The Day I Got Screwed - Twice

One morning, I woke up sopping wet. The phone had rung, and I got up in a panic. As I walked down the hallway, I ran into the wall and saw little white sparkles swirling around my mind. When I got to the living room, I found my husband of two years sitting in his favorite chair. I perched myself on the arm of the chair and said, “I sweated in my sleep.”

Mathew looked up at me and said, “No, you didn’t, I poured water on you." "You poured water on me?” I whimpered as tears welled up in my eyes.

He said, “Yes — you wouldn't wake up.” He went on to say that he had had sex with me while I was unconscious. And then, almost as an afterthought, he stated, “The phone call was Mike from Junction City. He said you’re late.”

I sat with that for a moment, still overcome by grief because he had poured water on me, but I shook my head and said, “Well, I better get around.”

When I went into the bathroom, I noticed one side of my face had sagging, but I didn’t know what caused it, and I knew I had to get to work, so I focused on getting dressed.

On the way to Junction City, the car wouldn’t stay on the road. I found myself in the ditch several times, but fortunately always found my way back on the road every time.

Something was wrong, I felt out of sorts, and found it hard to focus. So, midway there, I decided to go to my grandma's house, because it was on the way. I don't remember exactly what I told her — something about fish eggs, apparently — but I said enough to convince her to drive me the rest of the way, or I would do it myself. She knew me too well.

When I arrived at work, I felt guilty and ashamed. I was never late. I tried to concentrate. I felt slow. I couldn't think clearly. I just prayed to make it through the day.

When I got off work, my mother was waiting for me in the parking lot. She took one look at me and asked what had happened. I told her about not waking up, about Mathew, about my grandmother driving me in.

She said, "Let's go to the hospital."

I agreed.

She took me to urgent care. I went into the examining room, had my vitals checked, and waited. I was 21 years old, and something was very wrong with me, and I was waiting for someone — anyone — to tell me what it was.

What I got instead was a gray-haired man, barely five feet tall, who never stepped within four feet of me. He had already made up his mind before I finished a sentence. My health issue, he decided, was the result of dieting.

He dismissed me. He dismissed everything that had happened. When I walked out of that room and saw my mother's face, I burst into tears. I was so hysterical she had to ask me to repeat myself several times.

I was gasping for air, barely able to form words, trying to tell her what had just happened. I heard her say, "Let me call Jim." Her husband. He knew a doctor who might be able to see me that day.

When I arrived at the new doctor's office, I was brought to the back almost immediately. The doctor came in within seconds, asked me a few questions, looked at me — did a quick examination — and said, "I think we need to get an MRI."

That was the beginning of nine weeks of medical testing that revealed two things: I had suffered a stroke, and I was pregnant.

Seven months later, I had my son.

Afterwords, for a good portion of my life, I did not trust medical providers.

The people who were supposed to help when I needed them the most sent me away saying it was nothing, stop dieting. I was not in my right mind. I was a 21-year-old girl who could have died. And I was dismissed to try and figure things out on my own.

It took me years to reconcile the betrayal of that first doctor—the man who looked at a twenty-one-year-old in the midst of a neurological crisis and saw nothing more than a girl trying to lose weight.

By reducing a stroke and a pregnancy to a lecture on dieting, he didn't just fail his Hippocratic Oath; he stole my sense of safety, in the trust that I once had for medical professionals. That dismissal stayed with me much longer than the physical symptoms, a cold reminder of how easily a person’s reality can be erased by someone in a position of power.

The road back to trusting medical providers was long and jagged. I had to learn to be my own advocate, to find the strength to speak over the dismissals, and to remember that not all medical professionals are alike.

But now, I actually found a voice that could never be silenced again. I am no longer that girl gasping for air in a parking lot; I am a woman who knows that when the world tries to quiet you, that is exactly when you must speak the loudest.

That experience is part of why I do what I do today. I work with non-native English speakers — nurses, physicians, professionals — who know exactly what it feels like to have the right words trapped inside them. The difference between being heard and being dismissed is often not what you know. It is how you are able to communicate it under pressure. I built The Elephant Method because no one should lose their voice when it matters most.