Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 21, 2015
When something bad happens in our lives, I doubt anyone remembers all of the way it happened especially if it happens when we're young. I know the life I had known ended and the life I ended up with actually began.
I was looking through my baby book for a picture and found this entry.
I was told I was 4 when the worst happened. I guess my parents were no longer able to remember it either. Actually telling me life changed when I was 4 really did begin then.
Too many things happened that year.
In February, my Mom was driving near the hospital when someone stopped short. She slammed on the brakes and I slammed into the dashboard. Covered in blood, she rushed me into the emergency room and 10 stitches later, we went home. My chin healed but the scar never went away. I never told her but I was afraid every time she drove after that but it wasn't even her fault.
In July, I learned that there were many other dangers in the world that left deeper scars than can be seen.
My Mom filled the paper bag with fresh popcorn while I put on my pajamas. It was movie night! My brothers and I jumped into the station wagon. Mom was in the front seat getting a kick out of us begging her to let us have some popcorn. Nothing like the smell of home cooked popcorn. I don't remember what movie we were going to watch at the drive-in. We never got to see it. Before it started, life as I knew it ended.
While the cartoons were playing at the drive-in, my brothers and I went to the snack stand for drinks to go with the popcorn. On the way back, I saw the slide in the big kids park and wanted to slide down. They didn't notice me sneak away. I didn't think about being alone for the first time on top of that huge slide. After all, why be afraid when I went down it a hundred times on my brother Nick's lap?
I climbed to the top, sat my bottom down and that's when I knew I just made a huge mistake. I was too afraid to slide down it. With a line behind me of other kids waiting, I knew I couldn't walk back down. My fingers were frozen on the bars. The kid behind me was yelling at me to move. I guess he got tired of waiting and gave me a shove. I went over the side.
By then my brother Nick was looking for me. He found me passed out on the ground. My parents told me he carried me back to the car thinking I was dead most of the way. Then I opened my eyes just before we reached the car.
My Dad drove as fast as he could to the hospital. I don't remember what my brother Warren was doing or my Mom. I can remember is Nick held me in the back of the station wagon and telling him he was holding me too tight.
The next thing I remember was the doctor telling my parents to take me home and I'd be fine. I was lucky I didn't die from the fall but lucky again I didn't die during the night. It turned out the doctor didn't read the x-ray right. The next morning my parents rushed me to the children's hospital where they were told I had a fractured skull and a concussion. Letting me sleep after that kind of head trauma was the worst thing they could have done but they didn't know it. I woke up with my left eye swollen shut and wasn't talking right.
I was in the hospital for 4 days. After the swelling went down, I remember doctors and nurses coming into the children's ward wondering what was wrong with me because I looked fine to them. They couldn't see anything wrong with me until someone explained to them what happened.
A month later, according to the baby book, they did a brain scan that came out negative. All I know is that must have been done because I still couldn't talk right. The doctor told my parents to have me see a speech therapist. A month after school started I had shingles.
Life as I knew it ended again. My parents were fighting more and my Dad was drinking more. He became a violent alcoholic. Someone how I think he ended up blaming Nick because the abuse was mostly centered on him.
It was so bad that one night as my parents were shouting at eachother I was in bed, banging my head against the wall to crack it open again so they would go back to the way they were before the accident.
Folks saw the scar on my chin and knew something happened to me. They never saw the scars inside of me.
I had to learn how to talk right again, so I was reluctant to talk at all to anyone outside of my family. They talked everything to death. In other words, when something happened we all talked about it until I was done needing to. They gave lousy advice but I knew I was loved and talking about it helped. Years later after seeing family counselors I began to understand talk therapy works to bring people out of the dangers they survived into a normal place of relative safety.
I started to write my thoughts more than talk about them because as I got older I grew more self conscious about saying things especially if it was emotional and my words got jumbled up when I talked too fast.
When I turned 13, my Dad was destroying the living room in a rage without noticing me on the couch. As I got up, he had thrown a chair and it hit me. I fell to the floor and that was the last time he drank. My Mom made him leave and he stayed in an apartment for a long time while going to AA and we went to Alanon.
He moved back home but the damage had been done. After that, he had heart attacks and a couple of strokes. What I later learned was that my Dad changed a lot while in the Army. He was a Korean War veteran. By the time Nick was about 2, he was stationed in Japan and my Mom took Nick there for a year. My other brother Warren was born at Fort Dix. Dad was out of the Army when I was born. Something happened to him while he was in the service because he was 100% disabled.
Now it is obvious he must have had PTSD and I think the rest of my family suffered as well.
I made one bad decision after another jumping at what made me feel better about living. I drank at an early age, smoked cigarettes and pot. I also became a jock, as if that made sense, but it made me feel good being in control of something only I did. My high school English teacher told me I should become a writer but my parents wouldn't support that and told me I had to go to college to get a "real job" and make a living for myself.
I hated the thought. I got a good job right out of high school at the same time I was taking college classes in business. I quit two colleges but kept the job.
One night on my way home from work, I was hit in the rear by a car with failing brakes in the passing line on the highway. I threw my arms over my face as the spin sent the car into the guardrail. I thought I was going to die and my Mom would be pissed off if she couldn't have an open casket. Dumb thinking I know but that was all I could think about.
I got out of the car and pushed it from the passing lane to the breakdown lane after I knew the people in the other car were ok. I couldn't stop laughing. The EMTs got me to the hospital and I am sure they did a drug test considering my reaction to the whole thing. I am sure that I was more shocked about being alive than the accident happening. I didn't even know what hospital I was taken to when the nurse handed me the phone to talk to my Mom. The nurse had to tell her I was telling the truth. My Dad made me drive his car after we drove to see what happened to my Mom's car. Yep, I totaled it.
Driving down the same highway I almost died on was the best thing my Dad could have done because I doubt I would have gotten behind the wheel again if I waited to long.
The next time I shocked people by living was when my ex-husband came home from work one night and decided I needed to die. He started an argument, then hit me. My brothers made sure I knew how to fight and after years of swimming, I was strong enough to fight back for my life. He had me on the floor with his hands on my throat when our landlady banged on the door screaming she called the police.
The divorce papers were filed for the next day with our family lawyer.
My ex stalked me for about a year. Time and time again, we called the police but there was nothing they could do since they never caught him near me. Even the neighbors saying they saw him was not enough to stop him. Going to court over and over again did nothing. When we got divorced, the judge made me cover his health insurance and he got to keep the money I gave him to start his own business.
He finally stopped when I went after him with a 2x4 telling him next time he wouldn't be so lucky to drive away in his car.
By the time I met my current husband, I thought I had been rid of my ex until we got engaged and he walked over to Jack to introduce himself. "You're marrying my wife" he said as he reached out his hand to shake Jack's. Then I knew he must have been stalking us without being seen.
Jack and I have been married for over 30 years. He's a Vietnam veteran with PTSD and I keep saying that everything I have done in all these years is because of him and how wonderful he really is. Now I as look back on my life more I am sure the only reason why I understood what was happening to him was because of what happened to me.
I had a call from a young man who had been given my card from a friend. He wanted to know if I would help him since he was not a veteran. I told him I would simply because I knew how much he needed someone to talk to.
He told me that no one understood what was happening to him and too many people in his life walked away from him. I told him that happens all the time simply because most people just don't understand PTSD. While I have never been diagnosed with it I knew exactly what he was talking about. Then I told him the story of trying to explain it to a group a few years ago.
When I talk to non-military folks, I remind them of things they had been through that were very traumatic. Most of the people in this group started to recount things that happened in their own lives but one guy sitting in the back of the room had his arms folder around his chest giving a look of disbelief. I looked him right in the eyes and asked him if he was born or not. "What" he asked with a scowl. Then I told him that his life changed in a that one second of time.
One minute life is good and we are all being well taken care of feeling safe in the only home we've ever known with our Moms. We're there for 9 months until like a flash, we're being evicted! Tossed into the hands of a total stranger. We cry and shake while someone cleans us up in those first few seconds of life alone. That was not just our introduction into the world, it all began with that first traumatic event that changed us.
If all of us looked back on times that were traumatic in our own lives, then we'd be a lot closer to not just understanding PTSD, but healing it. Closer to less suffering and more healing but not many want to take the time to do it. So much easier to just judge someone and what scars they carry on their body instead of what they carry inside their souls.
I studied trauma and crisis intervention years after I faced most of mine so that I could understand my husband. I ended up understanding myself more.
The life I knew ended with each event I could not control but I was in control over what I did afterwards. The scar on my chin had me walking with my head down for years until I started to look upwards and forward. The problem I had talking once prohibited me from public speaking to the point where a speech I wrote in high school had to be read by a classmate for a national contest and won first prize but no one outside the class knew I wrote it. Now I talk all the time.
My faith in God has been tested more times than I can even remember but today it is strong to be able to talk about His love and the power our souls have to overcome anything. My belief in love was shattered but after spending over half my life with my husband and still holding hands, I believe that love can be stronger than anything else.
What happens to us is not all there is. Just because life as we know it ends with trauma, that doesn't mean the next chapter in the book of us can't be even better than the last. Don't close the book on your life. Heal and put the rest of your life back into your own hands. You are not trauma's victim. You are a survivor!
You can read the rest of what happened in For the Love of Jack, His War My Battle
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