PTSD

Original date 1 April 2011
 
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a type of anxiety disorder.  It can occur after you've seen or experienced a traumatic event that involved the threat of injury or death.

PTSD is a lasting consequence of traumatic ordeals that cause intense fear, helplessness, or horror, such as a sexual or physical assault, the unexpected death of a loved one, an accident, war, or natural disaster. Families of victims can also develop post-traumatic stress disorder, as can emergency personnel and rescue workers.

Most people who experience a traumatic event will have reactions that may include shock, anger, nervousness, fear, and even guilt. These reactions are common; and for most people, they go away over time. For a person with PTSD, however, these feelings continue and even increase, becoming so strong that they keep the person from living a normal life. People with PTSD have symptoms for longer than one month and cannot function as well as before the event occurred.

Maybe you don’t associate losing your husband to cancer, knowing and preparing for death, as involving trauma or PTSD, but it does.  It doesn’t matter how long or how sick Brian was, that we were told it was time for Hospice a few days before his death, or anything.  It IS a trauma.  Watching the person you love most in the world slowly suffer and die, knowing there is no more hope, no more future, no more laughter,no more hugs, no more kisses, no more, no more, no more...is very traumatic.

The scene of Brian laying in the hospital bed, taking those last labored breaths before dying, is embedded in my brain.  It will flash in front of me without warning, and stop me dead in my tracks.   The image is burned into me.  I lay in my bed, crying, praying to God that He take that memory from me.   I don't want to remember.  I don't want to remember.  I don't want to remember.  I hold my hands over my ears, and I close my eyes, shut tight...I sob into my pillow I don't want to remember.  It haunts me.

While I'm at work, while driving my car, while in the shower, while out with friends....it haunts me.  It hunts me.  It reminds me that Brian is gone, Brian is dead, Brian is no more.  Brian suffered and you didn't help him.  Brian was in pain, and you didn't stop it.  Brian died, and you didn't prevent it.   It's my fault he's gone.  I didn't love him enough to keep him here.  I didn't help him.  I couldn't stop it.  There was nothing I could do.