Page 65 of Perfect Chemistry

“Oh my god, is she okay?”

“Right now she’s alive, but we need to get her to the hospital. Are you her next of kin?”

“I’m her mother.”

“Her blood alcohol was .39. We’re going to admit her until we can detox her body.”

* * *

Katie.

“Katie?”

I opened my eyes and looked up at Steven. Wait. Why was I looking up at Steven?

My eyes opened wide and I tried to move, but Steven held me still.

“Relax. You had a panic attack and hit your head. I need you to just focus on my voice, and bring yourself back down. Remember this drill?” Steven talked soothingly to me like he had when I first met him, and had attacks all of the time.

I listened to his voice and focused on my breath control, timing my inhales and exhales to the beats of my heart.

“That’s it. This was a pretty bad spell, and you have a goose egg on your head from your fall. I don’t want you to freak out again, so I am going to tell you what’s happening,” Colonel Giancolo’s voice came from my side.

I realized that she was holding my hand.

“I need you to trust me, Gunny. I know it’s hard. I know you don’t want to let anyone else in, but I need you to trust me to help you.” She spoke so calmly, it felt like my mom used to talk to me when I was little.

“Two emergency medical technicians are going to come in here and check you over. Then we are going to take you to the main hospital and get you checked over again”, she continued. “I’m not leaving your side, ok. Let me be your advocate. Can you trust me enough for that?” she asked me and it nearly broke me.

I couldn’t remember the last time someone stood up for me. When was the last time someone offered to be my shield so that I could be weak?

Tyson.

“Ok,” I whispered.

Just as she said, two EMTs came in and examined me before loading me onto a stretcher and taking me to the emergency department for examination and evaluation for concussion. No surprise, I gave myself a concussion. Colonel Giancolo was in the room with me for every lab, exam, and scan. She never left my side.

When I was situated in a room, she took a seat next to my bed and started up a conversation with me.

“Have you ever heard of the expression ‘hitting rock bottom’?” she asked.

I nodded, “Yeah. Doesn’t it refer to people with addiction? They don’t know how to get help until everything they have is gone?”

Colonel G nodded and then continued. “What if they already have nothing to lose? What happens when there is a loss of rock bottom?”

I had no idea, and I told her as much.

“They never stop spiraling,” she explained. “Gunny, you lost everything important to you. You lost confidence in your physical body because of your injury. You lost your husband, your best friend and co-conspirator. You lost a child you never had a chance of keeping. What is rock bottom for someone like you?” she asked.

I didn’t know the answer. I was just trying to make it through an hour, let alone one day at a time. I never thought of more than that.

“The brain is an amazing thing,” she changed the subject. “It will force you to live, fighting for you until it can’t. Sometimes it even does crazy shit like protecting you without you knowing it. Like creating a pocket around something unhealthy in the body. You know what I mean?” she continued.

I nodded. I had heard of people having cysts removed that turned out to be a foreign body, or a built up membrane to contain something infectious. It was an auto-response protection mechanism.

“Did you know the brain can do that with memories? Sometimes it’s just a matter of repressing something so far into the subconscious that it is forgotten. And sometimes, in rare occasions, the brain creates a whole new identity to shield itself from traumas. Have you heard of that before?” she asked.

I had never heard of anything like that and told her as much.

---