Early morning trauma dump, pt 4.

6:32am

Final dump for a while. Like I mentioned in my last past, these memories play in my head like images or a short clip. Tonight has been a very active one for uninvited memories.

My therapist told me to journal when I have memories from growing up that keep me from sleeping. This is only a small bit of my past trauma but it’s the stuff that is keeping me up tonight for whatever reason.

Memory 4.

I became a certified nurse assistant when I was 17 years old, a junior in highschool. At the age of 19 I got a job working in a rehab facility for people who have surgery (like a hip replacement) and can’t take care of themselves at home. Sometimes people who are on hospice stay at those facilities, and sometimes super obese people who are bed bound stay at the facility.

I remember there was this one resident I took care of, mind you this was 9-10 years ago. He was declining and had a bad fall out of bed the night before. This day I was taking care of him he had passed away. This was expected. What wasn’t expected was he had cut the inside of his mouth when he had fallen and the clot that was keeping it from bleeding stopped when he died. This caused his mouth to start bleeding profusely. It looked like a scary movie when the scary people smile and a bunch of blood oozes out of their mouth. This residents son was standing outside of the door while I was cleaning his dad’s body. My coworker was trying to get the bleeding to stop but nothing was working. Then his son walked in, thankfully the curtain was pulled closed so he didn’t see what was happening. In a panic my coworker and I started jamming wash cloths in this dead guys mouth and quickly turned him to face the wall and began to wash his back so his son couldn’t see what was happening. My coworker, being close to 40 years old, walked the son out to the hallway and explained what was going on so the son wouldn’t walk in and see his dad with his mouth jammed full of washcloths.

Sometimes I’ll be having a smooth day and the image of me shoving wash cloths into a dead guys bleeding mouth pops into my head. There are many other things similar and some worse than this that I have flash memories of. This is just the one that keeps showing up in my mind tonight.