Muffle the Scream: Part I

Reviving Victims Rights in Richmond

By Dana Logan

It was three am. July 16. Three years and a month ago. I woke up with a man stand-ing over my bed; his hand on my mouth. It was there to muffle the scream that was sure to come. A scream that did come, but was futile. It was not heard by my then-sleep-ing roommate, my upstairs neighbors—I'm not even entirely sure that I heard it myself. But what supplemented the scream was much more effective.

My left foot, by pure survival instinct, was firmly planted in the center of the intruder's body. I kicked. Hard enough that he was no longer standing over me. Hard enough that, as I stood up out of bed, my attacker was a full three or four feet away.

It was only then that my hand reached to my chest, then, pulled back. My fingers tight around something foreign. My hand, now in front of me, opened, revealing a knife, slick with my own blood—blood now spilling from a hole in my chest.

With his weapon in my hand and with no doubt that I would fight back, the man turned to leave. He ran out of my bedroom and continued through the front door. Following close behind him, to make sure he left and the threat of further attack was gone, I locked the door, then made my way to the phone. Dialing the number we all know by heart, I was already thinking about the next step, and for the first time, it occurred to me that I was in pain. Cordless phone in hand, I went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, placed it over the wound and applied pressure. Now I was calling out for my roommate, still asleep at the other end of our long apart-ment. When she awoke to my banging on her locked bedroom door, panic washed over her still groggy face. But by then, there wasnothing left to do except wait—for the am-bulance, en route, for the doctors to mend my deep wound, and for some sense to be made of all this.

The police arrived quickly. Four and a half minutes after my phone call. Five min-utes too late to catch the intruder. The short trip, from my apartment in the fan to MCV, took longer than you can imagine, but was made bearable by two EMTs that reassured me and even made me smile.

At the trauma center, I was poked and prodded. Ultrasounds. Rape kits. X-rays. The works. And still, they couldn't tell what kind of damage had been done. They needed a better look.

Not even fully comprehending what that would mean, but also not really caring, so long as they fixed me, I signed papers to let by the time I reached the operating room, the doctors had decided to do a laparoscopy first. The camera, which they inserted through a small incision above my belly button, showed very little dam-age. The knife, which had pen-etrated four and a half to five inches deep, had missed my heart by a quarter of an inch, snuck by my lungs, and just barely nicked my liver. With no need now to open my chest for repairs, the surgeons irrigated my liver to get the blood out, stitched me up, and sent me to recovery.

Recovery. Physically, it was only a couple weeks before my skin was replaced with scar tissue and my stitches dissi-pated. And while it was, at times, excruciating, it was nothing compared to the mental, emotional and psychological healing that would consume me for months to come.

…continued next week