I recently sat down to write a new bio for this website and found myself struggling with where to start. I sat staring at a page that was blank except for a single sentence: “nothing changes one’s perspective on life like almost losing it at 23.” I didn’t think this line was good enough. Apart from the vague language it contained, this statement didn’t come close to covering how I feel about my life; most importantly that more than a change in perspective (if I’m being brutally honest) what I have been left with is the tendency to feel that nothing is good enough. Nothing will make up for the time my illness cost me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to write about what the light taught me until I shared what happened in the dark.
10 years ago, I’m lying back, looking up at hospital ceiling tiles, eyes half-blinded by pain, trying to make sense of the shapes and voices hovering over me. It is April 18th, 2010 and 15 minutes ago I turned 23. The last couple of hours have been a frantic blur. Doctors pump me with antibiotics, trying to fight off the infection that is rapidly spreading through my body. An Infectious Disease specialist is rushed in. Surgeons flock. “We have to take her to surgery now.” What’s going on? “Miss Simerly, please sign this form. It’s a release form, in the event of your death.” What?! Death? What is wrong with me? How did this happen?
The answers come in slowly. I have contracted necrotizing fasciitis, a rare and poorly understood disease; a silent killer that literally feeds on the flesh of its victims. I had already been sitting there for 4 hours as massive doses of antibiotics were pumped into my system through an IV. They were having no affect. My vitals were tanking and the doctors were baffled. As I lay in pre-op, facing uncertainty, death and pain, I am weirdly calm. Sure, it would be a major tragedy to have my life end so young, to never know what it is like to fall in love, and all of the other important things life is about, but I had been so fortunate.
I flash back to just a few weeks earlier to a party with friends in at our Venice Beach apartment. Like most of our parties, this one ended with a dash down to the water for late night skinny-dipping. I remember how the moonlight lit up the sand as we raced to the water, the wind lapping at my face, as I gasped for air from laughter, and the bitter taste of the saltwater as I plunged into the waves, impervious to the cold from adrenaline and drink and youth. Who could know, that lurking in that water was a tiny, microscopic organism that through a tiny scratch, would infest my body and cause the life or death struggle I was facing? Ok, I said to myself, I hope the little bacteria bastards haven’t gotten too far and decided to snack on something vital. I didn’t think to pray.
While my battle against necrotizing fasciitis eventually took over two years of my life, it was an experience that revealed to me how character is built. The pain, debilitation and fear broke my heart over and over. Multiple times I went through wound care and physical therapy, thinking I had recovered, only to be back in the hospital months later, to face it all again. Tom Mankiewicz (Mank), who was my screenwriting mentor at the time wrote my mother: “Don’t worry, Nancy. She’s got a good engine in her. She’ll beat this thing.” As I spent month after month staring out the window and scrolling through social media watching all my young friends live the life one is supposed to in their early 20’s, my resolve to get back to normal grew.
But while this feeling fueled my fight to survive, what was left in the years that followed was an insatiable need to do everything I had been too cautious to do before. I partied. Tried drugs for the first time (what is a little cocaine after one has been on a Dilaudid drip for months?) I went to Coachella and dated rock musicians. I moved to Seattle where not all the freeways led to doctor’s offices and there were mountains to climb to rehab my leg. I tried to fall in love. I traveled solo through Southeast Asia. I became… an utter train wreck of experience seeking.
So what I want to share here are not the whimsical tales of a privileged girl who has gotten to travel the world. Instead, I want to share thoughts from a journey of a woman who was running as far as possible away from herself… and what she found when a world-wide pandemic finally forced her to stop.
