Happy Goat Horror

Dark bleatings, everyone! “That Time I…” is a series of articles I’m writing about incidents from my real life that are either tied to my love of horror, or are indeed the real-life stuff that horror fiction is made of. I was inspired to do this because of constant encouragement by loved ones to do so (apparently I have entertaining stories to tell).

I thought I’d kick things off with what has become a hilarious memory, but at the time it was the stuff of my worst nightmares – literally, sort of.

TW: I’m discussing traumatic injury, opiate use (hospital prescribed and administered), PTSD, and what I can only describe as “an episode”. Lol. Before you proceed, I’d like to assure you that I’m pretty well-adjusted normally, and that this was a very specific circumstance where the fates aligned to cause… er… what you’re about to read.

Follow me, if you will, into the past – to the year 2010. I was on a hospital ward in the early stages of recovery from “quite a lot” of life-saving surgery (more on that another time) because of a car accident. In case you’re wondering, everyone else was fine. Amongst my injuries was a broken spine, and I was therefore unable to get up out of bed at this time, to run away from zombies, for example – a statement that will become relevant in just a minute. There’s something I thought I’d never get to say with a straight face. Well, sort of a straight face – the left side is ever so slightly lopsided because of that time I got mauled by a dog (again, more on that another time). The point is, I was unable to even sit up unaided, let alone stand or run.

So anyway, to paint you a picture of the incident in question, it was the middle of the night and I was in my hospital bed. I was surrounded by peaceful, sleeping patients. But oh no, not I, Insomnia Girl. The thing about being severely injured is that quite often, it also comes with the joy of trauma. I hadn’t been diagnosed yet but I would later be told I had PTSD, which comes with all sorts of extra freebies like intense anxiety and irrational fears. I mean… really irrational fears… like goblins (and again… more on that another time. We have fun here!).

Despite being on a morphine drip dialled up to “holy shit so much drugs”, and sedatives that I think were to keep me relaxed so I wouldn’t involuntarily move around too much, the second the lights went out for the night my eyes would ping open and stay like cartoon eyes propped open with match sticks until sunrise. Why? Because, naturally, if I fell asleep, I’d die. For no apparent reason. Also, how could anyone sleep with those helium balloons next to the bed when, at any time, they could spontaneously explode, engulfing me in flames? Helium isn’t even combustible, something I knew at the time, but logic won’t stop the crazies when your brain is in a constant state of WTF?! Sometimes I’d start to relax and then I’d randomly think something like “oh my god, what if there’s an air bubble in my saline drip?!” Lol, trauma.

Anyway, I only tell you that so you have an idea of what my general resting mental state was. My stress level was right at the snapping point at any given time, so I’m sure you can imagine that should any negative stimuli enter the scene, things might go… awry.

On this particular night, I fell asleep. I’m unsure what happened but there was a nurse change-over unusually late and all I know is that on top of the consistent morphine drip and other stuff, I was also given an oral dose of morphine. I think this miiiiight have been some sort of miscommunication or mistake, but regardless, I fell into a nightmarish slumber in which I dreamed about a man screeching and sprinting at me. I awoke, profusely sweating, my heart hammering, and even though my eyes were open, I was still in the nightmare. Oh yes, that’s right, for the first time ever, I was experiencing the absolute joy of sleep paralysis. If you’re unfamiliar with this particular demon, allow me to briefly summarise it: you’re sort of awake, but now the nightmare you’re having is right before your eyes in your real bedroom, and oh yeah, your body is still paralysed because it hasn’t caught up with your mind and woken up yet. All my fellow sleep paralysis homies, can I get a ‘HELLLLLLL THIS IS HELL WHAT THE F IS THAT IN THE CORNER?!’ Whoop whoop.

So I wake up and I see a bedraggled man – who is a figment of my imagination – racing towards me, screaming. Eventually, this fades away (but slowly, oh so slowly), and I’m fully awake, alone, and absolutely terrified, because something is amiss. For some reason, the curtains all the way around my bed are drawn, cutting me off from the rest of my room and the other patients, and entombing me. I say “entombing” for dramatic flair, because I immediately freak out. The lights are all off, aren’t they, so I appear to be way more closed in than I actually am. Kind of like I’m in a coffin. Kind of like I’m dead. Kind of like – this horrible thought dawns on me as I’m trying to figure out why someone would close the curtains around me while I sleep – I died in my sleep, just as I feared I would, and then a nurse found me and shut the curtains to shield the other patients from having to see my corpse.

Have I mentioned I am absolutely tripping balls? Between the intense concoction and volume of drugs in my system, the PTSD, and the sleep paralysis nightmare, I am quite convinced at this point that the rational explanation is that I am dead as a doornail. My hand fumbles around for the switch that allows me to call the nurse. I find it, press the button, and hear the beep up the corridor at the nurses station. But alas, no one answers. I press it again. I wait. No one comes. Of course they’re not coming, I tell myself, because I’m dead. I think I’m pressing the button, but in the realm of the living, which I can see but not interact with, nothing is happening. I keep pressing the button, the panic rising, and I keep not getting a response.

Oh my god, I realise. If I died before I was strong enough to get up, does that mean I’m now a ghost trapped in my own body?! Oh my god, I think, am I enclosed because I’m no longer even in my hospital bed? Am I already in a drawer in the morgue?!

“I’m panicking!” I yell into the ether – seriously, that’s what I yelled. “Help, I don’t like it!” I take stock of my situation in an attempt to calm myself, but that makes things worse because all I know is that I’m dead and trapped in my body. And it doesn’t help that the man from my nightmare is still screaming. But wait, I’m awake now, so why can I still hear bedraggled nightmare man? He wasn’t a nightmare at all, I deduce, he’s some thing from the ghost realm, and he’s coming for me. Well, as you might imagine, I totally lose my shit. I start crying – loudly – and I’m still futilely pressing the button for the nurse.

Eventually, I hear someone in my room get up and a minute later she returns with the nurse who’d given me the extra morphine. I’d woken her up with all my freaking out, I guess. A nurse pulls the curtains open and asks if I’m okay.

“Am I dead?!” I wail. She blinks at me.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Can you see me? Am I dead?!” I cry. She disappears and comes back with another nurse. They side-eye me and mutter. I’m assured that I’m quite alive and that my curtains were only drawn because someone came to take observations while I slept and did it for my own privacy. I’m told to get some rest. I tell them I’m wide awake and I’m freaking out. They ask me why, I repeat that I’m dead. They’re perplexed. The new nurse is asking if I’m always like this, the other nurse is telling her she doesn’t know because she works nights and usually doesn’t interact with me. They decide I need something to get me to sleep. “I don’t want to fucking sleep!” I protest. “That’s how all this trouble started!” I’m overruled, and probably quite rightly so, because I am indeed hysterical and in need of something to calm me down.

So I’m sedated with something other than the usual. I fall back asleep pretty quickly considering I’m insisting to the nurses that if they think I can get back to sleep, they’re nuts. They must have found that pretty funny coming from me, the absolute nutter. I turn out to be half right. Despite the frankly enormous amount of drugs that by now are enough to conk out an elephant, my eyes ping back open not long after I drop off because that dude is STILL screaming.

This time, upon waking, I find everyone else in my room awake and sitting up in their beds, looking scared. All of us hear an infuriated man screeching gibberish, and a commotion somewhere up the hall. We hear running footsteps, things clattering as if being thrown, and stressed nurse voices. I’m comforted to not be alone with this new fear, and also not comforted because I can’t be imagining it if everyone else hears it.

And then, out of nowhere, I think about the remake of The Crazies. Specifically, the scene where the protagonist is strapped down and unable to flee her hospital bed, and is forced to watch as one of the Crazies proceeds to stab several people to death with a pitchfork. Oh my god, my drug-addled brain goes, it’s happening. It’s finally happening.

The zombies are here.

Even in that state, I knew it was illogical, but I simply could not convince myself that what we were all hearing wasn’t the start of the zombie apocalypse. It’s funny to me now that zombies was the conclusion I came to because of course it was – everyone who knows me knows how obsessed I’ve always been with zombies.

Regardless of the silliness though, I don’t think I can properly articulate how terrifying that was for me. I wasn’t just weak and recovering, I was actually incapable of getting out of bed. All I could think was that when the zombies reached our room, everyone would run and leave me, and I’d be eaten alive. I was absolutely 100% convinced of this, and thus, I freaked out again. I was so frantic and emotional that one of the other ladies (probably the same one who’d fetched the nurse the first time) went out to get a nurse for me, because by this point everyone was pressing their nurse buttons and getting no answer.

The new nurse returned, took one look at me, and left again. But she came back five minutes later with two cups of tea, closed the curtains around my bed, turned on my lamp, sat down, and quite savagely demanded to know what the fuck was going on with me. I told her everything. She quietly listened as she sipped her tea and then informed me that what was actually happening was an enormous anxiety/panic attack. Anxiety and panic attacks aren’t quite the same thing, but she was sure I was having one or both. She also told me that I should have been sleeping like a baby and the fact that I wasn’t possibly meant that the effects of the drugs were exacerbating my stress. The screaming man was a patient who was extremely unwell and difficult to care for, but was no threat to anyone. She asked me about the accident that put me in hospital and she sympathised. She said it was no wonder I was so tightly wound and the brain does funny things when it’s traumatised and exhausted. Every time I started freaking out again, she told me to get a grip and made me more tea. That beautiful, blessed, savage woman didn’t leave my side until the next day rolled around, and kept talking me off the ledge by calling me a silly bitch and telling me to calm my tiny tits. I’m not normally a fan of tough love but she knew what she was doing and she got me back to somewhere approaching rational.

Upon reflection, I guess the zombie thing surfaced because I had recently been in a near-death scenario, and I was pretty scared of dying. And what’s a stronger metaphor for death coming for you than zombies shambling down the hall? The brain is a truly weird thing, I tell you. Every time I think about that night, it’s so surreal remembering how absolutely batshit my thought processes went. It will never stop being funny to me that I actually yelled, “I’m panicking!”

So anyway, that happened.