My Story…

What happened to me —

*Trigger warning the following includes details of IPV and SA

On January 1st 2015 I lay asleep, alone, in my (locked) hotel room in Florence, Italy. My door was kicked down and shortly thereafter, I was strangled with two hands by a man who sat above me while I lay on the bed below. The pressure of the strangulation, compounded with the force of gravity and the angle at which I was laying, is believed to have caused a stress fracture at my C4-C5 vertebrae, kyphosis of the cervical spine, and disc-degeneration. Still trapped in my body are the memories of my esophagus being crushed like a pop can, the last sip of oxygen in my lungs, the vacancy in his eyes, and the sense of impending darkness that lay on the other side of that last breath of oxygen.bit of inhale was an infinite cliff of darkness.

I was in shock for weeks. “Neurogenic shock results from damage to the spinal cord above the level of the 6th thoracic vertebra. It is found in about half of people who suffer spinal cord injury within the first 24 hours, and usually doesn't go away for one to three weeks” [sometimes lasting six weeks]. In this state, “the body loses its ability to activate the sympathetic nervous system so that only parasympathetic tone remains.” The resulting loss of sympathetic tone, compromises the sympathetic nervous system which regulates the fight or flight response and maintains homeostasis and homeodynamics. The sympathetic nervous system is described as being antagonistic to to the parasympathetic nervous system which stimulates the body to "feed and breed" and to (then) "rest-and-digest".

All of that is important because the first question the police asked was the shame-inducing question, “Why didn’t you go to authorities right away?” 

At the time, the idea of running into the lobby of the hotel, with its florescent lights, loud sounds, and New Years Eve partiers, paralyzed me. Somewhere from my subconscious leaped forward the international tabloids from 2007 where Seattle’s Amanda Knox and her then boyfriend were depicted horribly in the media for the murder of their roommate in Italy resulting in their wrongful conviction and imprisonment for four years, where she was later exonerated. But what I recalled was the interrogation and issues she’d had with police investigations and a lack of interpreter.

Involving police just didn’t feel safe. I was fragile. On a mostly unconscious level, the sensory overload was enough to cause me to run to a dark, quiet staircase and find solitude. But after a short amount of time, when guests entered the staircase and saw me, I took flight again, running back to my room, where I curled myself into the corner making myself as small and as quiet as I possibly could. There was hardly any logic or reason running through my brain. That part of my brain, the lymbic part, was basically offline. I was a reptile seeking survival. Not even conscious safety. Just survival.

A few short hours later, our tour and bus were leaving the hotel parking lot and we were on to Pisa for the afternoon. Followed by Lucerne, Switzerland by evening. Have you ever been in shock? It’s very much like operating from zombie-mode.

The autonomic nervous system is a control system that operates on a largely unconsciously level. It regulates heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. Understanding that along with how the parasympathetic nervous system stimulates the body to “feed and breed” helped me to process why he and I had sex that morning. It also explained why I bled. A few weeks later I had lost about 10-15 lbs, the skin on my body erupted into a horrible rash, my eyes turned puffy and around the lids and under the eyes turned a dark blue/purple. I looked like an Ogre from Lord of the Rings. — Years later, I discovered The Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention explains non-fatal strangulations can cause delayed stroke and/or death days, weeks, even months later. In one case, an autopsy linked cause of death to complications from a non-fatal strangulation one year prior. They cite multiple case studies of victims feeling or appearing “fine” but upon CTA scan uncover tears to the right and/or left carotid artery, major blood vessels in the neck that supply blood to the brain, neck, and face.

Years later I would have an x-ray to confirm spinal injury in the cervical spine. C4-C5 vertebrae roots give rise to the dorsal scapular nerve and the phrenic nerve. The phrenic nerve is a mixed motor/sensory nerve which provides exclusive motor control of the diaphragm, the primary muscle of respiration. For me, inhalation is more challenging than exhalation because stored in my mind and body is the traumatic memory, 'hold on to that last sip of oxygen; do not finish that breath because beyond it, is… not life.' -- This fear hid in my unconscious for four and a half years. That’s 40 million inhales and exhales before I could take a full deep inhale without a tandem visceral fear of very close and very near, blackness/emptiness on the other side. 

I was 28 years old, a born and raised resident of suburb outside of Vancouver, BC and a ballet teacher of 12 years at the time. There had never been a previous incident of intimate partner violence in our relationship. I later learned, through a confession from him, that he had been physically violent with a previous partner in his home province of Ontario where a witness had been present. I also became aware of another incident where he had strangled a friend of his with the same witness as the previous assault present again.