eyes telling them to convert light into images was very badly damaged. Because of this you had a 100% chance of losing your eyesight.

You experienced severe brain damage and your brain began to hemorrhage blood and you required surgery. All of a sudden the blood began to dissipate and reached your stomach where it was dissolved, so no surgery was needed for that.

Originally you lost all of your teeth except for two. Your jaw was wired shut. Your jaw was broken in 6 places. Now the next one I had to look up because I was not familiar with it. It’s an extremely rare injury. Your jaw broke away from your skull, and your upper jaw broke away from the lower jaw. A significant amount of metal had to be used to position your jaw back in place.

Your neck was broken.

Your left arm was broken at the elbow, severing a nerve. As a result you would lose feeling and movement in your thumb and forefinger.

Five ribs were broken on your left side.

A machine had to be attached to your lungs to enable you to breathe. There is a 27% chance this procedure would result in lungs collapsing. Both of your lungs collapsed.

Your spine was broken badly.

A part of it was so shattered that metal rods were attached to hold it together.

Your right knee cap was severely broken. A significant amount of metal had to be used to hold it together. It was at first decided that your right leg would be amputated, but some nerves had survived, so it was left to heal. It will never return back to the way it was however. You will experience some problems with it in the future.

Both ankles were dislocated. Your left ankle began to swell severely and surgery had to be performed and the ankle was drained.

Your right foot was broken and two bones began to disintegrate, and were replaced with metal.

I will write you a note that you will need to get your doctor to sign. There is a likelihood that you will set off metal detectors, so you can take the note with you in case you are stopped by security."

Collapsed lungs... doctors had accidently collapsed my lungs. So... this is why such measures had to be taken to ‘clean’ them out? This is the connection I now make. When my father had noticed my reaction to the hospital staff’s treatment of me, and raised his concerns, he was simply told my reaction was a mere reflex. That was no reflex. I was in agony. I see doctor’s actions as being unbelievably cruel. And I should be grateful?

I know that what Gwen says next I will remember for the rest of my life,

"Basically Karina, there was absolutely nothing doctors could have done to save your life. The injuries were severe and extensive. The fact that you are alive and are sitting here in front of me... well... that’s all you."

I had a 0% chance to live. There was nothing doctors could have done to save my life, so I don’t see why I should give them credit for this. My survival was a fluke. They did help me stay alive by forcing me to breathe. This of course very successfully collapsed both of my lungs. What I had to endure because of this was absolute hell on earth. I may seem like an ungrateful brat, but I cannot say that I am grateful to doctors for putting me through that. If I had a choice, I would pick death over the incredible misery I felt, in a heartbeat. I do not know if I will ever be able to look back on what I had to endure and sincerely say, "It was worth it." Basically in my opinion doctors do not have a good track record, and whatever positive opinions I may have had about them were destroyed by Dr. Hill.

Gwen tries to cheer me up, I guess, and tells me,

"You will still be able to have children."

Wonderful. You know, the one ability I would have loved to have destroyed. If doctors had their hearts set on amputating something, they could have just amputated my uterus. They can amputate the crap out of it.

9 months after I was unfortunate enough to live through my own murder, I finally know the degree of my injuries and what they were. I know months will pass, and I will still be unable to comprehend the extent. I just can’t wrap my mind around this. Nothing feels real. Gwen tells me that by looking at me she could never tell I suffered any injuries at all if it wasn’t for my wheelchair. I like hearing this. She asks me if I have a picture she can take a look at to see how I looked before. I take out my health card. She looks it over, then looks at me and back at the picture.

"You look the same. Your cheeks are just more sunken in now. Have you lost weight?"

I nod.

I realize the doctor who worked on my face, and replaced my jaw, is the only doctor I am grateful to. Unlike the other doctors who Frankensteined me back together in a very sloppy manner, I feel that this one worked hard to make sure my life would be bearable, while the others simply concluded that I would just be happy to be alive, if I somehow managed to survive, so I would be happy with their work no matter how half baked it was. I am however very thankful to them for not amputating my left eye and right leg like they has initially wanted to.

I always think about how things would be if everything that doctors were convinced would happen, actually happened.

Lets hypothetically assume this was a suicide attempt. Would I be happy that I was kept alive? At what cost? After all, doctors did say my right leg would have to be amputated, my left eye would have to be amputated, and I had a 200% chance to be blind. In that case would they really think I would be happy to be kept alive? This hypothetical situation is completely unimaginable. If it did happen and doctors kept me alive, in that case, I would see it as incredibly heartless. They of course would pat themselves on the back believing that in time I would be very pleased with their work.

When we see that an animal is suffering, the animal is usually ‘put to sleep.’ That is the humane thing to do after all. Not with me though. Why? Because I am human I have to be kept alive no matter how hellish things become for me. This is considered humane? No one even had to ‘put me to sleep.’ All that doctors had to do was just leave my destroyed body alone.

 

 

31

I do not know at what particular moment this happened, but I realize I have begun to distance myself from what my life is now. In other words, I just try hard to numb myself. I know if I could drink I would drink. I just cannot walk to the liquor store, and even if I could I wouldn’t because I know there will be hell to pay if my mother ever found out. A half an hour of my mother’s nagging is not worth all of the alcohol in the world.

I know this rehabilitation I am going to now will not restore anything. I realize with time, I begin to feel more pain. The pain in my ankle begins to become worse. The next day after I attend rehab, I have to use crutches if I want to get out of bed. This will last for about three days, and then the pain in my ankle returns to being bearable, like it had been before a rehab appointment.

At times when I return to rehab, I am in so much pain, I am unable to do any physical exercises. I am then asked to do something simple, like ride a recumbent bike.

It has now been a few weeks, and I realize I have lost all faith in this rehabilitation facility. The taxi ride to and from this place alone is not easy for me to handle. All of my life I had experienced light motion sickness, but now it is a lot more prominent. Could this be caused by brain damage? I do not know.

I begin to often reflect on the books I have read written by psychics, in an attempt to find the meaning of life, despite my mother’s complaints that I am wasting time and filling my head with trash. At some point I begin to realize my life does not have a meaning. I know what I would like to do, but I know it has been taken away from me. The books do explain that we come to this planet to accomplish a goal. For example, we may have a goal to learn a lesson in forgiveness, and until we learn which ever lesson we came to Earth to learn, we live on until we reach our goal.

I often think back on the man who tried to kill me. He did not physically kill me, but he killed my life, and the two investigators assigned to close my case, killed my future. With the help of the medical staff, I was kept alive to be a first hand witness to this. I should be grateful to be alive? After all, if I was not kept alive, how would I be able to experience the emotional and physical agony that I had no idea could even exist on such a level, until I got a very good taste of it. I know I can never forgive the man responsible for this. I hope the lesson I have to learn before I die is not a lesson in forgiveness, otherwise I will be here forever. Probably beat some world records.

If I was physically able, and had the stomach to, I would break the man’s left ankle. I do not wish for him to die. I was never given this luxury. I want to give him a very good taste of what his actions have caused. I dream about crippling him. I wasn’t allowed to die. I now realize that there are many, many things in this life that are a lot worse than death.

More than having him maimed, I would like this man to be taken out of society. He does not belong amongst others. He should be put away for life. In that case, I would hope his life would be a very, very long one.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he will try to kill again. If his victims are lucky, they will die right away, and not be kept alive to mourn over the life they have lost. When he does this again, if asked, he will tell everyone that the victim simply committed suicide. Being the wonderful person that he is, he did try to stop them... but he just couldn’t. I know that as a police officer he is above the law. If his coworkers suspect him being involved in a murder, they will keep their mouths shut. Police officers after all, are like a family. They are in ‘constant danger’ and have to stick together.

I have a feeling that when my killer first decided to go into law enforcement, people must have thought something along the lines of;

"Oh this is wonderful. He will dedicate his life to bringing peace to our society and fight crime."

I am sure absolutely no one thought;

"Oh this is wonderful. Now he can kill and maim whoever he wants and have a much easier time getting away with it. Lucky guy."

In this moment I realize I no longer trust a single police officer I see. I now see how they walk around in a very cocky way, in their bulletproof vests, with whatever firearm they have hanging on their hips. After all they are in ‘constant danger’ somehow.

Loupe wheels me out to a fast food restaurant one day, and we sit by the widow eating doughnuts. Outside there are three kids skateboarding. This must pose some sort of ‘danger,’ so the police arrive in their bulletproof gear to break this up. I imagine that if they were not in a public place, the kids would have just been killed. The deaths would be blamed on a simple skateboarding accident... or suicide, (hey, why not? People seem to eat this bullshit up).

If anyone begins to ask questions as to why bullets were found in the kids’ bodies, the ‘special investigators’ would chime in here. The kids where being careless. They were ‘severely’ intoxicated and ended up skateboarding right into the bullets, and even though the police did everything they could to save them, they were just too late. If they know what is good for them, no one will question this. Kids were careless and drunk... probably suicidal. End of story.

When I think about the police force in this country I live in, I am reminded of the classic story, "Lord of the Flies." It’s about a group of young men who are stranded on a deserted island. I think if they ever had an authority figure, he passes away sometime in the beginning of the story.

So left alone to their own devices, the boys turn into little savages. They kill and ostracize.

This is what I think of the police force now. When they interacted with Loupe, my father and me, 100% of the time they have proven to be power hungry, thoughtless, heartless individuals.

In my eyes, they are a group of very immature children, that were given a completely undeserved sense of authority.

It is only when this happens to me, does my father begin to obsessively read the newspaper articles about cases like mine. Not as severe though. The articles are more along the lines of a man filing a complaint after an officer broke his arm. The police officer or course denies everything. He denies ever even being there. They always have a lawyer on their side. Government money pays for incredibly good lawyers. The victims, like me, do not have the spare money to get a very good attorney. After all, every single penny I’ll receive from my disability checks will go to pay for rent and food. And even that isn’t enough. On this disability income, I will never be able to afford to live on my own.

I know that if I try to reopen my case and go to the police station, I will pay for it. For me, no good will come out of it. I will just irritate the killer. I know he will make me suffer. I know now that my hands are tied, and I no longer have the strength to do anything. I am just going through the motions.