The Excruciating Journey of a Las Vegas Massacre Survivor. WORTH a read.
This should be required reading before any conversations about gun control. Thank you, Washington Post, for doing this story. Let’s see more of the consequences, over months and years of recoveriy, so we can have an informed public discourse. Insurance companies: how about giving us a total of what you paid out for shooting victims from Las Vegas — and how much you denied. Let’s stop hiding the FACTS.
The terrible injustice that people are put through this kind of hell, just so guns are easily accessible to mostly anyone, is so tragic and without comparison. EIGHT surgeries. Several major organs.
Who pays for this? The misery, the loss of FREEDOM, the PAIN, and the medical costs. The husband has spent almost six months by her side at the hospital. Her 89-year old mother is watching her go through this. The whole family is losing precious time and happiness and freedom from THEIR lives. For WHAT?
Dear God, I hope this woman heals soon.
LAS VEGAS — On Rosemarie Melanson’s 153rd night in the hospital, she starts to vomit and can’t stop. She pulls her knees to her chest, closes her eyes and coughs bits of strawberry banana smoothie into a plastic bin her husband, Steve, holds for her. Stephanie, their eldest daughter, stands beside the bed, her gaze fixed on the wall. She’d brought the smoothie for Rosemarie, thinking it would be a treat. But her mother has been unable to keep down food since she was shot in the upper body at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip more than five months ago.
When the heaving subsides, Stephanie offers a whisper: “I’m sorry mom.” “No,” Rosemarie replies. “You don’t have to be sorry. My stomach does that sometimes.”
Tears glisten on Stephanie’s cheeks. Steve catches her eye from across the bed and mouths, “It’s okay.”
But it isn’t okay, Stephanie says later. None of them have been okay since Oct. 1, when the family was caught in the crosshairs of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Rosemarie, 54, has been hospitalized for all but two days since — her excruciating recovery a testament to the all-consuming devastation a single high-velocity bullet can cause.
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