I was walking home from the bar one night, (yes it was dumb but I didn’t have a car and was too proud to ask for a ride. I walked everywhere all the time anyway.) About a third of the way home I realized someone was following me. Came to a fork in the road, one way leads me home in 2 blocks and the other way is a 24 hour coffee shop but that was more like 4 blocks and the road didn’t have street lights.

I decided to go home (this doesn’t really happen does it? It’ll be fine) and pick up my pace a little but now I hear footsteps behind me, and gaining, until he finally catches up to me and grabbed me from behind. “Keep your mouth shut and you won’t get hurt” I’ll never forget those words. Well having just come from the bar I still had a buzz kinda and I definitely wasn’t going anywhere with this guy, so I kinda twisted around and he punched me a couple times in the ribs. No lie I actually hit him with my purse and I did yell but no one came to their window or anything. He ran away the other way and I went home, I was right around the corner.

When I got to my 3rd floor apartment I was telling my roommates (my brother and my ex) what had happened and I had blood running all down my arm, I thought he punched me but he actually stabbed me 3 times with something thin and pointy. I get woozy when I see my own blood so after that I don’t remember too much. My brother grabbed a kitchen knife and took off looking for the guy, cops were called, cops came, cops said it was my ex. They literally didn’t believe me. I went to the hospital in an ambulance and stayed 3 nights I think, I had a collapsed lung in the left side and have a gnarly scar from the chest tube. They never caught him.

Not that interesting, but I was walking in the dark one night to get a glass of water. I made it down the stairs and turned towards the kitchen to step on something wet and slimy feeling. I touched it with my hand just to figure out my cat had decided to throw up there.

I was once so drunk that I ate a piece of pizza that fell cheese side down on a San Francisco sidewalk.

When I was about 20 years old, I went to the Philippines with my family. We stayed with family friends who are quite wealthy and live in a big mansion, which meant all us guests had our own rooms. Mine was a spacious bedroom downstairs that once belonged to their son before he died in a motorcycle crash.

One night I was struck by sleep paralysis, which was nothing new for me, except for one thing. Normally I don’t see shadowy figures or anything like that, but this time I saw something that I’ve never forgotten.

I was on my back with my head turned toward the staircase that led up to the bedroom door. Along the bottom of the stairs was a short hallway, and from there a barefoot old lady in a white nightgown appeared and started walking slowly toward me. I could tell she was old because she had gray hair and wrinkly skin, but I couldn’t see her face. It wasn’t obscured by her hair or anything, but it was blurry, unlike the rest of her body.

She kept getting closer and closer, and I kept trying to scream, but all I could do was look. When she was a few feet away, I was able to shut my eyes, and eventually I broke the paralysis. After I opened my eyes again, she was gone.

Years later I told this story to my friend who grew up in the Philippines. When I got to the part about the old lady in white, her eyes got big and she said, “Wait, you saw the White Lady?!” Apparently my description matched some spooky folklore she heard about as a kid. I had no idea about that, and until then I always figured I had a vivid hallucination. Now I’m not so sure.

I had just left the military to go to college, was a healthy mid-20s person with bright eyes for the future.

After a month, I was getting winded while hiking. After three months, I was fainting with high exertion. After six months, I was getting daily migraines. After eight months, I was having full tonic-clonic seizures.

After ten months, I was sat in front of a cardiologist that told me if I didn’t agree to a surgery and a stay in the hospital, I would be dead in three to five months.

This is all significantly shortened, but going from having a real taste of freedom and being able to do anything I set my mind to, to being laid up in a hospital bed with a mile of wires and tube sticking in me and on me – it was terrifying.