Oh yeah, and this:
http://tapu-tapu-tapu.blogspot.com/2011/09/dead-body-i-didnt-find-or-why-tapu.html
Blog Post “The Dead Body I Didn’t Find.”
Ever get trapped with an insane person who just has to talk to you? Happened when I was 19. It was the summer of 1979 and I was riding the Rapid Transit to downtown Cleveland. I sat in the back and wound up with a nervous, demented older guy sitting next to me who had straggly unkempt blond hair, a scraggly beard, snaggle teeth, and horrible manic staring eyeballs.
He told me about his experiences in Vietnam: “My CO said, ‘You gonna kill this little girl?’ I said, ‘The fuck I am.’ He said, ‘You don’t kill this little girl, I’m gonna kill you and her both.’ So I killed her. Now look at me.”
I think I have never felt sicker in my soul than the time I had to sit there and listen to him babble like that. I try not to remember it. I don’t want to even imagine living with the memory of actually having been there.
When I was about 6 or 7, we lived kitty corner to the town baseball field in Elgin, OK. On the far side of the baseball field, there was a huge vacant lot that my brother and I used to play in and ride our ponies in. I was out playing once and heard a dog crying. Not just a whimper here and there, but agonized whimpering and an almost but not quite howl thrown in now and then. I went looking for the dog, and when I found it, its paws were tied together with wire and it was covered in blood and ants and it looked like she’d been skinned. I ran home to tell my dad and he went out, not really believing I could have seen what I told him I saw. When he saw her, he took one look and literally ran all the way back home and got his gun. He told me to stay in the house and went and shot her and then called the sheriff. My dad would never talk about it with me, only saying when I asked that there was no way she could have lived and that nothing should ever have to suffer like she did. I STILL have nightmares about it.
Arriving at the scene of an accident and searching for a good friend of mine that had been thrown about 10-15 metres when the car rolled, hard to say for sure, but its very possible she hit a tree. We were a little out of town so we did what we could (not much - she was unconscious and breathing, all we could do was keep her warm and talk to her) then helped the ambulance guys get her on a stretcher, carry her up out of the ditch and into the ambulance. She was pretty banged up internally and died a week later, mainly due to brain injuries.
I was out for a jog with my mom and my dog, Mickey, when a big, noisy truck rumbled down the street. Mickey went after it like a rocket, barking furiously, jumped, hit the right rear wheel, and when under. I manager to see that his skull was crushed in and his eye lying on the asphalt besides him before my mom picked me up and carried me away.
It was my tenth birthday.
When I was around 8 years old, my mom had checked out a bunch of library books and cassette tapes for a Girl Scouts unit on dance. My dad and she got into a fight, so mom took my sister and me out of the house for awhile. We came home to find my dad (drunker than shit) had locked us out. He barricaded the door with our upright, extremely heavy piano. After she called the police, we were let back into the house. It looked like a tornado hit. The library books were torn apart, with pages strewn around the living room. There were dents in the wall from where he’d thrown them. The tape inside the cassettes had been pulled out and torn.
The brutality destroyed my trust in him. Fighting, screaming, and hitting each other was par for the course for my parents. But I was *really *into books as a kid. Their destruction made him a monster to me. That was the first time I remember thinking of him as the enemy.
In Gulf War, Episode I, I came across an Iraqi Armored Personnel Carrier, much like a BMP, that was nose down in a ditch. The driver, deceased, was still in the seat. I looked and saw what looked like a leg wound on his left thigh, but it didn’t look right. Then I saw he must have hit his head on the rim of the driver’s hatch when it crashed. What I was seeing on his leg was a head wound that dripped brain matter onto his leg. It must have been the very slow realization of what had happened, but that image stays with me. Not in a scary or traumatizing way, it just stays.
Dear God, this thread is so hard to read. 
Over a year ago, my husband was put in the hospital again for hepatic encephalopathy. And as fun extra, he hadn’t been able to eat very well for a while. So, the doctor on call decided to give him something called Reglan. Well, turns out he’s highly allergic. What happened next still makes me almost vomit and cry simultaneously when I think about it…
He couldn’t swallow. He couldn’t talk beyond grunting. His tongue lolled out uncontrollably. But the worst part? While the encephalopathy can make him unstable (he hallucinates, for example), this made him seem like he’d totally lost his mind. Then to add insult to injury, the doctor refused to do anything, saying that there was nothing to give him to correct what was happening. Further, he couldn’t tell me how long it would be before it wore off, if ever. I’ve never been so fucking terrified in my life.
If another one of his regular doctors hadn’t intervened and got him moved after I threatened to take him out of there myself and sue them into oblivion, he would’ve died. Just the worst time of our lives ever.
I was 11 when my older sister took me with her to see Psycho. I’ve never taken a shower since that I didn’t wish for half a dozen or so Rottweilers between me and the bathroom door, and an equal number of Dobies keeping guard outside. If I don’t get cleaned up before dark, then I stay grubby until morning.
When I was little I learned a very ugly lesson on acoustics.
When people in El Salvador did protest the stolen election of 1972 (It was so blatant that even a few important military guys did attempt a coup against the military guy making the stealing) Air force personnel that was still supportive of the one doing the steal commanded a few private planes to hide who they were to the world, and dropped bombs on top of crowds that did gather to support the president that actually would had won if the election had been an honest one.
I was 6 years old at my grandmother’s home that was on a hill, and we were locked inside as bombs and unrest were going on, the bombs could be listened clearly at a distance, but I was forever scarred when I did hear the simultaneous screams of death, pain and fear of a packed crowd that was hit by a bomb, it was very similar in intensity to people in a soccer stadium like a mile away screaming “goal!” at the same time, the sound can travel that and a bit farther it seems. And on a hill it can intensify just a bit more.
I think what also scarred me was that on the following days (and years later even) all adults (family, tv reporters and politicians) did not want to explain properly what took place, or to hide it as much as possible.
Good on you!
I’ve been on-scene at deaths, worked in an ER, and have seen horrible things happen to other people, but I can generally put them in a different place in my brain. Even the Gainesville murders in the early 90s went into that part of my brain after the initial terror.
But really, the worst was in college. My grandmother had been acting a little strange, so my dad got her to come stay with us for a bit. One night around 1 am, the house alarm went off.
I woke up and groggily realized it wasn’t my father’s plectron announcing a fire (I only woke up for certain tones).
So I went downstairs to figure out WTH was up.
And I saw my dad, naked, trying to calm down my grandmother. She woke up thoroughly distressed and confused, and tried to go out and catch the bus to get home to “the kids”. Who were not her children, but her younger siblings (as we figured out when we got her calmed down).
Dad grabbed a throw pillow, put it in front of himself, and told me to go upstairs.
On one level, the story is really funny. On another…not so much.
I don’t know about scarred, but there are two things I remember well after all these years.
One was when I was probably in my early teens. My hometown was very small and there were only three streets that crossed the railroad tracks. One Saturday night the train stopped and was blocking one or two of those streets. This older woman decided it was too far to walk around the train and decided to cross between two cars. At that moment, the engineer let go of the brake. I remember her on the stretcher before they loaded her in the ambulance. She died on the way to the hospital.
The other one happened when I was a bit older and in college or shortly after I got out. I was coming around a curve on a street in one of the larger towns in the state and saw a body covered with a sheet. Apparently a child had been hit while trying to cross the street. The look on the driver’s face was a look of utter anguish and despair.
A dead baby hanging on a utility pole.
It’s been 40 years. I still have the occasional dream about it.
Years ago, a drunk driver ran a red light at an intersection a block from my house. It was late, 2 or 3 am, but very loud. I was a senior in high school. Against my father’s objections, I went out to see what I could do.
He had t-boned a family in a sedan. A man had gone to pick up his wife from working the late shift at the local hospital. She was sitting on the curb, rocking their young child. Neighbors provided a blanket and I sat with her for awhile as her car burned, and crews tried to get her husband out. She prayed mostly. Her husband didn’t make it. Drunk driver was largely un injured.
I am to this day cautious about checking oncoming traffic on change of light, and a right bitch about driving under the influence.
I have two scars in my heart.
The first was when I was a college freshman and living in an off-campus rooming house. One of my housemates was a graduate art student. One day his girlfriend came over, and said that he hadn’t shown up for his part-time job, which was very unusual for him. We tried his door, but it was locked. I told her not to look, as I broke the door down. He was hanging by the closet door, naked. I remember how white his skin was, covered with blue blood vessels. He hadn’t left a note, and nobody had a clue about why he did it.
The second happened back when I was living in NYC. It was a beautiful spring day, and I decided to walk across Houston Street and have lunch in SOHO. An 18-wheeler was traveling down Houston, and a young guy, probably a messenger, was biking between the lanes. Somehow he lost his balance and wound up under the tires of the truck. He was squashed like a bug, blood and organs shooting out to the street, and other parts including his head were flattened and wrapped around one of the tires. I was maybe 15 feet away, and a crazy thought occurred to me, that we could gather his remains and put him back together again, alive. The driver didn’t know what had happened, and witnesses chased after the truck to the next light. When he saw what had happened, he just cried out and collapsed in anguish.
The top video in the list that popped up was one narrated by Temple Grandin. I watched it. I’m not seeing the problem here.
I’m a military OR nurse, and have served in Afghanistan twice, so there’s a fair amount of stuff I’ve seen. Like GrumpyBunny, I can compartmentalize pretty well, but there’s a couple of things that stand out…the first was during my first deployment. A young Afghan boy, about 11 or 12, had stepped on a land mine. His legs were blown off just below the knees, but what struck me about him was what a beautiful child he was. Curly hair, green eyes, aquiline nose. You could clearly see Alexander’s soldiers in him. And on that beautiful child’s face was a look of stunned pain and incomprehension.
The second was in the very beginning of my second deployment, the first week. We got through a Navy EOD guy who had had all four of his limbs and his genitals blown off. It made me seriously wonder if what we were doing to save his life, and the lives of other similarly wounded men, was doing them any favors. I carry him around with me still.