Nominated by
Sarah Blowers
January 16, 2023
On June 12th 2022 I was violently attacked whilst out walking my dog, just metres from my front door. It was such a brutal attack and so unprovoked that after only a few days I broke psychologically when my attackers were bailed to their home address, 3 doors from mine - I had never seen them before and had no idea they were my neighbours. My friend Helen received some texts from me that I don’t remember sending but the content of them convinced her that she needed to find me as I was almost definitely going to take my own life. She managed to coax out of me where I was and she dropped what she was doing telling her friends that she needed to leave to stop her friend from killing herself. I have never returned to my property and I never will be able to - the trauma is too great to ever set foot where it happened, where pieces of my hair and scalp were found and where my life was destroyed in the blink of an eye.
I have now been living in Helen’s house for 7 months. It has not been an easy time as my mental health is so unstable, my trauma affects every day of her life as much as it does mine but she has stood by me every step of the way. She is constantly patient with me but she also gets cross with me when I need to stand up for myself and when I need to keep going. She has been to every doctors appointment with me, she’s supported me financially and basically put her life on hold to care for me.
At the time of the attack I had no idea that just moments before, the same people had attacked another neighbour who had been dragged, unconscious, to safety by another extremely brave neighbour. That is what I had unwittingly stumbled across and why I was subsequently attacked. The man who was severely hurt before me has since then, devastatingly, taken his own life, unable to cope with the trauma of what they did to him. He leaves behind a wife and two children.
If my friend had not found me when she did - I would, without a doubt, also have taken my own life, myself leaving behind 3 grown children. Helen is the only reason I’m alive today. There is no possible way I could ever repay her for saving my life and keeping me alive still when sometimes I just don’t want to live anymore. But she deserves to know how incredibly awesome she is.