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Chapter 1: The Day My Body Said No

I woke to a fluorescent light buzzing overhead. I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth–stale alcohol and cigarettes. That metallic, unmistakable hospital smell hung in the air.  I’d become intimately familiar with that smell over my years as a nurse. The way it seemed to deepen as the night grew darker, the antiseptic mingling with the scent of hope and fear. This time, though, I was on the other side of the bed. I didn’t know where I was, or how I’d gotten there at first. My body lay heavy against the mattress as if an invisible weight pressed me down. My mind felt disconnected, like it belonged to someone else. 
The night before came back in fragments. Not all at once, just enough to make my stomach drop. I remembered the VFW hall a few blocks from our house. The cheap beer. The familiar faces. The way the bartender listened without asking too many questions. I remembered walking home. And then, blank space. Sharp edges. The knowledge that something had gone terribly wrong.
I was in a psychiatric hospital.

Eventually, I understood why I was there. During one of my drinking binges, a gun had gone off. I had fired a gun. Was I trying to kill myself?  
My husband had called the police. I had been involuntarily committed under Florida’s Baker Act and taken to the Community Crisis Stabilization Unit. I was twenty‑five years old. I was broken and crying out for help and found myself institutionalized.
Lying there, waiting for someone to decide what would happen to me next, I felt a mix of shame and disbelief. I had spent years caring for people in crisis, trauma patients, wounded soldiers, bodies hanging between life and death. I knew hospitals. I knew the protocols. But nothing in my training prepared me for the experience of being treated like a problem to be contained instead of a human being who was hurting.
The room itself felt punitive. Cinderblock walls. A narrow, hard bed. No windows. No sense of time. Meals arrived in plastic containers, slid onto a tray like I was in a jail cell. I wasn’t allowed outside. I didn’t feel safer. I didn’t feel less like pulling the trigger. I didn’t feel better. I felt worse.
What struck me most was the way my pain seemed to be viewed as a threat. Not something to understand, something to control. I felt criminalized for my mental health, as if wanting to escape unbearable pain was evidence that I belonged behind locked doors. At one point, while waiting for the psychiatrist, I noticed my paper chart sitting on the table. My own medical record. On impulse, I reached for it. I wanted to know what they had written about me. I wanted to understand how I was being seen.A staff member noticed and told me I wasn’t allowed to look at it.
“It’s my body,” I thought, “My life. My record.”
I had lost authority over my own story. That other people were making decisions about me without me. I was no longer the expert on my own experience. I stayed for forty‑eight hours. My husband worked behind the scenes, coordinating with my VA providers, trying to get me released as quickly as possible. He understood what I was starting to realize: the longer I stayed there, the more harm it was doing.
When I finally left, I knew one thing for sure, I never wanted to be back in a place like that again. But knowing what I didn’t want wasn’t the same as knowing how to live. It would take years for me to figure that out. 

The first flashback had happened months earlier, just days after I returned home from Afghanistan.
I was out for a run, something I had done constantly while deployed. Sometimes I ran twelve miles a day, burning off adrenaline, keeping my mind busy, outrunning thoughts I didn’t yet have language for.
A truck passed me on the road. Diesel. The smell hit me before I could think. Suddenly, I wasn’t on a quiet Sarasota street anymore. I was back on the flight line, running toward the helicopters. The sound was overwhelming, engines roaring, voices shouting over one another, dust and sand whipping into my face. The heat pressed in from every direction. My heart slammed in my chest, already elevated from the run, now surging with pure adrenaline. For about thirty seconds, maybe a minute, I was gone. Then I snapped back. I stopped running. I stood there on the sidewalk, bent over, trying to breathe. I remember thinking, almost casually, Oh. That must have been a flashback.

I’d heard the term before. I knew it happened to people who had been through combat. I cataloged the experience, labeled it, and moved on. I didn’t tell anyone. That became a pattern. Over time, the flashbacks came more often, two or three times a week at their peak. Each one brought a surge of adrenaline my body had learned to produce overseas, followed by a crash that made ordinary life feel unbearable. My nervous system didn’t know how to downshift. It had been trained for urgency, chaos, constant vigilance.
Normal life felt flat. Empty. Miserable. And underneath it all was a quiet belief I didn’t yet know how to name: that the most important thing I would ever do with my life was already behind me. Afghanistan had been the peak. Everything else felt like a slow descent. I was young, barely twenty‑six, and already convinced that meaning was something I had lost.

Here’s the thing about military training–they’re training us to manage in chaos, to make moment-to-moment decisions when we know the next rocket could hit the medical tent we’re trying to save lives in. To do that, to manage in that environment, you have to learn how to stuff all the motions in a carefully constructed pocket. I wonder, often, if that is the point of boot camp–to develop that pocket the same way a sea otter grows a pouch under its arm for its favorite rock. It takes the rock out from time to time to open a shell when it needs to eat, but otherwise the rock stays neatly tucked under its arm. The military training I received helped me construct a feelings pocket, but they neglected to teach me what to do when I made it back stateside and the pocket overflowed with feelings I was ill-equipped to look at, let alone deal with. 
I coped the only way I knew how.
I drank.
The VFW became a second home. It was within walking distance, which made it easy to disappear there after a long day. The bartender knew my name. She listened. The other patrons were mostly older veterans, men who had served in different wars, different eras. I was usually the only woman. Always the youngest by decades. But there was an unspoken understanding in that room. A shared language I didn’t have to translate. I didn’t need to explain myself. I didn’t need to censor my experiences for fear of horrifying people who had never seen what I had seen.
Outside that space, I carried my story like a secret. I didn’t wear the hats or the shirts. I didn’t announce myself as a veteran. I moved through civilian life quietly, knowing that if I spoke honestly, I would either be misunderstood or met with uncomfortable silence. So I learned how to compartmentalize. How to numb. How to survive. None of it felt like healing, I didn't even know that was a thing or that it was accessible to me. I clung to the sense of calm I’d constructed in the military, stuffing the feelings into my pocket and drinking in hope I could drown them. Was it healthy? No. But it felt safer than falling apart.

Afghanistan itself lives in my memory as a strange blend of chaos and beauty. Our base, Forward Operating Base Salerno, sat in a valley near the Pakistan border, in an area known for  heavy enemy activity. Rockets were a regular occurrence. The unit we replaced had lost a captain to a rocket-propelled grenade attack just weeks before we arrived. Another soldier had died by suicide in a watchtower. From day one, there was a heaviness in the air.
I was a combat medic, trained as a practical nurse through the Army. My job was to respond quickly, efficiently, without hesitation. Patients came in fast. Decisions had to be made immediately. There was no room for emotion, only action. This was made more difficult by the sensory landscape I landed in. Intensity was our constant companion. The noise never stopped. Helicopters roared overhead, engines idling, voices raised just to be heard. Heat radiated off metal surfaces, pressing into your skin. The air smelled like fuel and dust, a combination that worked its way into your clothes, your hair, your body, your soul.
At night, the base went completely dark. No lights. No glow from nearby towns. Just wind, the low hum of machinery, and the vastness of the sky. The stars were stunning in a way I had never seen before. There was something about the darkness that felt safer to me. As if being unseen offered a kind of relief. There were no rockets at night. We were shrouded in a temporary cloak of safety until the next day.
One day, an Afghan child was brought in. He couldn’t have been more than seven–the gangly limbs of childhood not yet showing the muscle he’d grow should he live to become a man. He stepped on an explosive device. Shrapnel wounds covered his body. I was one of the first to reach him. We moved quickly, doing what we could with what we had. Hours passed in a blur of motion–hands working, voices calling out numbers, protocols unfolding almost automatically. Eventually, the surgeon called the case.
The boy didn’t survive.
At the time, I did what I had been trained to do. I kept moving. I stuffed the moment and the associated feelings into my pocket. I folded the experience into the part of myself that knew how to keep going.Years later, when I found out I was pregnant, that memory returned–not as a thought, but as a feeling. I sobbed in the shower, imagining the fragile life I was growing and wondering if I was capable of protecting it in the way it needed. I thought about that Afghan child. About how fragile life is. About how close the line can be between survival and loss. And about what it means to bring someone into a world shaped by trauma–mine included.

Finding out I was pregnant changed something. I wasn’t healed. I wasn’t even close. But for the first time, the stakes shifted. It wasn’t just about me anymore. I realized I didn’t want to pass this on. The hypervigilance. The emotional armor. The distance I had learned to use as protection. I wanted to be present. Available. Able to feel. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but I understood this much: my body was still carrying things I hadn’t dealt with. Survival had a cost. And ignoring it didn’t make it disappear. I had spent years pushing through pain, trusting my intellect over my instincts, doing what I thought I was supposed to do.
My body had finally said no. What I didn’t know yet was how to listen. That would come later. For now, all I had was a question–quiet, persistent, impossible to ignore:
What if the body isn’t breaking down… but trying to get our attention?

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• Update #1 - Draft Week Feb. 2, 2026

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  THANK YOU from my heart for your pre-order. I have been humbled by the support of friends, family, strangers and many people from various periods …

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