HER PAIN WAS REAL: Orlando shooting survivor was target of 'insensitive' and bizarre conspiracy theories while she recovered from bullet wound

 While Patience Carter battled the pain of her wounds from the Pulse nightclub shooting, she became the target of bizarre social media claims that she was faking her story of survival.

The 20-year-old Philadelphia native became the target of odd conspiracy theories that tried to prove that Carter was posing as a shooting victim and wasn’t actually at Pulse the night of the attack.

“Thank you to all the skeptics that believe my pain isn’t real, it’s your outrageous insensitivity that makes me want to heal even faster, and grow even stronger,” Carter captioned an Instagram photo showing her wounded leg, elevated and in a cast while she sits in a wheelchair.

The photo was snapped on the day Carter was discharged from the hospital. She wore a pair of red, rhinestone “Dorothy” slippers on her feet and wrote in the pic's caption that there was “No place like home.”

The strange rumors about Carter originated from a Youtube video which claimed that the Fox 29 intern was a “crisis actor,” or someone paid to pretend they’ve been a victim of a crime.

“This is faked. This is staged. They are using actors. There is no doubt about it. This is 100% bullshit,” an unidentified narrator says over a video montage of news coverage about Carter, who was one of the 53 people wounded in the LGBT targeted attack.

Other social media skeptics piled on the theories by publishing photos of Carter from the night of the attack and manipulating time stamps in a twisted attempt to prove she hadn't actually gone to Pulse the night of the shooting,  according to Snopes.

Carter, a New York University student, went to the gay club the night of June 11 with her best friend, Tiara Parker, and Parker’s cousin, Akyra Murray, while they were visiting Orlando for the first time from Philadelphia.

The group of girlffriends picked the nightclub on a whim after doing a Yelp search of popular 18 and over nightlife spots, she told reporters from her hospital bed.

Moments after Parker ordered an Uber to take the girls home, the night took a nightmarish turn when they heard Omar Mateen burst into the bar and started spraying bullets into the crowd of clubbers.

Murray, 18, was the youngest victim of the mass shooting after dying from a bullet wound to her arm in the club's bathroom as she waited for authorities to stop the massacre. Parker narrowly survived with a gunshot wound to her stomach.

Carter penned a poem expressing the mixed emotions of making it out of the mass shooting alive.

“The guilt of feeling lucky to be alive is heavy,” Carter wrote.
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