Receiving a call from my mom telling me that she’d had a mammogram and that the doctor found something suspicious, but that they didn’t think it was serious.
The follow-up call, telling me that it was cancer. I yelled at my husband to come grab the baby, and then leaned over on the washing machine, because otherwise I couldn’t have stood up.
The night before my mom’s mastectomy I’d flown down to Texas to be with her for the surgery and recovery. We had a nice evening and my brother and sister were going to drive up the next day. Once everyone finally got to sleep, I got a call from my dad. My first words (Dad has a habit of calling me late at night after he’s been drinking.) were “Dad! It’s 2 am. What do you want?” He told me that he was sorry for calling so late, but that they were at the hospital, that he, my brother, my sister and a friend had been in a rollover accident and that they were all okay, but they were taking my sister in for some tests.
The follow-up call about an hour later where he told me that she’d broken her neck and couldn’t feel her arms or legs.
Talking to some friends of my mom who’d gone by and seen my sister in the ICU before coming up to see my mom, who told me that she was sedated, on a respirator and that I needed to prepare for the fact that she might die.
My sister and I weren’t very close, but the thought of her dying scared the hell out of me. It’s been almost a year now, and she didn’t die, she regained feeling in her arms (Well, she can feel her legs, but can’t move them now.), and we are very, very close now.
Back in high school I was hanging out with some friends at my house one night and we were tripping on acid and also doing some coke. While using a razorblade to chop lines, I (tripping, mind you.) decided to start cutting my writs at the same time. They weren’t deep cuts at first, and never got deep enough to be life-threatening, but a friend mentioned it to another friend of ours. This guy was volatile and very unpredictable while sober, so tripping he was 100x worse. He came in, yelling “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Then he went to the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife and told me that if I wanted to cut myself, he’d show me how to do it right, and grabbed me and held the knife to me. I started freaking out and crying and he yelled some more but never followed through. That was the last time I did coke or acid.