Watch Man Share His Happiness After Being Given A Second Chance At Life Following Failed Suicide Attempt!
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A man was left paralyzed from the waist down after shooting himself in an attempt to take his own life.
28-year-old Kevin Ortiz, who used to serve in the Air Force, is a California-based suicide attempt survivor who was given a second chance at life and love after he failed to end his life back in 2012.
“What I remember was just the gun going off, it was so loud my ears were ringing,” the man recalled in an interview with Barcroft TV. “My head just kind of went down and that is when I saw a hole in my chest.”
“The moment I attempted suicide it is actually kind of vivid. I was driving, I had just left the storage unit. I was driving and I came to a stop and the gun was actually about to fall,” he added, speaking of the dreadful night that changed the course of his life forever.
“For some reason, it came to my head that if I pull the trigger nothing is going to happen and I pulled the trigger and something happened. I lost my breath and my head just dropped and when it dropped I saw a hole in my chest right here there was a hole in my uniform.
“I really didn’t have any pain in my chest and after that I just kind of like passed out and when I woke back up it was a like I’d pass out again.
“When I woke back up I was on ground in pretty much in the middle of the highway, and this lady is telling me ‘what is your name? what is going on?’ because what she thought I’d had a seizure.
“And the ambulance got there and I had passed out again. The next thing you know you wake up and I was on the operating table so at this time I just got a bright light to my face, I can’t even see anything.
“And then I wake up like two weeks later. The moment I found I was paralyzed I’d just woke up out of the coma. My mom was sitting right across to me and she pretty much told me (I was) paralyzed.”
Speaking of Kevin, Kassandra Garibay, his high school crush, added:
“I met Kevin in school, I had seen him first and I eventually sent him a friend request on Myspace and that is how pretty much we started talking and dating.
“When I met Kevin in high school he never seemed to have any time of struggle, or he never seemed depressed, ever sad, anything like that – far from it.
“He was funny, and he was always smiling no matter what. He was class-clown but he was very smart and that’s what really attracted me to Kevin.”
Nevertheless, the couple broke up in 2010 after Kevin moved from Georgia to California. Three years later, after Kassandra found out about his suicide attempt, however, the pair were reunited.
“I had found out online through Facebook that he got into an accident, so I was able to get in touch with his sister and at that moment I literally I broke down,” she said.
Following the incident, the pair got back together and Kevin started seeing his life from a different perspective.
“Kassandra pretty much helps me with my everyday life, so like waking up, taking a shower, getting in the car, she is the one that folds up my wheelchair and puts it in the trunk,” he expressed.
“So that is what she helps me out with and I would say that she helps me out with my mental health as well because we have a very open relationship.”
Speaking of their second chance at making a relationship go right, Kassandra admitted that their bond is now much stronger than ever before.
“I think our relationship now is a little bit different but better, we communicate a lot more, we are very open and I think that is what makes our relationship close and very intimate so after the accident, everything, I think our relationship is a 100 percent times better,” she said.
And as for Kevin’s new mission, he now wants to raise awareness and confront the stigma associated with depression in males.
“When it comes to health, I think men don’t like to be weak,” he said.
“I think there is a stigma for men because men are supposed to be macho, very dominant and I feel like mental health is considered a weakness and no man wants to look weak and that is pretty much it.
“Male depression is very taboo, I think depression period is taboo, nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to admit that they probably need to see somebody when I think in actuality I think that everybody needs to see somebody at some point in time.”
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