One Year of Reality and How It Nearly Killed Me: My Life Behind the Scenes (24 page)

I lost my head.

That’s sort of how I felt when I was on the ground waiting for the ambulance right after my accident. And during my recuperation, I still felt the need to keep working and not recovering. I didn’t see people every day, I wasn’t solving important problems, and I didn’t have to handle any phone calls from overseas or make any deals for camera gear. I was finally still. The wheels were still spinning in my head, but my body wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t working. And since I tied my identity to how successful I was professionally, my self-esteem bottomed out.

There was a whole lot of white noise in my head.

I was desperate to get back to work and frightened of losing my contacts. I tried to rev myself back up again by keeping a schedule. Getting up, reading, doing my exercises, going on eBay to sell items, sending out résumés (even though the doctors had told me I wasn’t supposed to be working), making calls, and coming up with show ideas. I was doing everything I could to stay in the game. But there were two very different voices in my head. One said things like, “You’re going to be OK. You’re the best. Don’t worry.” The other was filled with nagging doubt, and it kept asking me, “Who’s going to hire you now? You fell on the job; you’re toxic.” I did what I could to suppress the negative feelings, but I felt like I was just trying to kid myself.

I didn’t get out much during my recuperation. It was a pretty lonely time. I didn’t want to let on that I was feeling the stress of what had happened, and so I stayed away from visitors and people calling. It was hard because anytime I finally wanted to go out, it would cost me money. Aside from Kelly, Rhonda, and Laura, I didn’t have much of a support group. Kelly would come over and take me out to dinner or fix something at my house when I needed help. It felt like a lot of work to maintain the rest of my relationships and friendships. I had convinced myself that if I never called people, they would never call me. I
got to the point where I felt that calling people was an intrusion, and I started to stay even further away.

I was quickly losing my positive-attitude battle, particularly when I heard that one of my old bosses had said, “Why would I hire her if she got injured on a show?” I started to feel like my career was pretty much over just when it seemed that I was really on a good career track. And I was older than most of my peers, primarily because it had taken me so long to finally decide what I wanted to pursue. When I started to think about my future and what I needed to do to secure it, my world fell apart. I was depressed, and I started gaining weight (something that was very easy for me to do) because I was eating a lot without working out. I would try to work out with my trainer, but it was just too hard. Too many different body parts hurt too much. Some days I could do sit-ups, and some days I couldn’t. I really struggled with leg weights because of my knee. I finally gave up on working out altogether until I considered myself fixed and whole.

I was a drama queen having a pity party with myself.

But there was another voice in my head that kept asking a lot of questions. Was it worth it? Was I really
happy? Was I getting where I wanted to be? Was I truly living my life? Did I even know who I was? Asking these questions slowed me down and gave me time to reflect. I began to embrace the downtime and actually started to answer some of those questions.

I also started to have some serious financial issues. The disability pay I was receiving while recuperating barely paid for my apartment, and I needed to be responsible. I tried to come up with a budget but was always coming up very short. I needed to do something. I had some savings, but those would be wiped out in no time. I started working with a former producer in a multilevel marketing company, but that started costing me more in terms of time than it rewarded me financially. A little after my elbow surgery, I received a letter from workers’ compensation that said something about retaining a lawyer, which I decided to do. I was also having problems with my left shoulder. It was always tight, and I would have horrible headaches in my right eye; it felt like a pin was being stuck in my eyeball. And my whole upper back was as hard as a rock; I couldn’t get comfortable. I started the inquiries to get that checked out with workers’ comp, and my attorney followed up for me.

The 401k I had from a previous job had taken a hard hit in the stock market. It was $7,000 at one
point, but by the time I arranged to cash it in, it was $900. But I needed the money. I also needed to move. So I had a large yard sale of stuff that was enough to get me moved into a one-bedroom apartment that would save me $600 a month.

Once my elbow had healed enough and I had some physical therapy, I was scheduled for wrist surgery. I must’ve landed on it when I fell because I had tissue damage and some torn ligaments. So I was in another cast, and I needed yet more physical therapy.

My new apartment was on an upper floor, which would’ve been OK if my knee didn’t hurt all the time. But I learned to power through it. My knee was the one thing that seemed neglected, even though it had been the second most painful body part after I fell. There was no surgery scheduled for that, although I did get some physical therapy. I also started receiving permanent partial disability payments from workers’ comp. I had started to take out money from my credit cards, figuring that I could pay them off as soon as I started working again. I have to thank
The Amazing Race
for my credit cards. I had used a lot of them on the show, and it helped my credit rating, giving me the ability to get more credit. It was also my downfall, but at this point, I didn’t know what else to do. I still wasn’t working.

Then I had an epiphany.

I got it. I was feeling sorry for myself, pouting around the house, and feeling miserable for myself. Yeah, I had a lot of problems, but I remembered hearing and reading that it is important to help other people rather than focusing on your own problems. Meaning I needed to stop focusing on “poor me” and do something for someone else— which is exactly what I did. A dear friend of mine became sick during my recovery. We had visited a couple of times, and I decided to pick her up one day and drive to Santa Barbara for lunch. We talked about our mutual woes, but we focused on what we were doing to make things better. It was a great afternoon. Knowing she was having financial difficulty, I decided to put together a party that was a fund raiser for her. I don’t recall the details of how it all came about, but Laura helped spearhead the event and secured the location for the party, and a few other volunteers brought decorations and food. Together we raised about $2,500 for my friend. That felt great. Organizing the party made me realize just how lucky I was. My friend’s illness was potentially life threatening. I just had some silly injuries. You gain a different perspective when you help those who need it. And I enjoyed doing this
even more because she hadn’t asked for it. It was a surprise.

I was beginning to put my drama-queen days behind me and see a glimmer of a silver lining. My head was still playing games with me, but I started to win the battle of positive thinking. I knew I would get over these injuries and be stronger for surviving them. I was going to laugh about it someday, just as I had promised myself while lying on the sidewalk a few months earlier.

But another injury that had nothing to do with my injuries from the shows caught up to me. Early on in my career, I’d experienced lower-back issues and had a deteriorating disk. At one point while working on
Wild Things
, I would sometimes have to crawl up the stairs to work (there was no elevator in the building). And on top of the shoulder pain and eye-piercing headaches, my back had started to act up again.

However, I was fortunate to have health insurance from a short-term job and was able to have a spinal fusion, complete with a couple of rods and screws as well as some cadaver bone to seal the disk from moving, sort of cementing it in place. I was
beginning to feel better and waking up with a more positive attitude.

My friends came to see me and to bring me things while I was recuperating. I saw some of my poker buddies, friends from shows, and Rhonda and Kelly, and it felt good. The only problem was that I wasn’t sure how I was going to get home. One of my poker buddies, Mark, volunteered to take me to my apartment, but I would need to climb up a lot of stairs to get to my unit. Once I was able to get up and go to the bathroom at the hospital, the nurses started trying to get me to walk up and down stairs. As soon as I could handle at least one stair, I was out the door.

Walking was very painful after the lower-back surgery, especially since I was also heavy, and I’ve always carried my weight in my stomach. But I was looking forward to finally getting back into fighting shape. And my mom was going to come out and help me for a week, since I would be mostly bedridden. The doctor suggested that someone should stay with me for at least a week in case I fell or something happened to me. This would mean that my mom would be with me over Thanksgiving.

My mom was helpful—except when I fell in the bathroom. My mom couldn’t help me, but I managed
to pull myself upright, although it took quite a lot of effort and screaming. Toward the end of my mom’s stay, I was finally able to walk around a bit more and hang out in the living room. It was not much fun for her, but I appreciated her visit. It would be another month of recuperation before I could start working again, which meant that I probably wouldn’t be working until after Christmas, in January or even February. So I decided to just hang in there financially until the New Year.

But then I received a letter just before Christmas.

Workers’ comp had approved surgery for my shoulder. That was the good news. The bad news was that it could take me up to seven months to recuperate after that surgery. I was stunned. A chill shot up my spine.
Seven months?
I was in crazy debt, and I couldn’t take out any more money. And at this point, my mom was helping me out. I couldn’t take seven months of not working, living on state disability and the small checks I was receiving from workers’ comp. I needed the surgery, but I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment. I decided to move back home with my mom and have my surgery done in Indiana; I would spend the seven months of recuperation among old friends and family. So once again I had a big yard sale to get rid of as much stuff as possible (this was
the third time in as many years). Then I packed up whatever was left for my move back home.

Rhonda and I took a road trip and drove back to Indiana at the end of January. It took about three days and two traffic citations in Arizona to get home. When we were pulled over by the highway patrol in Arizona, the officer asked me where I was going. I told him Indiana. He asked me what took me there, and I told him the I-40 to the I-69 into Indianapolis. Rhonda explained that he wanted to know
why
I was going to Indiana. I think he rewarded me with an extra ticket for that response. When we finally arrived home, I breathed a sigh of relief that I was no longer paying rent. I was now officially a “boomerang baby,” another statistic. But I was feeling good about being home. I figured I would recuperate, get my head on straight, and return triumphantly to Hollywood, ready to take it on again.

I still had to recover from my back surgery before I could have the shoulder surgery. The doctor had told me to try physical therapy for my shoulder first to see if that fixed anything. It didn’t. So in April I had my shoulder surgery. I don’t know many of the details, but they did something like cutting part of my collar bone off so that it would fit against
another bone in my shoulder. I have pictures of the little blade cutting through me. Pretty amazing. I was in and out of surgery in about four hours and then back home to recuperate.

I was also able to go back to work in a month, six months earlier than the recovery time outlined in the letter. Well, it had just been an estimate, I guess. I still had pain in my shoulder, probably from the surgery, but the headaches were gone. Someone had finally taken the pins out of my left eyeball.

I needed to go back to work to cover the mounting debt I had accumulated since being injured. I did get a job over the phone shortly after I began my job search, and I returned to Los Angeles.

But it didn’t work out. Not just the job—which was terrible—but financially. It was hard to rent a place and a car while working in LA. I wasn’t making any headway in paying my bills, and the only way to really get my debt down was to declare bankruptcy, which I refused to do. I don’t believe in bankruptcy and was ready to fight it all the way.

And then I got another notice from workers’ comp.

Workers’ comp agreed that I could be retrained in another skill. I had requested this four years earlier, and in fact, I’d sent a proposal to my attorney outlining what I wanted to do and how much it would cost. I had wanted to be retrained as an Avid editor so that I could edit television shows. Editing was my first love while in film school, and my first job was as an assistant editor at Norton Air Force Base through a company one of my professors had started. But that dream was over for me. I felt like I was too old to start at the bottom and decided that real-estate appraising might be the way to go. Actually, Kelly had told me once that I would be great at it because of my attention to detail and love of numbers. So, on her recommendation, I decided to take the chance and learn something else. The kicker was that I couldn’t work and study at the same time, so I ended my awful job and spent the next six months learning real-estate appraising. But after I had finished all of my classes and passed the state’s test to become an official real-estate trainee, I was beyond broke and could not find a job in either real estate or production. I had two months of money left, period. If I could not find a job, then I would have to move back home.

I moved back home for the last time. But not before I had yet another yard sale where I tried to
sell everything I owned. Since I don’t like borrowing from friends or family, I had a raffle to raise money to pay my final rent and move back home.