“The piece of metal that remains in my body was meant to kill me. Suddenly, I was not who I am. I was an evidence locker.” “Still have three bullets inside of me that doctors did not remove. It can often do more damage trying to fish out all those pieces than just leaving it there.” “Here is this foreign object in my body that shouldn’t be there.” “Gunman is on the loose —” “Armed with a Sig Sauer MCX rifle —” “With an AR-15 —” “And our hearts pour out to the people in Florida —” “Bullets started coming through our classroom door and then seconds later, my whole body shook. I was super curious to see the pictures of what they took out of me when they had surgery to remove some of the fragments. One of those is like clearly the shell casing. The doctors show you for a quick second and then all that gets given to the police. You don’t even get to keep it. I mean, I’m not going to make it into a necklace or anything, but I feel like I carried it around in my body for years, that I should be able to have it. It’s mine. Just last year — 10 years later — I found out that some of the bullet fragments on this side had found their way into my hip joint and were causing the lead levels in my blood to elevate to dangerous levels. It just, like, kind of deflated me. I mean, it was like, you know — I made all this progress. I had this life. I had a wife and kids. Like, was totally moved on and, like, doing well. And now, it’s not over. In fact, it’s this whole other different problem.” “It felt more like a bee sting than anything else. I actually didn’t realize something was wrong until I had already picked my 17-year-old daughter up, thrown her against the wall and covered her with my body. The bullet hit my rib and it tracked around until my spine. It still causes quite a bit of pain, especially if it moves. I could have said, ‘This is his rage inside my body.’ But I couldn’t let it be there. So I had to reimagine that bullet as lucky and a little bit of a spark of life inside me, encouraging me.” “My leg started vibrating and raised from the floor. I was, like, laying to the right. I was, like, holding Martin, so the bullets I received in the left side. I remember feeling the left femur one because it touched my femur and exploded. And he died next to me on the floor. I saw him die next to me. You can see all these little dots. It looks like sand. If they could take them out, probably they would be more easy to erase from my memory.” “It just felt like I was this, like, warm ball of numbness. I remember that day asking for my friend’s phone so that I could look at myself in the face. I had, like, blood down my face and I had blood in my hair and I couldn’t see out of one of my eyes. I remember looking at myself and I was like, ‘Who is that?’ My body took all of the shrapnel from, like, the students — the two students who were shot and killed next me. At one point, I could like wiggle around the piece of metal that was above my lip. I also have shrapnel behind my right eye. It kind of haunts my dreams because like, I’m scared that I’m going to be, like, 40 years old and I’m going to wake up and I can’t see out of one of my eyes.” “I can instantly go from chatting with someone to tears in my eyes because the bullet aggravated a nerve.” “What happens to long-term lead levels is super scary. I mean, this is, like, cognitive decline and, like, neuro issues.” “Aesthetically speaking, it’s not a very visible thing. But underneath the surface, it is for me. And I don’t really care how many people tell me I’m beautiful. It doesn’t change that feeling of not belonging within your body because it’s — it’s not who I was before.” “The shooter — I try to think that he is a no one. Like an individual that doesn’t exist. And that’s how I treat the bullets, too.”