PART I
Preface: Haunted By Ghosts

Sometimes, I drank a glass of blood in the evening. It was my opponents who made me do it though. They were the ones who tried to knock my teeth out, or break my face, or cause internal bleeding while we fought in the ring or cage. Over the past few years, while I was recovering from my latest injury as a fighter, a terrible back injury, the image of my body withering in pain always came to mind. Now, here I was, preparing for an upcoming boxing match.
As a fighter though, specifically, as a boxer, wrestler and martial artist, I was used to the hell that came with stepping into a ring or a cage. It wasn’t just blood, but split lips, bruises, broken bones, battered chins and shins, dislocated shoulders or cracked ribs, which were always a part of the deal. But at age 42, I often wondered why I was risking my body or why I would ever want to pull my stool up to the server and order another bloody drink.
I had doubts for a long time as to whether I should return to fighting. It wasn’t just that I fought men and women, but most of them were half my age. Besides, I had nagging injuries and battle scars from my fighting career. Most of those healed, but my back never did really.
As I stood in my mini gym, which was in the basement of my house, I prepared my mind to do the clean and jerk, hoisting 200 pounds over my head. I bent down in a squatted position, and grabbed the barbell with a white-knuckled grip. Taking a few deep breaths, I mentally prepared myself to succeed, especially since there was no one in the basement to spot me. If something went terribly wrong, like my arms weakening, my back giving out, or my legs buckling beneath me, the weight could smash my body to the floor.
I flipped the weight up and pressed it over my head. It felt unstable, like I was trying to balance the load while riding a wave on a surfboard in the ocean. Shit, I had lifted 200 pounds before, many times in fact. Lifting was an integral part of my training as an athlete. It helped give me explosive power, plus tone and tight muscles. And I loved the fact that the guys at the gym didn’t mind training with me because as they said, I wasn’t a “skirt.” Even my daughter, Floricia, gave me a nickname – She Beast – because I was so strong, naturally strong, too. No steroids for this girl.
But today, as I squirmed around, trying with all my might to stand tall with more than my own body weight above my head, I looked down at my power lifter legs that bulged out from my sky blue shorts, and I sensed something was terribly wrong.
A couple of years earlier, when I was training with a professional wrestler from the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), he picked me up, high into the air, and slammed my body to the mat. Whoever said television wrestling was fake never got slammed to a mat. Still, it was my fault for not kicking my legs up and out properly so my lower back didn’t absorb the whole shock of the landing. As a result, as soon as I hit the mat I heard my back pop; it sounded the way I used to pop bubble gum when I was a little girl. The pain that shot into my back bled into my legs almost immediately. It faded quickly into a tingling sensation and then, my legs went numb. At first, I thought maybe I broke my back, that I was now paralyzed.
With a ruptured disk in my back, I thought about going the surgery route, but I decided against it. Instead, I spent a great deal of time with my chiropractors, Dr. Klein and Dr. Tom, who bent my body this way and twisted me that way, as they tried to move bones and stretch tendons under my massive amount of muscle. After three years of chiropractic therapy, I was finally given the clearance to return to exercising. Going slow and steady, it took me another year to get back to my regular training.
Now here I stood with a 200 pound weight wobbling over my head. My arms gave out, and a moment later the weights came crashing down onto the concrete floor, as I quickly jumped back to avoid injury. The booming sound reverberated off the walls. I stood there thinking to myself, “What in the world is wrong with you Jill?”
The weights stood stoically and the basement remained silent, as I stared at my fingers, which were stained with clipped red fingernail polish. I never did think polish fit the image of a bad ass fighter. Focusing on the weight again, doubts began to creep into my already dazed mind. What sense did it make to come back from such a traumatic injury and add even greater trauma to my back, to my body? I had to face facts – I was past my prime and pushing 43 hard.
After I unwrapped my hands I knew something was definitely wrong with me and it had nothing to do with the weakness I still felt in my back. Suddenly, a wave of emptiness engulfed me and tears swelled up in my eyes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t balance the 200 pounds. That was light compared to the weight I could now feel draping across my shoulders, like a burden of despair, regret, guilt, and emotional pain, like emotional demons that wrapped their arms tightly around me, almost suffocating me. The pressure pushed me to the ground, forcing me to put my hands on the cold concrete floor to stop myself from falling. As I struggled to stand, I couldn’t.