“My husband always says, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ He dropped to his knees. I could hear the sirens. I grabbed and hugged my sister-in-law, trying to face her away from the horror. We were all in the worst kind of shock. This was not happening, not Royce. It could not be our perfect Royce.”
“This bear has been a huge part of my dog, Lucky’s, life for six years now. He goes absolutely everywhere with him, whether it’s outside or to bed at night. My dad knew he had to get it back to Lucky in full recovery.”
“An hour later, my brother called me. ‘Meghan I just found dad in the bathroom, he isn’t responsive.’ ‘Facetime me, let me try and talk to him!’ ‘No Meghan, I’m telling you, there’s something wrong.’ The image of my dad is something I’ll never forget.”
“The smell of burning flesh is in the air. My helmet chin strap is inside my mouth and being forced down my throat. In a state of panic, I pull at it and choke violently. All my senses are in shock. In an attempt to escape my impending fate, I notice all movement is restricted by an unseen force. Then, I wake up.”
“He told me, ‘Go ahead and try to leave b***h, you’re nothing. Nobody will believe you.’ I discovered I was pregnant. This was my worst nightmare, but also a glimpse of hope. He started using heroin. When she came, she brought me power. ‘If you try to leave me and take her, I will kill us all.'”
“I called 911 on myself. I asked them to send an ambulance. I was hallucinating. People were walking past me in my own home. Walking in front of my car while I was driving at night.”
“At this point, I was devastated. Some believe being overweight can cause it. I was told that if I did not lose weight, I would go blind. I had no will to do anything anymore. It seemed that just when I made it through one obstacle to being healthy, I was facing another.”
“I felt my skull slide into my throat. I immediately started gagging and pushed my chair on its hind legs. It can be very difficult to be a teenage girl and be taken seriously. This wasn’t the first or last time I’d be doubted about my symptoms. Being doubted really plays with your head. I was never a dramatic attention seeking individual.”
“I tried to say to Luca that we calmly needed to go, ‘But you said we would go on the swings,’ was his response to me. I couldn’t even make it to the swings where I couldn’t stop crying. We were there for 10 minutes.”
“We ended up talking. I opened up about my grief and he shared that his father had passed away. We had been very good friends for years and helped each other through battling the same demons… And then I got the call, he had been robbed and shot in a parking lot. My world crumbled. Why him? Why now?”
