The Parts That Never Get Published
The parts that get edited out. The truth behind the story.
My story was published by Iowa Workforce Development, and I am incredibly proud of it.
Seeing myself sitting inside Rebel Wellness and reading about how Vocational Rehabilitation helped me rebuild my working life was emotional.
But then I saw that one word in the headline:
Disabled.
That word hit hard.
Not because it isn't true.
Because I am still learning how to wear it. And accept that truth.
The published version tells you where I am today. Rebuilding. Running a business. Helping people.
But there are parts of this story that don't fit neatly into a headline.
The anger. The grief. The betrayal. The workplace harassment. The career I lost. The retirement I spent 18 years working toward.
And the parts my body and nervous system still carry.
People may look at me and think, "But you don't look disabled."
I know.
You see me standing in my studio. You see me working, laughing, helping other people and building something I love.
What you don't see is the pain I've learned to live with. The constant adjusting. The hypervigilance. The way my body can react to sirens or a uniform before my mind even understands why.
Sometimes I have to remind myself:
I'm safe. I'm here. I'm not there anymore.
That's part of disability too.
Before any of this, I knew exactly who I was.
I gave 18 years to corrections and detention. That wasn't just a paycheck. It was my career, my livelihood, my security and my retirement plan.
Outside of that uniform, I was a runner. I was a hiker. I lifted heavy. I trained and built my body with the goal of competing in bodybuilding.
Strength wasn't just something I practiced.
It was part of how I knew myself.
And then one night at work, everything changed.
My shift started at 11:45 p.m.
For approximately four hours, I had been dealing with this inmate largely by myself.
Eventually, I requested assistance from a female deputy because my two male coworkers had refused to assist with the inmate because she was female.
The female deputy came in to help me at approximately 2:45 am.
Sadly, she was injured almost immediately and had to exit the cell.
And suddenly the inmate's focus was solely on me.
Alone in that cell.
There is a portion of what happened next that I do not remember.
I know now that this is apparently when I was clotheslined to the ground. My foot became caught in the in-ground toilet, and the inmate ended up on top of me.
But I don't remember going down.
I don't remember being clotheslined.
I remember coming to.
I remember realizing I was on the floor with the inmate on top of me. my one foot stuck in the infloor toilet.
And I remember looking toward the cell door.
My male coworker was standing there.
He was propping the cell door open.
His arms were crossed.
And he had a grin on his face.
I remember looking at him and thinking:
Why the hell aren't you helping me?
That image has never left me.
In corrections, having your coworker's back isn't supposed to be optional.
You don't have to like each other.
You don't have to be friends.
When something goes down, you step in.
That's the job.
I had years of experience and training. I also had some knowledge of judo, but I was limited by the techniques we were trained and authorized to use as detention officers.
So I did what I could to protect myself.
Eventually, a call went out to the local police department.
It ultimately took five police officers and me to restrain that inmate.
Five officers.
And me.
During that restraint, the same male coworker pulled his Taser.
I saw the red dots on my arm.
In the middle of trying to restrain this inmate with five police officers, I had to reach back, point his Taser toward the ground and tell him:
"You better not hit me with that."
That same night, the Master Control officer said to me:
"It was funny as hell watching you get clotheslined."
I remember being pissed.
Because I had absolutely no memory of it.
Even after everything was finally under control, I couldn't simply get into an ambulance and leave to have my injuries evaluated.
I was the only certified female detention officer in the building that night.
I had to wait for another certified female detention officer to come in and provide coverage before I could leave.
There was something else at play too.
Through the different departments I had worked for over the years, I had been trained and conditioned with a mentality that ran deep:
If you're not dead, you don't leave the scene until everything is completed.
So I stayed.
Injured.
Writing the incident report.
Waiting for coverage.
I knew something wasn't right. I remember a paramedic asking me if I was okay. I told him, “No, I don't think so. I'm numb right now, and I have to stay until another certified female officer gets here.
I didn't understand it then, but I was deep in survival mode. Tunnel vision. Fight or flight.
And still, I stayed.
I didn't finally leave that building until approximately 5:00 a.m.
And “walked out” might be generous. I limped out.
For a long time afterward, I carried embarrassment about that night.
Maybe I should have handled it differently.
Maybe I should have been stronger.
And there was that missing piece I couldn't explain.
I knew I'd been told that I had been clotheslined.
But I couldn't remember it.
It took nearly two years of therapy, talking about the assault and processing what happened before I finally understood something important:
I had blacked out.
There was tunnel vision.
There were pieces my brain simply did not give me access to.
Survival isn't a test of strength.
I wasn't in a gym.
I wasn't training.
I was being assaulted.
I was surviving.
Once I understood that, some of the embarrassment started losing its grip.
What exactly was I supposed to be embarrassed about?
That an inmate who ultimately required five police officers and me to restrain had overpowered me?
That I blacked out?
That my body and brain responded to an assault by trying to survive it?
That I expected my coworker to step in and help me?
No.
That wasn't mine to carry.
But one question has never completely left me:
Why didn't he help?
That question was never about whether I was strong enough.
And then there was what didn't happen afterward.
After a significant incident in a jail, prison or similar environment, there are standard operating procedures. Incidents are reviewed. There is typically a debriefing. You walk through what happened, what went right, what went wrong and what needs to be addressed.
After 18 years working in these environments, I understood that.
I never received the debriefing I needed.
So the questions came home with me.
What happened afterward became another kind of wound.
There were appointments. Pain. Procedures. X-Rays. MRI's. Surgeries. Workers' compensation.
Unless you've lived through a workers' compensation journey, it can be incredibly difficult to explain the stress that comes with it.
And some of the minimizing came directly from my own chain of command.
My lieutenant would say things like:
"Oh, you're not injured. It's just arthritis."
There were comments about my age.
Yet I had two surgeries. MRI's and x-rays that showed the injuries, the broken parts.
I was walking around that jail on crutches and in a boot.
I was seeing doctors, undergoing treatment and living with pain and limitations every day.
And someone in my own chain of command was telling me I wasn't really injured.
Then there was the workplace harassment.
I'm calling it what it was.
Workplace harassment.
I was called names.
I was threatened.
I was used as an example of what employees supposedly shouldn't do.
There was one moment when I came out of the Master Control bathroom and, through the crack of the door, saw a female coworker open my water bottle and smell it. Like what the fuck woman!
I can't tell you why she did that.
I can only assume and make as ass out of everyone. but....
I can only tell you what I saw and how unsettling it felt in an environment where I already didn't feel safe.
I was injured doing my job. Not perfect but doing my best.
I sought medical care.
I entered workers' compensation.
And somehow I began to feel like I was the problem.
Somewhere along the way, I started seeing how the cards were falling.
I didn't know exactly when the last card would drop, but I had this overwhelming feeling that eventually I was going to be fired.
So I watched it unfold. Literally
I watched the scrutiny increase.
I watched the way people interacted with me change.
I watched coworkers seem frustrated when I wasn't making the mistakes they seemed to be waiting for.
There are things I witnessed during that period that could probably fill another story all by themselves.
But I kept doing my job.
Because when I was at work, I was at work.
I wasn't there to make friends.
I wasn't there to win a popularity contest.
I went there to do my job.
I did my job. You did yours. We had each other's backs. And everybody went home safe.
That was the win.
So I kept showing up.
And I kept watching the cards fall.
Approximately eight months after the assault and injury, I was fired.
I was devastated.
But I wasn't surprised.
I had spent months watching the cards turn over, one by one.
And losing that job wasn't simply losing employment.
I lost the career I thought I would retire from.
I lost the opportunity for the retirement.
I lost security.
And I lost huge pieces of the identity I had built around what my body could do.
Running.
Hiking.
Heavy lifting.
Bodybuilding.
The body I trusted.
The future I thought I understood.
People love to talk about starting over.
They don't talk nearly enough about the grief that comes before the starting-over part.
And leaving that workplace didn't mean everything connected to it simply disappeared.
It doesn't seem to end!
More than three years after the assault, long after I had been fired and had begun rebuilding my life, something happened that brought the hypervigilance roaring back.
I had just had a tooth pulled. I was medicated, tired and pretty out of it when I noticed a missed call from a sheriff's deputy from that county.
I called back.
He said:
"Yeah, I was just wondering if I could get in for a massage. I'm downtown."
But I recognized his voice, I could hear the decipt and the sounds in the background.
To me, those sounds were unmistakably familiar.
They sounded like the jail. Not like being "down town"
After we hung up, my website booking platform began alerting me that someone was on my website.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Five pings from that same city.
I cannot tell you someone else's intentions.
I can tell you what happened.
And I can tell you what my body did with it.
My nervous system went straight back on alert.
More than three years later.
Leaving the jail didn't mean the jail immediately left me.
And that is part of the disability people don't see.
I've had to learn to say these words out loud:
I have a disability.
There. I said it!
And my disability isn't only psychiatric or invisible.
I walk with a permanent limp.
My arm no longer fully straightens with extension.
My back is constantly on fire.
I have to limit my working hours.
My body is physically different from the body that walked into work that night.
Then there are the invisible pieces.
The hypervigilance.
The nervous system responses.
The reaction to sirens.
The reaction to uniforms.
Even today, sometimes when I see a male officer in uniform, a question crosses my mind:
Does he have his coworkers' backs?
If the woman standing beside him were in trouble, would he step in?
Or would he stand back and laugh too?
I don't like that my mind goes there.
But sometimes it does.
And that's part of my truth too.
I lost trust.
Then there's Onyx.
Walking through the world with a service dog means allowing something about myself to become visible that I struggled for a long time to accept.
There is stigma surrounding service dogs, especially psychiatric service dogs. There are also people who misuse the label, and I have had to work through the fear of being judged because of that.
But I'm not hiding it anymore.
Onyx is still a service dog in training, and he is already performing tasks for me.
Accepting his help doesn't erase my strength.
I'm learning that maybe strength just looks different now.
Sometimes strength isn't fighting my body.
Sometimes it's finally listening to it.
Sometimes it's saying, "I have a disability," without immediately feeling like I have to defend or explain myself.
And sometimes strength has four paws walking beside you.
And through all of this...
Rebel Wellness was born.
Not from some perfect business plan.
It came through my own pain.
My trauma.
My anger.
My grief.
My healing.
And the process of figuring out who the hell I am after the life I thought I knew disappeared.
Still trying to figure out who I am. And now what.
I know what it feels like when your body changes.
I know what it feels like when pieces of your identity shatter.
I know what it feels like when your pain is minimized or questioned.
I know what it feels like when your nervous system is screaming danger while your logical mind is trying to say, You're safe now.
And that is part of why Rebel Wellness is what it is.
You don't have to prove your pain to me to be taken seriously.
For a long time, there were parts of this story I wasn't sure I should tell.
Because this version isn't tidy.
Some of it might make people uncomfortable.
But lately I've started asking myself a different question:
Who does my silence protect?
I'm not the only injured worker who has felt discarded.
I'm not the only person who has wondered whether the people standing beside them really had their back.
I'm not the only person grieving a career, a body, an identity or a future they thought they were building.
I'm not the only female in uniform who had to put up with the crude men they worked with. And I am not talking about the crininals locked up!
So I'm finally saying it out loud.
Not because I want to live inside what happened.
But because I refuse to keep editing it out.
The published story is real.
And I'm incredibly proud of it.
Rebel Wellness is real.
And I'm damn proud of that too.
But so is everything it took to get here.
Healing doesn't require me to pretend I'm grateful for what happened.
Moving forward doesn't mean what happened was okay.
Building something beautiful afterward doesn't erase what it cost.
And I'm not tying a pretty little bow around any of this for somebody else's comfort.
I didn't choose what happened to me.
But I do choose what I build now.
And through all of it, here is Rebel Wellness.
The article tells one part of my story.
This is the part that didn't make the headline.
And I'm done editing myself out of my own story.
P.S. I am grateful for the Iowa Workforce Rehabilitation program, the Drake Business Accelerator and the Evelyn K Davis Center here in Des Moines Iowa. you can read their story by clicking the link below.
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