Personal Narrative: Identifying Life Trauma

I feel a sense of calmness wash over me. My thoughts are peaceful and positive. I am confident and capable. I sleep a deep, healing sleep. I wake in the morning refreshed and renewed.

“Wait! No! No!!!” The car was out of gas and then started slowing down. I sharply turned to the right off to the side of the road. SCREECH! The large brown pine tree became dented as my car slammed into it, after my attempt to stop. The drivers side door protruded inward due to a branch going through it. The branch was jabbed into my right shin and blood was spewing out. The floor became a sea of

On September 2nd 2016 my best friend, Ashley Minor, who is a single mom of two, was working her twelve house shift at the hospital. At the end of her shift her life stopped for a short time when she received a phone call that her 8 year old son Teagan, was hit by a car, and had multiple injuries.

Focus! The burden of destructive emotions constantly tarnishes my brain. It is essential that I isolate myself from the pessimistic chain of thoughts. I need to distort myself from the daily trauma and everlasting misery that I encounter. The turmoil has left me forever fatigued and has numbed my mind. My heart is grazed and broken with regret, my soul is haunted by fear and guilt along with my body diseased and rotten. The experience has been morbid and excruciating, I can’t tolerate this anymore.

When I woke up, I had no idea where I was, until seconds later when I realized almost everything in the room was white. My hair was pulled out of my bun and I was wearing a patient's gown. There was a lady in baby blue shirt with little snoopy dogs on it leaning over the bed with a clipboard in her left hand, and a pen in her right. The instant I moved my head to look around, I regretted it and let my head flop back down, then regretted that even more. My whole right side of my body felt like it was being burned and stabbed right there on the spot. I moaned and I heard my mom's voice, just a little too

Confused, shocked and fear filled my mind as I lye on my side, gasping for air, trying desperately to stagger onto my knees. A sharp pain suddenly ran up my spine into my forehead and quickly I collapsed back onto the cold damp floor inside this mangled metal coffin in which I was trapped in. Bit by bit I moved my hand closer to my forehead, trying to impede this massive throbbing that was affecting my head. I skimmed my forehead and paused my hand on a huge gash. The pain shot into my head again, but I was able to clutch on to the seat and hold my balance. There was blood pouring down the side

I wake up and I am not entirely sure where I am at. I am laying in a bed and rolling around as someone is pushing me. The door infront of me opens manually and I am pushed through the door still not knowing what is going on. I have a sling on my arm, but I cannot feel it at all. My right arm is numb from the shoulder down, but as I am rolled into my room I see my mother, father, and grandma sitting and waiting on me. I remember now; I just came out of shoulder surgery that could possibly make or break my baseball career. The doctor comes in and explained what happened in the operating room, and explains that everything went very well. He had no complications and that after I get food in my system that I could leave. Everything was happening

Throughout our lives, every person encounters hardships that put a strain on other aspects of our lives. The biggest hardship that I have faced was taking care of my wife after she suffered a severe head injury while at work. The injury was the result of a salad fridge door falling and striking the back of her head, causing her to receive a severe concussion that lead to post-concussion syndrome. As a result, she became completely dependent on me. Some of the major hardships that we faced during these times are finances, helping her cope with her injury while she recovered, and maintaining my 4.0 GPA.

A couple of years ago, one night, I was about to propose to my girlfriend before an nfl game tbh, when my roommate Joseph barged into the room out of nowhere, tripped and fell over, breaking a glass table with his face. Totally ruined the mood. Now, I didn't know Joseph THAT well, don't even remember where he was from, but let' just say I put my plans on hold to help him through his injuries.Joseph had gotten a big glass shard in his eye, making him completely blind in that eye. He was walking around with one of those cotton pads on his eye for a couple of months. Then suddenly, he disappeared, along with my girlfriend .Apparently they'd bonded during the time after his injuries, and eloped together , left me behind without as much as a note.

We also got a brother along with a mother and father. He was born with alcohol syndrome because his mother drank when she was pregnant with him. We all had our own bag of problems. I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for everything that happened to me. When I was a year old, one of my foster families didn't strap me into my car seat, and they got into a wreck. The car accident started my PTSD, but after that, everything bad that happened made my PTSD worse. My sister had mental health issues, to the point where the doctors said her mindset would remain at 15 until she's 35.

In high school I liked to be very active. One of my favorite activities was soccer. I played numerous years before high school. While playing for the high school team, my timed mile was not where it should have been, I was so perseverant that I practiced a great deal of times. Finally I had reached my goal, but in doing so, I received many stress fractures. I was in so much pain but I refused to let it show, until I could not take the pain. The doctor said I had broke both of my legs with stress fractures and some larger fractures. He had informed me I could no longer play soccer competitively and I was not allowed to participate in any of athletic actives that year.

“Chantelle! Come over and see this,” my mom whispered as she glided past me towards her client’s chair. I unfolded my nine-year-old self from under the empty hair dryer and gingerly walked over. While peering skeptically at the child’s scalp before me, I began to note tiny bugs crawling by the roots and my eyes followed my mother’s comb tip as she pointed out several nits. This was definitely one of the worst cases of lice she had shown me, and I had seen quite a few by then! As the daughter of a hairstylist, my exposure to skin and hair started at an early age. Growing up in a salon allowed me to observe first hand how significant an impact looking healthy on the outside had on a client’s everyday confidence and self-esteem; a lesson that was later reinforced during my acne ridden teenage years at an all-girls high school. At the salon, I always enjoyed being called over by the estheticians and hairdressers to view interesting cases that ranged from alopecia and cystic acne, to severe foot fungus and poliosis. Since my mother and her employees always recommended physician follow-ups when they spotted something suspicious, I was always left wondering what happened on the medical end of the spectrum. In high school and college, I began to fulfill this curiosity by reading about the science behind skin, hair and nail disorders.

Introduction: I have chosen this subject in order to maybe understand it better, in a way that hopefully it becomes easier for me to deal with it, this condition to which I have become very familiar with, not because I study it but because I am one who suffers from such disorder; this is what I call the side of the coin that no one see. Although I don’t think is such a bad thing, some have given this disorder a serious bad image to which as usual the media have distortion its image to a point where we have become and sometimes feel as if we were in a glass box. By first hand I have experienced how for example a potential job interview changes its trajectory once is discovered that I might suffer from such disorder.

My first encounter with a patient has been rather difficult: it was my mother. When our family used to live in the Philippines, there was an armed robbery in our house. While the intruders left our family alive, their damage was felt. My mother began suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Seeing her suffer pained me. Despite my numerous attempts to calm her, however, she remained distressed. If I had ever understood helplessness, it was problem then. It was the pain of the inability to help someone you love.

One night after writing a history paper, I was so tired I went to bed without eating. Around two in the morning I woke up scared for my life. My clothes were soaked with sweat, my head was spinning, my whole body was shaking, and I knew my blood sugar was horribly low. Getting out of bed, I went to my fridge to get something to eat. The next thing I know, I wake up in a hospital bed with both of my parents looking at me. I had been informed that I slipped into a coma for a day and I was lucky to be alive. My heart had also stopped beating when they found me. My only thoughts were that I had missed a day of classes.