Walking Miracles

By Amanda Perry

In Walking Miracles I talk about the traumas that formed my life and made me who I am today. I chose to write about my trauma and bring it to the world as a means to help others who are going through the same thing. This book is a collection of short stories and poems as well as letters from my abuser, which outline the story of my traumas. In here I created a character known as Grace Hope, who undergoes a lot of challenges against a serial rapist, and in the end she became a symbol of my trauma and how I was able to defeat it despite all the challenges that were thrown at her. In Walking Miracles you will come to an understanding of your own self-worth, as I talk about how I was nothing and meant something more. In here I lost people, dealt with an abusive partner, lived through a physical illness that was undiagnosed for twenty years, and almost gave up hope to the world. Yet I also found the true meaning to life and became closer to those that know me. I hope when you read Walking Miracles, some part of it will stay with you for a lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684989454

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1: Who I Was

Is Death an Option?

Angry Storm

Feeling the Pain

Moments of Happiness

Outside

Prowling Below

Affirmations

Walking through Depression

Relaxation

Chapter 2: Lost Trust

Chapter 3: My Ex Continued

Forgiveness

Fighting Fear

The Other Man

The Ugly Truth

Last Hope

Silence No More

Love

Silence Speaks

Chapter 4: Saving Hope

Rebirth

The Hospitals

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Walking Miracles

Amanda Perry

Copyright © 2022 Amanda Perry

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-68498-944-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-945-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 1

Who I Was

This is my book on short poems and stories. With each piece I will tell you a small bit about my life and my reason for writing. Before I introduce some of my stories, I want to tell you about my life. I grew up in a lower middle-class American family. I have one sister who, despite our shared trauma, we are polar opposites and share different life experiences. To this day my sister and I no longer have a relationship because of our traumatic past, and I have been okay without her since she has gone away from my life. When you begin to change who you are as a person, you start to recognize the faults of others who are where you were, and you will see them either get better on their own, or you will watch them suffer with their issues and never get better. I made the active choice to change who I was and how I defined myself, and as I got better, I watched some of my family grow into better people and others who are like my sister fail miserably and attack me for being a better version of myself. When you get better but those around you don't feel the same way, you have to make the hardest choice one can make by separating yourself from all those people who wish to hurt you because they choose not to change who they are. When I say I have shared trauma with my sister, it is plainly this: we grew up in an abusive and neglectful home because of the economic status that my parents were always in and because they themselves grew up in abusive homes and didn't know any better. I chose not to walk that same path as my parents, but my sister chose to follow in their footsteps when it came to raising her children. We both saw this problem, and this has built a divide between us as individuals. My story will be about how I have conquered challenges and chose to change who I am to become a better self. I would like to tell you about my personal struggles that have led me to my existence today.

I have a cousin that told me that we were sick because we were growing against the grain of our family history of abuse. We made a choice to not let our abusive home environment of our childhood affect how we were going to be as an adult, and we were not going to pass on those ways on to our children. I will have several doctors tell me that my physical illness is due to my emotional trauma, and I need to sort out my emotional trauma before I get better. When my reality was, I was living with undiagnosed Lyme disease that was introduced into my system at the age of eleven and continued to get worse because it was left untreated for twenty years before I was told I had it. My bones went from hard as stone to a fall nearly destroying my knee in the matter of fifteen years of undiagnosed Lyme. In my last year before I was diagnosed, I had broken two bones. I had never broken a bone in all my life before. The Lyme was eating away my bones, eating away the lining of my nervous system and eating away my heart, GI tract, and reproductive organs. My system was failing one organ at a time. The first organ that needed to be removed was my tonsils, then my gallbladder, then my appendix. Thus far I have lost useless organs to this disease. My heart was next on the chopping block, and I now have a heart monitor built into my chest to watch for deadly heart rhythms, like V-tach and heart block. I never let this disease take away my spirit. Yet it has almost taken away my life many times. I might have grown up in an abusive home with severely challenging health problems, but I am not defined by the trauma. That never made me sick. I know some doctors will not choose to see that I was sick by two insect bites when I was young, eleven and again at sixteen. Some doctors still believe that all my issues are all in my head and can only be cured through psychology, not medicine. I don't see those kinds of doctors anymore. I physically and emotionally can't be around those types of people. You as a human being have a right to be heard by your medical provider, and if they choose not to see your illness for what it is, then they are not the person for you. It took me twenty years to figure that out. Don't waste your time on people who only see you as someone more than a psych case.

I was eleven years old when I first began to pass out because my heart was not keeping up with me. My doctors told my parents that I was faking it for attention. All because they could not figure me out. I hid my passing out for years. Only a few times was it quite obvious that I had passed out, and I would be brought up to the hospital, and they would run their test and find nothing. I was broken, and no one had the capacity to fix me in the best of the best hospital in my area. I was marked as an attention seeker at the age of eleven by a hospital that could care less if you don't come from money. Eleven years old and all I wanted to do was be invisible to the world because no one helped me escape my abusive home. No one was there for me as a child because I did well at hiding everything from the world, and people were telling me that I was sick because I was choosing to be sick on purpose. Yeah, try to psych that mentality out of someone. A kid who was hiding her whole life from the world wants a condition that brings her attention. The only attention that I had as a kid was negative. That word attention was toxic to my life. My parents spent most of their time at work, and when they were home, they weren't really there to be with their kids. We never did anything together, and when my sister and I were too much for them, we were locked away in our room for hours on end. Again, my parents were young and irresponsible and not ready to have children when they did have children. The way I grew up was normal for me because I understood the problems. I would never raise my child the same way I was raised. Without freedom and without friends outside of school.

By the time I was twelve years old, suicidal thoughts had crossed my mind often. By now I was hiding passing out for a year and still living with my parents. It never occurred to me that my conversation with a friend of mine would have meant so much to me as a child and then as an adult, but this conversation has been in my head for the last twenty-plus years. My friend Derek and I were sitting in our sixth grade classroom when an announcement of a man jumping off the Quechee Gorge came over the loudspeaker. This man must have been important because his death was the only suicide that the school ever reported to its students. I remember looking at Derek and telling him—the first person that I ever told I was suicidal was my friend—I would never jump off the bridge; I would overdose and sit on the top of the bridge. My friend told me that he would jump off it. All I could think to wonder was why he was so depressed. On the outside Derek had the perfect life. He had a girlfriend. Both his parents would take him to do awesome things. I envied Derek's life as a child. I could not see why he was so depressed. But then again no one knows what happens behind closed doors at the end of the day. Years had passed, and we went to separate high schools. Derek and my life fell out of alignment. Then when I was twenty-one years old, I got a message to reach out to Derek, and I would get this message every day for three months. I made excuses as to why I could not reach out to him. The day the messages stopped was July 4, 2011. I would never know for another several weeks that this was the day that my friend jumped off the Quechee Gorge Bridge and did not survive. I cried my hardest, believing that if I had just answered that damn message my friend might not have ended his life that day. Because of his death, his family fought to have a suicide barrier put up to protect people from jumping to their deaths. When I read an article on how the town was stuck on whether or not they should put up a suicide net or bars (a long-standing debate for the town and their reason for not doing anything), I wrote to them to have them put up bars. I told the townsfolk that they needed to put up bars because the Empire State Building had put up bars, and people still go there. The main reason that they should have put up bars was because suicide is a thought, and this thought only lasts a short period of time. I told them five minutes, but it is even shorter than that. If it takes a person five minutes longer to climb to the top to the railing, then they saved a life. The person might just give up, or in someone's case, they might be seen climbing the rail and be saved by another person. It was all about timing. My friend had all the time in the world to climb over the rail and lose his grip as he descended to the rocky water below. It took me years to let his death go. He meant more to me gone than he did me finding him and talking to him while he was still here. It took me years to remind myself that Derek made his choice on not wanting to live, and his choice might have saved others' lives in the end. His death made a difference when the countless number of people who jumped and died didn't matter to the town of Hartford. Those lives that were taken after that man jumped off the gorge in 2001 did not matter until my friend jumped on July 4, 2011. Then all of a sudden his life mattered, and the town stopped thinking about what to do with the bridge, and they did something. That was the life of Derek Cooper, my friend. It takes one life to make a difference in another's life. Be that difference. Stay here and shine. Because if it was not for Derek's family to push for something to be done about the safety of the bridge, the town of Hartford would still be debating on barrier options. Derek's family saved more lives by fighting for the life that they lost to suicide. You can save more lives by telling your story and sharing your experience then just staying silent and thinking about suicide. Just remember, suicide is a thought that you don't have to put into action. You can put it into action by letting go of the pain that is pushing the thought through. I say that from a place of survival. I know where you are at in that thought, and I have seen this darkness. Don't let your name become a statistic one day, just another number or just something written on a service award or stone. You mean more than the moment you are stuck in your head. Your life is valuable. You just need to see it too.

Things went on as my life did. When I was sixteen years old, I had the opportunity to go to Japan with thirteen other students. It was a great trip until my last two days in that country. I began to have seizures, my first ever. They brought me to the hospital, and I was checked out. The seizures had stopped, and they thought I was done with them, until the next morning when I began having them again. I was brought back to the hospital, where I was kept until the seizures would stopped. They didn't stop, and I would have episode after episode. I remember at one point my teacher was crying because I was having another episode, and it was not stopping. I remember being in the seizure when they first started. I remember my muscles tightening up and releasing in rapid sequences and my body thrashing like a fish out of water. I even saw a video of me having an episode after I got back stateside. No matter what I tried doing to make the episode stop, it would not. I could not get control over my own body as it thrashed against walls and the floor. I was in a Japanese hospital for five days. On the fifth day, they transferred me to a hospital closer to the airport. They attempted to get me on a plane, but I seized in the airport terminal, and they sent me back to the hospital. I was in the hospital overnight with another young lady who had been in a car crash. She told me that they transfer you from hospital to hospital every six months, and she had been in several hospitals. I had my worst seizure that night. When I had come to, they were actually using a bag to keep me breathing. It was rough the next morning. We were back at the airport, and my teacher had told me to not seize until after we got on the plane. I could not control my seizures, but we made it through airport security and got on to the plane without a hitch. I ended up seizing before takeoff, and they almost kicked us off the plane. They were informed that I had a doctor who was flying with me, and he was there because I was having these seizures. We lifted off, and I had four seizures throughout the flight. We landed in Boston International Airport, where an ambulance was waiting for us. I don't remember how I got off the airplane or through customs. That was all gone by now. I remember the second ambulance ride from one hospital to Dartmouth, but I don't remember how I left Boston or anything about the first hospital.

I can say once I reached this country and could understand the language, doctors here were more focused on the doctor I came in with then they were a seizure patient with a history of faking illness. It was years before I had a proper treatment for the illness that had caused my seizures. I was thirty-one before I was ever diagnosed with Lyme disease, and that was the real heartbreaker for me. When I found out I had Lyme and it had caused so much of my issues, I was torn because all the abuse I suffered at the hands of my doctors and family I suffered over a treatable disease. You have to know the symptoms of this disease to treat it in 50 percent of those who are suffering from it. I was also low income my entire adult life, so to the best of the best hospitals, I was a waste of time, resources, and air. They claim to care about all their patients, but they only give a crap about the people who can line their pockets. If you ever need to see a social class problem in our society, you should go to the best of the best hospital in this area. But if you are on state aid or in a lower-income bracket, then your care is just as worthless as your income or your life in their eyes. They just waste your time and tell you all your issues are in your head. You're faking or you are making it up. I know. I lived with that system for thirty years of my life. I named the best of the best hospital in Vermont and New Hampshire one time. I will never go back to them because those people have taken apart so much of my life over a treatable disease. When I say my doctors didn't care, I am only referring to those who work at this hospital and other hospitals that are aspiring to be like them.

What was it like living with Lyme disease for twenty years undiagnosed? Well, I will let my past poems explain that situation.

Is Death an Option?

I find myself at another collapsed bridge

Stuck beneath the debris struggle to get air

A failure in my family's eyes

No longer are they to do the things they want

Out of fear that I will end my life

I am only holding them emotionally hostage

Wondering if I will wake up

My last breaths of sanity

Were taken over by the flooding water

I am here no more

Nothing but a dysfunctional being

Who walks the line of death

Angry Storm

Anger that comes as a sudden storm

Forming into turning winds

Comes from the pulling forces

Of euphoria and fear

They crash together like hot and cold

As they funnel to the ground

The power of this storm flows out

As steam from a volcano

Trying hard not to destroy all in its wake

Feeling the Pain

I have gone over the edge

My feelings are now on the outside

I can feel every sound, every tone

It is like watching the ripples of a pool when a leaf touches it

When the sound hits my body, it is not pain I feel

But the sensation of someone touching you softly

Beneath the surface, pain is all I feel

It is sharp enough to take me down

With the burning of an empty flame

Similar to that of a paper cut

Except internal and deep

This pain I feel outlines my insides

I can feel this pain

But the source cannot be found

It does not change in manner

But fluxgates in intensity

It does not matter what I do

To treat it

It is an out-of-control wind

That comes but never goes away

Another pain sits higher up

It is like a dagger to the chest

Feeling it go in

And never coming out

It comes in me like a crashing wave

Against a solemn rock

These pains alone

Knock me to my knees

As I scream for it to stop

Never have I been beaten

In the manner in which they come

Oh how much I would prefer

The iron fist of another

Or a lashing of a belt across my back

Only because that I can fight

And that I know will eventually come to an end

Moments of Happiness

There are days that you want to hold onto forever, moments in time that you wish would never end. Days I feel that I wish my illness would just end. I get sick, and I can't ever tell what is a true sickness from a virus or disease and what is all related to stress. I have been so sick of hearing that my illness is related to stress and that there is nothing that can be done. I am also sick of being so depressed for reasons that seem outside my control and missing out on the fun aspects of life.

I am a mother of a four-year-old son, and he has been in my care his entire life, yet I have been fighting to keep him away from a man that contains a part of him, wanting my son dead. This man just happens to be my son's biological father. That is one of my many stressors. Another is finances; that is the one stressor that is common for just about everyone over the age of fifteen years old, and it is also a lifetime struggle for most. I also attend school in which I am so close to graduating and receiving my associate's degree, yet I can't see how I can get there. Only six course stands in my way, a math test, and a writing assignment, yet it still seems impossible. I have been in the working world since I was fifteen years old. At seventeen I was put on disability because I had several bouts of seizures that have thus far been a mystery as to why they occur. Every few months I have a seizure, and every few months I get nowhere in resolving the issue. I have, however, found some way outside of medicine to get from having three to four seizures a day every day to having one that comes in a pair every few months. I learned some control over them. I just don't have complete control.

Stress, I have learned, is a never-ending cycle. It can be slowed down, changed, and even delayed, but it is never ending until death. At twenty-three years old, I have seen a lot of things in my lifetime, and I have experienced more bad than good. I have days where giving up looks really good, and ending my suffering here on earth looks to be in my favor. Even though I have put myself in places where pain is all I deserved, I have never truly believed that the end is truly ever for me. I have in the past taken it upon myself to end my suffering but never had the ability to succeed. I believe that I failed because of those moments in time where you just want it to freeze and stay in that moment forever. It is these moments that keep me fighting through everything that is thrown at me and keeps me going when I do everything possible to just give up. These moments when there is no pain from sickness or stress, where there are no worries about what is to come or if you will make it out of an unforeseen problem. It is not just the now that these moments occur in. It has occurred, and it is likely to occur again.

Tuesday October 1 started out as an ordinary Tuesday morning. I was tired and groggy and because of stress not in a great mood. I did my typical Tuesday routine, not really caring about the major test I had the following morning or the group project I was barely working on since my seizure. I did not even care too much about the English class that I was two weeks behind on.

I got my breakfast started and my son's breakfast. It was early morning as we sat in the living room silent. I occasionally would stare at the black TV, which used to run every morning, breaking the silence of the morning, until it broke. I finished my breakfast, told my son to get dressed, then got into the shower.

I heard my son open the side door to the house as I was in the shower and thought that he was letting out the dogs and talking to them, as we all do when we let them out. I got out of the shower, got dressed, and left the bathroom. When I saw my son, he told me that he saw a little girl outside, and she was cold, so he let her in. This was odd and threw my Tuesday morning for a twist; of course, there was no little girl in the house.

I had my son brush his teeth really well for his expected dentist appointment later in the afternoon. I brought him to day care and proceeded to my typical Tuesday morning appointment. I was late for that, and after I was done there, I went home for a nap. The half-hour drive on the interstate always seems to make me tired, and sometimes I fell asleep on the way to and from.

After my nap, I picked up my son from day care and brought him to his dentist appointment. We waited, then he finally got to go in. He had one bad tooth that would be coming out soon anyways so they left it be. Then we went to the park to play. It was not only just that we went to the park to play, but it was also that one moment with my son where it was just me and him, and I did not feel sick or worried about anything. One moment where I could just let things go.

The sun was out and almost like it was the first time in a long time I felt good and happy about things. This moment lasted for only twenty minutes, and then I was right back to the normal Tuesday, where we went home, then my son went with his Mimi because I had class that night. One moment that I wished would have lasted forever.

Now I cry when I think of that moment. I cry because I start thinking about how my relationship with my son is right now. I know my son loves me to pieces, and I wish almost all the time that I could have more time than I do to spend with him. My life is so busy between school, work, and my stress problems that it is hard for me to get those small moments in with my son. I am usually too sick or too tired to do things like that with him. So those are the moments that mean the world to