July 23, 2023, Lowell, Michigan
Almost 5½ years after a shotgun destroyed half her face and damaged her sight, Amedy Dewey’s nose sagged like a glove without a hand, loose and empty.
She wanted a new nose, needed a new nose, just to improve her breathing. So, she was on her way to Ann Arbor for another operation — the 20th since the shooting.
Legally blind, Amedy was riding in a 2007 Mitsubishi Endeavor driven by Rose Haynor, her aunt.
This was one day after the U.S. recorded its 400th mass shooting of the year, the earliest recorded in the last decade according to the Gun Violence Archive; and all of those shootings have ramifications. Even the incidents that are not technically termed “mass shootings” involving four or more people have different versions of Amedy.
They stopped at a Subway restaurant in Lowell about 15 miles east of Grand Rapids.
Amedy made her way to the bathroom, using a cane.
She heard a girl in a stall: “Why doesn’t she have an eye?”
A woman replied, and Amedy assumed it was the girl’s grandmother: “Go ahead and ask her.”
“Thank God,” Amedy thought.
Most parents hushed their children around Amedy, embarrassed by the questions and curiosity. Every day, she lives with the consequences of gun violence, but few want to talk about it. It’s easier to act like it didn’t happen.
The girl came out of the stall, wearing a yellow sundress. She washed her hands and asked Amedy: “Why don’t you have an eye?”
Amedy bent to the girl’s level — Amedy could see about 30% through her right eye on a good day. Her left eye was surgically removed. A skin graft had been pulled tight across her eye socket like a drape over an empty cave. What appeared to be her left cheek was a reconstruction — surgeons moved a flap of muscle from her back to the front of her face to give it contour.
“A very bad man hurt me,” Amedy said, softly. “But he can’t hurt anybody else. He’s all gone now.”
Amedy was neither embarrassed nor self-conscious about her scars. She lost her vanity long ago. It was replaced with determination. Amedy wants to tell her story, wants to be a force for change and her message is clear: Look at me. Hear my story. Try to understand what it means to be a survivor of a shooting.
“Move your eye,” the girl said.
“My right eye?” Amedy asked.
“No, that one,” the girl pointed at the left side of her face.
“Sweetheart, I don’t have an eye there,” Amedy said.
The girl giggled: “I’m just kidding.”
Amedy burst out laughing.
“That makes me feel like I am not so much of a freak,” Amedy would say later. “I have family members that are scared of me. When I get little kids that don’t know me at all, and they go and do that, it makes me feel like I’m a human being again, not this object that they’re staring at.”
Amedy, her Aunt Rose and Josh Snider, a family friend, returned to the car and headed east on Interstate 96 toward Lansing. About 7 miles down the highway, they passed the spot where the shooting happened, where her stepfather used a shotgun to shoot her mother, shoot Amedy in the face and kill himself.
Amedy went silent.
That night, Jan. 6, 2018, never really ended — the darkness never far.
Another surgery in the road to recovery
It’s…
This article was originally published by a www.yahoo.com . Read the Original article here. .