It was midnight, and I was trying to go to sleep; however, my stomach started to have some gradual pain. My stomach pain continued and did not stop. The pain in my stomach grew to a level to which I could not tolerate after three hours. I took some pain-relieving medications to stop my stomach agony, but this issue was not getting resolved, and now it was early morning, like 5 am. I went to fetch my car keys and went to my wife, but she was sleeping, so I did not bother her. I started the car engine ignition and started driving to the nearby general care hospital.

In the hospital, I went to the counter, but the attendant was sleeping, so I had to call him from the emergency room where he was sleeping. Now he charged me a dollar, and then I gave a receipt to the doctor. The doctor told me to buy a pain-relieving injection and also a drip as well from the nearby pharmacy.

I knocked on the pharmacy door because they were sleeping too. The attendant charged me 4 dollars and gave me all the listed medications. Now I lay down in the emergency room bed, and the doctor put me on the drip, which took like an hour to complete the procedure.

Iwas discharged from the hospital, and I started driving to the main market thinking I needed to buy myself some strawberry milkshake, but to my surprise, that shop was closed at 6 am in the morning. So I turned around, heading back home.

During this exact period, I started to stumble and almost lost control of my driving. At that exact moment, I was helpless because the drip that I took had some painkillers, which caused me drawsiness. I told myself that if I needed to safely get back to home, I needed to do something that I might not like to do, but I had no choice because if I did not act quickly, I might even lose my life due to a car accident.

Now I raised my left hand and started to slap myself three to four times and continued randomly slapping myself after 2 to 3 minutes to keep myself awake. I realized that day that sometimes in life one needs to hit himself in order to stay awake, perhaps.

Now during my entire life there have been periods where I have deliberatly pinched myself in order to keep myself in the present timeline. But slapping myself to remain awake was something new for me in it’s entirety.

I learned the following lessons that day:

• There might be times in your life when you are all alone, and no matter how weak you might be, you still need to fight yourself to survive.
• Remaining awake when you are feeling drowsy/sleepy while driving might get you in a road accident, so maybe the only option you have during those moments is to physically inflict some pain on yourself by slapping yourself as you are left with no choice.
• In life, there might be moments when self-inflicting pain is the only way to survive, perhaps. Let's say you have been shot by a bullet and there is no one to help you out, so you need to get that bullet out of your body yourself using a sharp tool at your disposal. Now this might be a painful process, but you have no other choice but to act according to the situation.

Have you gone through any experience in your life where you have to inflict self-harm on yourself in order to survive? Would love to hear your thoughts.

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This article was originally published on Medium. 

Resources:

https://medium.com/inkwell-atlas/when-life-made-me-slap-myself-34ac522be87f

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