Jungle of the Soul: A Story of Pain, Fear, and Hope

By Roxana D.

Roxana D. is a parathlete, a model, and a fierce advocate. "Jungle of the Soul" is her memoir which provides a raw, unedited look into her life. It starts with her dirt poor beginnings in Romania to the traumatic events she's faced and follows her journey of self-discovery after a tragic accident left her paralyzed from the waist down.

"Jungle of the Soul" is not a story for the faint of heart. Roxana's honesty about her childhood and abusive relationships will hit you like a punch, forcing you to re-assess your priorities and your worldview. It opens your eyes to the many challenges that women and people with disabilities face. Roxana's story challenges stereotypes and tells the truth behind the life of someone who suddenly becomes dependent on a wheelchair.

"Jungle of the Soul" takes us along on Roxana's journey of healing and self-acceptance. Her story is for anyone who wants to change their outlook on life and be inspired to chase their dreams. It is also for those who want insight into challenges of living with a disability.

This book is a valuable tool for those struggling with depressive thoughts and feel a lack of self-worth. It provides the keys to how one can overcome depression and live a happier and more full life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roxana D.
• Release date: Mar 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224624546

Book preview

Chapter 1

A4—Italy’s busiest highway and one of the most used and dangerous (due to its intense traffic) freeways in Europe. The mob of heavy load trucks occupies two lanes, forcing the other cars to flock to the third strip—the high speed one, where you have to pump up the gas if you don’t want to be showered in flashes by that one guy driving a Ferrari. This highway was, and still is, considered one of the main branches of the Italian road network, serving as a pathway between the Iberic Peninsula and the Balkan countries.

    My friend and I were in a 2002 Volkswagen Passat, cruising down the second lane of the highway. We were coming back from the province of Venicia and making our way home to Travagliato, Brescia. I swallowed the last mouthful of my prosciutto crudo and mozzarella sandwich and made myself comfortable in the shotgun seat. I drank a little bit of water and lit a cigarette. I was in the mood to listen to some music, so I dialed up the volume of the radio. I had a bad feeling, like a pit in my stomach, that a tragedy was just about to happen, and I was doing my best to relax and snap out of it. I blamed my feelings of dread on the weariness and stress that had been catching up to me at the time.

    I shouldn’t have dismissed it like that, but instead of doing something about it, I continued to ignore my anxiety. I took off my faux leather boots. I was exhausted and couldn’t wait to get home because I really needed a hot shower and a warm cozy bed. Okay, home might be an overstatement for that 1076 square foot apartment in Piazza di Travagliato[1] that I shared with four other people, but I was nonetheless excited to get there. I didn’t feel comfortable around all my roommates because I didn’t know them that well. They were three males and Cristina, the friend who was driving the car. But I was pretty content with our living arrangement. I had my own room where I felt safe, and, if the others got too loud, I could just shut the door and I wouldn’t have to deal with or hear anyone else.

    Cristina was looking for the lighter to ignite her second cigarette instead of keeping her eyes on the road. It made no difference to her that we had both just put out and thrown away our stubs just minutes ago to prevent the smell from sticking with us in the car. She wanted another.

    ‘Girl, where’s that pink lighter? The goddamn thing is always lost,’ she said, accusingly.

    ‘You smoke like a chimney! Here’s your lighter!’ I rolled my eyes and handed it to her.  I turned my head around and stared blankly at the swarm of cars that were going in the same direction we were.

    Then, out of nowhere, my head was slammed into the car’s window with such a force that my skin tore in an instant, leaving bright red stains on the window. The blow left me dumbfounded, but I didn’t have time to process anything. The force of the crash flung me to the left. Just then, my eyes wandered toward Cristina, and I vaguely remember looking at her as she tried to gain control of the vehicle. She was squeezing the steering wheel with both hands. She resembled a grotesque statue with her mouth agape and wide-open eyes, frozen in place by fear. Cristina was about 5 feet and 5 inches tall, the same as me, but we didn’t share the same build. She was slightly on the chubby side, and her 180 pounds helped her remain safely glued in her seat, protecting her from further harm.

    At some point, she started to wail, like some sort of dying cow. I just sat there and stared at her. I wasn’t scared or worried. I was in a daze. It seemed to me like my body was floating around in space, and I had no control over it. I was but a mere witness of the disaster that happened around me. All it took was one moment of carelessness and one cigarette. That was enough for her to lose control of the car as she was switching lanes, driving at a speed of over 60 miles per hour. Everything happened so fast that I didn’t get to say a thing.

    I was looking blankly at the scenery that unfolded before my eyes, and suddenly I felt, or I thought I felt, that the car had stopped. Scared as I was, I hurried to get my seatbelt off, and I reached to grab my bag, which was still on the back seat. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. My instinct was telling me to run and don’t look back. But that’s not what happened. I never made it out. Everything started spinning around as if I was trapped in a powerful tornado. It seemed like a violent Taiwanese typhoon had made its way to Italy and was now taking us away.

    All it took was one wretched moment… for another car, a brand-new Land Rover, to crash directly into our car. The vehicle spun around on the highway at a terrifying speed, with me lodged between the two front seats, in an awkward position. That’s when it probably happened… when my spine broke in two like some fragile twig, and the momentum of the spinning catapulted me into the back seat. The car slammed into the guard rails and stopped at last, right on the emergency lane of the highway.

    I opened my eyes and looked around. I could understand that I was still in the car, but I was unsure as to where. I wondered why my head was upside down on the backseat while my legs were still lodged between the front seats, dangling around in an unnatural way. Why did it look like I was broken in half? I assessed my situation, and I couldn’t understand a thing. I felt a horrible pain in my backside as if someone had lodged a dagger in there. I was having difficulty breathing, and with each breath that I took, I felt that invisible dagger twisting around and sinking deeper into my back, causing me unimaginable agony. Something was wrong, I thought. I looked around again, and I tried to remove myself from the car and the weird position I was in. I tried to pull my legs and readjust myself, believing that would ease my pain, but I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t feel my legs or control my body. I simply couldn’t move at all.

    I stopped for a second to catch my breath, but the pain was getting sharper. I felt the need to breathe, but it was getting harder and harder to do so. I was scared, awfully scared, but I didn’t say a thing. I tried to remain calm and understand what was happening to me. I always try to do that when I’m in a crisis situation. I carefully took a small breath, and I tried to piece together what had just happened. I looked out the window and could see the sunset, already fading away. Soon, the darkness of the night would come and swallow me into its terrible nightmare.

    I heard the voice of a woman who was on the phone. I didn’t know who she was at that time, but I heard her yelling at the person on the other end of the line,

    ‘Hey, man, I crashed the car on the highway! Come and get me out of here!’ She didn’t even realize at that time that she wasn’t the only one involved in the accident.

    After a moment of silence, the man on the phone, her husband, asked her about me.

    ‘Roxana who? Oh, Roxana!’ She stopped for a second to catch her breath, and then she responded. ‘I don’t know, man, I don’t hear her, I think she’s dead! Man, come get me out of here before I die too!’

    Cristina got out of the car, desperate to save herself. That’s when I started to scream too and let out the pain and desperation building up inside me. I screamed as hard as my lungs allowed me to, a heart-watching wail that could as well have been my last. That’s when a man, a truck driver, managed to stop his humongous vehicle close to what was left of our car and came to my aid. He must have heard me yelling, and he came in an instant to give a helping hand. The man looked at me with fear in his eyes and saluted me with a shaken "Ciao bella![2]" He had raven black curly hair with a thick bushy beard.

    I couldn’t respond, all I did was look at him with tear-stained eyes that pleaded for help. He looked at me long and hard, trying to understand how I got there and what he could do to help me. My body was so twisted between the remains of the car that I probably looked like a horrific rag doll. For starters, he took my dangling legs from in between the front seats, and he carefully picked me up under my arms and sat me upright. He had no way of knowing that my back was broken and that I could die at any moment. He just wanted to help me. The man laid my body in a decent position, and he started to comfort me as well as he could. He stroked my forehead, wiped away the blood from my face, and spoke to me, probably some encouraging words. I wouldn’t know what he was saying anyway, he spoke Italian—a language that was still foreign to me at that time.

    He probably told me that everything would be alright and that I should calm down. What else could he have said?

    Meanwhile, I was thinking about how it had only been two weeks since I’d first landed on Italian soil, dreaming of building a better life for myself. Who would have thought that my dreams would prematurely end on a hospital bed? Talk about destiny’s cruel jokes.

    I couldn’t stop crying. The pain was too much to bear. Suddenly, my whole life flashed before my eyes as the sirens of the ambulance were getting louder and louder. Those well-known sounds that make your skin crawl when you hear them getting closer, triggering that sense of terror and forcing you to realize that someone, somewhere was fighting for their life. And this time, I was that someone. I was the one crying and begging for help.

    The ambulance arrived shortly at the accident site, and I was quickly freed from my metal prison and placed on a stretcher. They intubated me right there on the spot, and I was thankful to finally get some air into my oxygen-starved lungs. By the time we arrived at the Borgo Trento Hospital in Verona, I was screaming in pain. I was immediately labeled medical emergency with low chances of survival but, to their credit, the doctors there managed to stabilize me. And I survived.

    I woke up after two days in the intensive care unit, connected to a bunch of medical machines. I looked around me and tried to grasp my surroundings. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. The memory of the crash and everything that came after it was wiped from my mind, and I was left with confusion and fear. My arms were lying at the sides of my body, and there were white cables attached to the tips of my fingers. I tried to move them, but it was incredibly hard. I looked at the IVs, the surveillance equipment, and the beeping monitor that guarded my bed. I had a small tube in my nose, and I could make out several other tubes and wires that I was connected to.

    The morphine kept my pain in check. But as soon as I started to feel it again, I remembered it fully, as well as the moment that had acquainted us for the first time. I remembered the accident. I tried to move again but couldn’t do anything. I wondered what they had done to me. Why couldn't I feel my legs? I looked downward, searching for them, but the white sheet covered me from head to toe. A nasty thought took control of me. What if I don’t have legs anymore? I forced my weak and trembling right hand into motion, and I managed to move the heavy sheet out of the way, liberating my frail body from its grasp. I let out a sigh of relief at the sight of my legs. I still had them. But why couldn’t I feel them? I strained myself to move my left arm and grabbed the tiny tube that came out of my nose to get a better look at it. There was a brownish mucus staining the plastic walls of the tube.

    I began to freak out and pull at the cables and everything that was around me. I wanted to escape from my white prison and go back home. The blaring of an alarm startled me and stopped me in my tracks. I scanned my surroundings to find that the door to my room was open now, and a petite, frail-looking nurse quickly made her way in, followed by a not so dainty looking colleague. This second nurse was quite robust and solid, her steps making the wooden floor vibrate, her triple chin swiveling from left to right as she comically approached me. I remained fixated on the impressive-looking woman, thinking to myself That’s it, I’m done for. If she’s going to hold me down, the oxygen machine will break, and I too will follow shortly. To my relief, the nurses only took hold of my arms, blocking me from frolicking around. I was completely immobilized.

    The shy pattering of steps caught my attention, and I turned to face a doctor who looked like he was well into his senior years. Despite the situation, he seemed eerily relaxed, as if he were walking down a boulevard and not a hospital room. In fact, I’d venture to say that he even looked somewhat repulsed and tired of his mundane hospital shifts. The tall, slouching doctor came to the side of my bed and placed his huge hand on my forehead, almost encompassing my whole face. He scrutinized me in an analytic sort of way, his ancient glasses resting awkwardly on his long, crooked nose. The medic didn’t speak to me then, but he turned to the nurses and told them to tie my arms. The poor man must have found plenty of reasons to fear for my safety and sanity in my manic gaze for him to choose such a forceful approach.

    I was still unable to breathe on my own. I needed artificial help because the force of the impact had damaged my ribcage, affecting my lungs and the blood vessels around them. Blood had accumulated inside my chest at the site of the injury, causing my breathing difficulties and pain. In medical terms, this trauma is known as hemothorax, and this condition seriously endangered my life and gave the doctors low hope regarding my survival.

    After I calmed down, I resumed the inspection of my surroundings. That’s when I noticed that I was not the only patient in that room. There were three other people there, my I.C.U squad, and they all seemed to be doing a lot worse than I was. The young lady who occupied the bed right next to mine caught my attention. I was absolutely stunned by her beauty. She had velvety dark skin, curly hair, and pouty lips. These features were complimented by a slim but curvy body that was ever so slightly noticeable under the white sheet that covered her. This twenty-year-old beauty seemed like she was pulled out of a magazine cover or runway show, and she looked bizarre in that white sterile room, hooked up to an oxygen machine.

    At a closer inspection, all my roommates needed the help of a ventilator to breathe, and they shared an aura of defeat and resignation. It was as if their souls had abandoned these bruised, haggard carcasses, leaving them to decompose on the hospital beds. I imagined that their souls had left for that wonderful place called Heaven, where the scenery was evergreen, and the sky was always blue and adorned with colorful rainbows. Yes, they were already on their way toward that foreign world of wondrous flowers, some of them unknown by the human world, where there was always spring, and vividly colored butterflies danced around your head... that place where the only thing that broke the silence was the warm and gentle breeze. A place of calm, filled by the joyous buzzing of bees and the melodious trills of various birds. At that moment, I found myself wishing to join them and escape from my earthly prison.

    The horrid and painful sight of the cold, lifeless bodies in that I.C.U room snapped me out of my colorful fantasy. I was there, imprisoned in that morbid silence, afraid of the high-pitched shriek of the round clock that hung on a wall. And in that moment of clarity, I realized that I too was just a mere carcass of who I’d been before. I looked just like my poor roommates, the only difference being I couldn’t see myself and recognize the same hopelessness and defeat in my reflection. I gazed at the medical machinery that surrounded me and at the white sheet that covered my foreign body. These were all things I could see with my own eyes, but I couldn’t truly see myself. I thought myself to be the healthiest person in the room and that my place was not there, among those poor dying souls. But was that the truth, or was it just my hopeful thinking?

    Tick-tock, tick-tock! I felt the ticking of the clock resonating in my head. Tick-tock, tick-tock! This continuous repetition was the only sound I heard, and the silence was getting harder to bear. That was only the beginning of my torment. The days went by at an incredibly slow pace, and the morphine was starting to fail me. I could feel my pain getting sharper and sharper. I was highly medicated, which made it seem like I was always asleep, but I couldn’t sleep. The pain kept me awake, a prisoner of misery. My pain was screaming, and I was screaming back at it. My pain was telling me, again and again, that I was still alive, and I would begrudgingly respond that I didn’t want to live like that.

    As if my pain and misery were not dramatic enough, I would soon get my official diagnosis, a heartbreaking one—traumatic TSCI (thoracic spinal cord injury). I was going to depend on a wheelchair to get around, and I would need constant help to take care of myself for the rest of my entire life. I would never be independent again. Tears, pain, agony, and suffering, these were the only things that defined me back then.

    After eleven days of staying in the intensive care unit, having only people who couldn’t breathe on their own around me (excluding the nurses and the medics who came in to do their rounds), came even harder at times. Not even one of these days passed without me thinking about my impending doom and wishing to free myself from the grasps of the medical machinery that kept me alive and succumb to the everlasting sleep of death. I wanted the horrible pain that tormented me every second, to stop.

    I still had serious health conditions, and death was not yet removed from the table, but I was moved to a regular ward. A big room with six beds—mine was the first one on the left of the door. I cried my eyes out there too, desperately wishing that someone would explain what had happened to me, why my body felt like a dead tree trunk, drained of all its sap, immobilized in a hospital bed. A torso that needed the assistance of a nurse 24/7. The thing that hurt me the most was that I couldn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t know their language. I was alone in a room full of foreigners.

    My answers came from an unexpected source. One day, the doctor who was on duty came, accompanied by a Moldavian woman, who spoke Romanian about as well as you’d expect from a Moldovan. Her name was Doina, and she was going to act as a translator so I could understand what the medic was saying.

    ‘I’m sorry for what I’m about to say but, because of the trauma you’ve been through, the spinal cord injuries, from now on you’ll be dependent on a wheelchair. You’re never going to walk again.’

    The doctor’s words sounded weird coming from the mouth of that red-haired woman, but they still hit me like a lightning strike. I can still hear them vibrating into my mind. I cried bitter tears. I couldn’t imagine a life like that for myself.

    ‘How can I live the rest of my life stuck in a wheelchair? No, I can’t accept that,’ I said then.

    I saw the regret in their eyes—there was nothing they could do for me. The medic left, but Doina stayed a little while longer with me. If you think she did it out of the goodness of her heart, you’d be wrong.

    Doina, a Moldovian woman from the countryside who bought fancy clothes from the Verona street markets and worked hard to pass as a stylish, modern, Italian lady couldn’t really break away from her native nature—a money-hungry creature who could smell an opportunity from a mile away. Now came her favorite part, the money talk.

    Doina’s appearance shifted in front of me at the flick of a switch. Gone were her compassionate front and her teary eyes. These attributes were replaced with a broad smile that almost made her thin lips disappear into the skin of her face as she tried to convince me to work with her lawyer and get some money from the car’s insurance (seeing as I was just a passenger, so I had no blame in the accident). Ah! No blame she said, but they sure found one, especially for me, just so they wouldn’t have to give me a dime.

    This is a legal matter I’m still disputing in the present days.

    But at that time, my thoughts were not about insurance or indemnity. They were elsewhere. I won’t be able to walk or run anymore. I won’t have the means to build a future for myself, find a job, or provide a good life for my son, I kept thinking as she continued to explain just how much money I could get out of this situation. Money didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted health, I wanted to get up and walk away from that hospital. I wanted to go back home to Romania and hug my child. Money couldn’t buy back my health and the life I had before the accident.

    ‘Okay, child, I’ll leave you now!’ said Doina before going out the door, disappointed that she hadn’t managed to pull me into her schemes.

    I had asked her nicely to bring me a mirror. During the accident, I had sustained some injuries to my head, and the big cut on the right side of my face, the one I got when I was slammed into the car’s window, had required stitches. My whole face hurt, and my cheeks and skin felt heavy and weird. She had no mirrors on her, but later that day a nurse came to me holding a small, round pocket mirror. Doina had done me one last favor by talking with the nurse about my wish.

    My arms were weak and moving them caused me a great deal of pain, but I managed to look into the mirror. I was terrified by the woman who stared back at me from the mirror. I wiped my eyes, hoping that my vision was somehow cloudy and that I needed to look closer. My face was so swollen from all the morphine that was pumped into my veins that it was completely round, resembling a ball. My brown hair was in disarray, and the area of the wound was shaved clean. My beady, hazel eyes that used to hide that joyous glimmer of life were now vacant and full of tears. I don’t know how I still had tears left to cry.  I was devastated by my diagnosis. Every time I remembered it, tears would run down my face. Sobbing became my default breathing.

    And then a miracle happened! My left big toe moved. I was baffled by this seemingly impossible happenstance, and I rushed to call the nurse. My toe kept wiggling, as if it said ‘Hey, I’m still here, I’m alive!’

    The nurse was just as amazed as I was by this, and she wasted no time to summon the medic. A group of medics and nurses came to see me, and that’s when I smiled—a hopeful smile, for the first time after the accident. The medical staff decided to sign me up for electrostimulation therapy, in hopes of saving my legs. It’s a good sign, a very good sign! I told myself.

    That’s when the idea that I would make it, I would walk again on my own two feet, got stuck in my brain. I told myself that I was going to be that person who made it out of the wheelchair, even though nobody else believed in them. I was absolutely convinced that the doctor was wrong about my prognosis. That’s how my mind got sick with hope, the hope that I would walk again someday soon.

    During those hard times, I felt the need to have someone beside me, to comfort and encourage me. I needed someone to tell me that my life was worth the fight. Someone, anyone… it wouldn’t have mattered who, as long as I wasn’t on my own.

    But no one was beside me, not my friends, not my family. No one. Just the doctors who were on call and the nurses who took care of me. They fed me and washed me every single morning. They cleaned my weakened body with a wet cloth, turning me from one side to the other. From time to time they rinsed it in a little basin filled with warm water, and then they would scrub my pale skin again, doing their best to tend to my needs.

    Sometimes, a priest would come by. I would always give him the stink eye when he approached my bed and mumbled prayers. I didn’t like having him around. I felt like he was reciting my last rites. There’s an old saying that goes the communion of the sick will bring about their eternal demise, especially if that person was gravely ill. The meaning was more that, by reciting the Holy Communion rites to the sick, you’re doing it specifically to rush them toward their death.

    This priest started to visit me right around the time when I started to hope that I may walk again soon. He