Casey Merriman Endures Trauma And COVID

A WARNING in this episode we mention some things that may be triggering to some listeners and may not be appropriate for young ears. If you feel like you need to talk to someone, the National Suicide Prevention hotline is 800-273-8255.

Just out of high school Casey Merriman had her first near death experience.

MERRIMAN: I didn’t know about the resources were out there. I didn’t think I deserved to use those resources…

This is Two Lives — stories of people who faced darkness and how those incidents changed the trajectory of their lives.

From KJZZ Original Productions I’m Laurel Morales. 

At 19 years old Casey Merriman was in a sexually abusive relationship and didn’t know who to turn to for help. 

MERRIMAN: I didn’t really have any hope. I didn’t see a future.

One morning she woke up with severe abdominal pain. She went to see a doctor. Turned out she had an ectopic pregnancy. She didn’t even know she was pregnant.

An ectopic pregnancy is when the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. It can’t survive outside the uterus. So if you let it grow, which Casey inadvertently was doing, it can damage your organs and you could lose so much blood that you die.

MERRIMAN: Beyond the physical and mental toll that that took on, there were all these other layers around my family and lack of support. 

Casey really didn’t feel like she could turn to any of the adults in her life. 

MERRIMAN: I really didn’t think I was going to survive. I didn’t know if I could allow myself to survive. I did genuinely contemplate suicide. 

Casey felt so much shame around what had happened — from the abuse to the pregnancy but something — she doesn’t really know what — stopped her from going through with killing herself. 

There are these moments that we just decide (consciously or not) to bury something so we can move on. 

CASTILLO: We’re sort of hard wired to want to avoid pain.

Jaime (pronounced Jamie) Castillo owns Find Your Shine Therapy. She specializes in trauma and says those moments don’t go away.

CASTILLO: It’s really a disorder of time. We know we have memories stored as trauma memories when our brain is registering them as a current threat even when we know they’re a past threat. 

And if we don’t deal with that trauma…

CASTILLO: Our brains continue to register threats that don’t actually exist so really it continues to act as if a past threat is a current threat so that creates a lot of inner conflict. 

For Casey it was all consuming.

MERRIMAN: You basically feel like you’re at war with your own brain and you can never turn it off and you can never escape. 

Flash forward a decade: Casey got married and had a kid … with a different guy. She moved to Phoenix for his job. A few years ago she had to fly back to Houston for a work trip. She decided to go to a bar she’d been to before. She was sipping her drink and checking her phone, not paying attention to anything but her screen.

MERRIMAN: At some point I went to the bathroom and someone drugged my drink. I was raped. It really dug up all the other things I had been through. I just thought the anxiety, the depression, the severe PTSD I thought it was going to basically wear me out like I would die of stress…

But this time was different. She got some help.

MERRIMAN: I knew that time I’m not going to lose to this. I had trauma specific PTSD therapy, support groups. And it was literally a life saver.

Licensed social worker Jaime Castillo says establishing safety is the first step.

CASTILLO: And then in some form or another it requires revisiting that trauma and helping our brains integrate the memory in a way that’s similar to the memory of what I ate for breakfast last Wednesday. It doesn’t have any emo charge because it's integrated into long term memory in a way that it doesn’t keep popping up and affecting us every single day or every single second. 

Castillo says it’s her goal to help people like Casey see that while these terrible things happened, you do not have to be defined by them. 

CASTILLO: It’s to not be controlled by my past experiences any longer …I can acknowledge that it happened to me but it’s not my entire story. 

It was during this time this year of intense therapy that Casey realized she wanted a divorce. 

MERRIMAN: I wasn’t going to mentally heal if I had stayed in that relationship. It was a really difficult decision to make. You know I didn’t really know anyone here.

Then not looking for a relationship she met Rich Merriman, who Casey describes as quick-witted, creative and kind.

MERRIMAN: I even jokingly told him when he asked me out, ‘I promise this isn’t a euphemism but I just don’t know if I’m ready.’ But I took it back and that was a good decision.

A year after they’d met they got married. Casey and her ex husband decided on joint custody of their daughter Natalie. 

When COVID hit the US, this made things complicated.

MERRIMAN: We both recognized that we needed to act as if we were the same household from a risk perspective. We’re very much of the view we would act conservatively together.

Casey was especially worried about Rich who is a cancer survivor and therefore immunocompromised and more vulnerable. So they stayed home and ordered groceries online. If they did go out, they wore masks.

MERRIMAN: When we would do things like ride bikes we’d go to more secluded areas.

SCENE WITH RICH RIDING 

MERRIMAN: My ex-husband was starting to go into his office and they were following proper protocols.

A COVID-positive coworker who was asymptomatic came to the office and sat in on a meeting. Days later Casey got a phone call from her ex-husband. He was COVID-positive. 

Natalie caught it from her dad and gave it to her mom and Rich. (Natalie and her Dad hadn’t shown any symptoms.) What do you do when your worst case scenario happens? Rich started feeling achy and ran a fever and Casey feared the worst for him. Meanwhile she was developing symptoms much worse than his.

MERRIMAN: It felt like I was in a compression chamber like my whole head was caving in that and that was punctuated by these extremely sharp stabbing pains that were bad enough where …I was in a meeting for work and I couldn’t even make out what the person talking to me was saying. It was garbled because my head was in such pain then my chest started hurting.

Casey took time off work and on the fourth day she started feeling better. It was a huge relief. But the following morning the disease was back with a vengeance.

MERRIMAN: The pain was at an 11. It was just awful. I was having a hard time completing sentences. My breath became shorter and shorter. I was just in so much pain it was becoming tiring to breathe. I was trying to stay calm. I started crying it’s inevitably a scary sensation. I couldn’t reach out and grab my breath…

Rich drove her to the hospital. Casey thought she was dying. But she put on a brave face for Natalie.

MERRIMAN: My daughter’s in the car. I can’t talk so I can’t explain to her what’s going on. 

When they finally arrived in the hospital parking lot Casey looked at them not knowing when or IF she’d see them again.

MERRIMAN: So you’re having to attempt to say ‘goodbye.’ You have no idea what’s on the other side…I was scared… when I said bye in the ER that I wasn’t going to come out. MORALES: Yeah, I can’t imagine what that would’ve been like.

Once inside the hospital it was like stepping into a dream.

MERRIMAN: It was odd to not see a full face. I was wearing my mask I had to wear it even when I couldn’t breathe. To add to the surrealness I’m having to use my phone to text my husband to let him know what’s going on.

Turns out her oxygen levels were ok. Her airway wasn’t closing. The shortness of breath was pain driven. She was so physically fatigued she couldn’t keep breathing. The medical team tried to figure out if she had blood clots in her lungs that were causing the pain but her tests didn’t show any. 

MERRIMAN: I was scared … The characteristics of how I felt were unlike anything I had ever felt before.

The nurses gave her fluids, a sedative, steroids, pain medicine all to try to get her breathing under control. It worked. She could finally breathe again.

So they gave her a prescription for an inhaler and discharged her the same night. The hospital was full of COVID patients. They needed her bed. 

Casey hasn’t forgotten that moment the relief she felt when she could finally get air to her lungs.

MERRIMAN: I know it may sound cliche but the clarity of being able to breathe again is just talk about something we all take for granted…

I talked to Casey just two weeks after she’d been discharged from the hospital so she was still recovering.

MERRIMAN: My body definitely still kind of feels the effects of when it was at its worse. I’m very tight, sore, beat up. I am tired talking to you right now. I hope that goes away ….MORALES: I have more questions for you but I’m going to hold onto them. MERRIMAN: That would be good.

We decided to schedule another interview when she had more energy. (She wore a headset this time, which explains why she sounded a little clearer.)

MERRIMAN: Last week I was feeling better. MORALES: Oh good. MERRIMAN: Yeah.

It’s been a month since her trip to the hospital and she’s had time to think about what happened. And she wanted to dispel myths about the virus so she posted on Facebook.

MERRIMAN: There’s this misconception if you don’t fit in certain categories that you have no risk. That’s not the case. 

Casey was super fit riding her bike almost everyday before catching the virus.

MERRIMAN: It’s frustrating …when someone wants to take care of themselves it requires others to buy in you know like wearing a mask. People treat it like it’s my decision. It is but it doesn't mean the consequences are limited to yourself.

After everything that Casey has been through with all she’s survived, it doesn’t seem fair that she was the one who got this nasty disease.

MERRIMAN: It’s that journey that has given me that perspective. 

Trauma therapist Jaime Castillo says Casey is like a mountain now. No matter the weather there may be sunny days or thunderstorms… 

CASTILLO: But all throughout it the mountain stands tall we are like the mountain and our emotions are like the weather healing means we become more like that mountain we can withstand anything. We can endure.

When I shared with Casey where the title of the podcast comes from that idea that we’re all given two lives. The second one starts the moment we realize we only have one.

MERRIMAN: To me the idea of the two lives it really stuck with me I was tearing up after I so related it resonated so strongly with me. PAUSE I’m firmly in this second life.

SCENE WITH CASEY AND NATALIE MAKING CUPCAKES 

I asked Casey what went through her mind when she found out she was having a girl.

MERRIMAN: When I was pregnant with her and found out I was having a girl I was so terrified. How do I prepare her for the world and hope she doesn’t ever have to go through these things?. 

MORALES: Out of these life experiences what do you want her to learn that you had to learn the hard way? MERRIMAN: Respect of self that you deserve to have someone treat you with respect and others deserve…It was a complete lack of self confidence and hope that someone would recognize I had some value that laid the groundwork for someone to take advantage of that.

And how do you learn that confidence if you don’t have adults in your life that believe in you? For Casey it starts with boundaries. And that’s what she’s teaching Natalie.

MERRIMAN: You have a right to demand that others treat you well. Sometimes it can be sad but you have to let relationships go.

The other thing Casey wants her daughter to know is no matter what she can always come to her with a problem..

MERRIMAN: How it can literally be a matter of life or death to have someone to go to to tell them. That’s what I didn’t have and that just so complicated everything.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

This episode was produced and hosted by me. Annie Galloway creates original illustrations for each show. You can see them at 2 lives dot org or our social sites. Find us at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at 2 Lives Podcast. And if you like the show please leave a review or rating at Apple Podcasts. Some people have asked how they can support 2 Lives. Go to 2 Lives dot org to find a link to see all the ways you can support us. And thank you! A version of this episode first aired on KJZZ’s 2 Lives in November of 2020.