The Itchy and Scratchy Show

For all of you out there who think you're having a bad week...

...all I can say is, at least you don't have shingles on your lady parts.

(Apologies to anyone who's dealt with death or violence or heartbreak this week, and is genuinely having a worse week than I am.)

Question: What does it feel like to get shot?

I was shot in the leg when I was 11, by one of the sons of my mother's then boyfriend. No particular reason, they just felt like it. *shrugs* I don't know exactly what kind of gun or bullet it was - I'm English, we don't "do" guns - but I know it was a rifle. Not an air rifle. The bullet lodged in my leg rather than passing through, made an entrance wound that was quite small but larger under the skin, and left several fragments. Maybe someone who knows firearms can extrapolate something from that (if you care that much about the details), but that's the limit of my knowledge when it comes to the type of gun and ammo.

(Apologies if I'm getting any of the terms wrong.)

I'm going to try and explain the way it felt, but it may not make sense to readers, as I find it impossible to separate the physical feelings from the emotional feelings that I had at the time.

I remember that I was bent over at the time - I was hanging out washing - and when the bullet hit me, I pitched forward and hit the ground head first. I don't know if whacking my head had any effect on my thoughts and feelings at the time. It's hard to explain how the bullet wound felt - it hurt and it didn't hurt at the same time. I was aware that there was pain, but the pain felt sort of irrelevant, because what I was most concerned with was a feeling of shattering. At the time, I was convinced that I'd been caught in an explosion - perhaps that I'd stepped on a landmine. I lay there on the grass, feeling myself disintegrate into dust and vapour, and for a while - seconds, minutes, hours, who knows? - it didn't occur to me to get up, because I felt like there was no 'me' left to move. I fully believed I was dead at that point, and all I could think was, So I guess that's that, then.

The sound of the boys laughing was what brought me back initially. Neither of them came to check on me, but I could hear them up by the house. I glanced around and caught sight of my hand, which confused me - How can I still have a hand if I'm nothing but dust and red mist? Who is 'I' anyway?Then I became aware of the pain once again, but in an abstract way. I recognised that I was in pain, but it didn't really affect me.

(I should mention that this sort of depersonalisation is something that I'm prone to, and always have been, so it wasn't necessarily caused by the shock of being shot, though that may have added to it. I switch into "robot mode" when confronted with any sort of emergency, which makes me able to cope with most kinds of pain, as well as excellent in a crisis. The downside is an aloofness and lack of empathy during crisis periods. If you need to be rescued and taken to safety, or you need a situation resolved rapidly, I'm your girl. If you need comfort, hopefully there's someone else around to give it, because that's not my forte, though I'm quite capable of giving comfort and sympathy during normal times.)

I made my way to my bedroom in a sort of daze, and got the first aid kit from the bathroom. It never occurred to me to call my mother, or her boyfriend, or an ambulance, nor to ask the boys for help. I've always been used to taking care of myself. With the help of a mirror (and a lot of thankfulness for the fact that I used to take ballet and have always been limber), I started picking bullet fragments out of my leg. I remember thinking that the world had shrunk, because the hole looked so tiny, and I couldn't figure out how it was possible for something that felt so big to look so small. The pain got progressively worse as I worked on it, but it didn't really affect me. I had a job to do, and pain was irrelevant. I got out what I thought was everything, disinfected the wound, slapped a dressing on and took a nap.

Over the next few days, the pain got worse, and once the crisis was over I actually started to feel the pain rather than just being aware of it. It was hideous - I don't have a good comparison for it, but it felt sort of like a contact burn that went on and on; like putting your hand on a hot grill and not removing it. When I came down to breakfast with a fever and a sweaty face, about four days after being shot, I confessed to my mom. I don't remember exactly what happened then, but I know I ended up getting the rest of the fragments, and the infected tissue, removed by a professional under local anaesthetic, and getting a nasty course of oral antibiotics that put me off my food for a month or so. If I'd been in America, it probably would have been a hospital stay, but England is a patch-them-up-and-send-them-home country, and I was back in my own bed by nighttime.

It hurt for a long time. Once the infection was gone, the ache continued - the closest thing I've felt to it was having a tooth pulled. Sometimes it still burns, if I get extremely hot or extremely cold. If I let my skin get too dry, I occasionally get a tugging sensation in the scar tissue that's not terribly pleasant. Moisturising cream only does so much, so when it gets dry I find the best thing I can do is eat an avocado every day for a week or so, which seems to fix the dehydrated skin. Sounds weird, but it works for me.

I can still feel the puckered skin with my fingers, although there are times when it's obvious and times when it feels almost normal to the touch. Regardless of how it feels to my fingers, I can always find it without a problem - the sensitivity has never gone away. I don't know how visible it is - it's on the back of my right thigh, right below my buttock, and I've never been curious enough to try and see it with a hand mirror. The last person who asked to see it said it was really visible and clearly a bullet wound, but that was in 2003. According to her, it's about the size of an average thumbnail (perhaps 1.25 - 1.5 cm diameter), paler than the surrounding skin, and sort of shiny.

If I ever tell people the story - which I don't often - I make a joke out of it, and tell them I was shot in the butt. "Shot in the leg" draws gasps of horror; "shot in the ass" makes people giggle.

I don't think about it much these days, except when it's hurting. Life happens, you know? It's not the worst thing that ever happened to me. Probably not even in the top 5.

That said, twenty years on I still have dreams. Sometimes when I'm asleep, I hear and feel a huge explosion. Sometimes it's a bomb, but usually the image I get in my mind is a huge crystal - larger than a person, clear and brilliant with shimmering lights on a million facets - being shattered by some force inside it. Shards fly off in every direction, and even though I can see the crystal, at the same time I understand that it's actually me who's shattering into splinters and diamond dust. I jerk awake in shock and horror, unsure whether I'm alive or dead. And the lone thought running through my head is always the same as it was that day. So I guess that's that, then.

My doctor calls this Exploding Head Syndrome, which is a (very odd) parasomnia with unknown cause. I'm never sure whether the doc is right, or if I'm just reliving the memory, or if it's some combination of the two. Either way, it leaves me haunted and uneasy for several hours after.

This post originally appeared on www.quora.com.