Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a type of anxiety disorder. It can occur after you have gone through an extreme emotional trauma that involved the threat of injury or death.
It's not just a soldier's plight either...
It's been four years and I am still not over what happened to us...to me. It's frustrating because I want it to be done with. I want the memories, the flashbacks to stop. I want the feelings of that time to stop making my mind think it's happening all over again!
Becoming a new parent was hard enough, but then having to deal with the immediacy of cancer was too much. Then came a death in the family...from cancer! ...the treatments...the postpartum depression... All of it was too much but then to add necrotizing fasciitis to the whole thing?!
Did you know Ben died? Yeah...he had continual problems with his oxygen levels and trauma to his body that he went Code Blue. They brought him back, but he has no memory of this...I do...
He also had 27 blood transfusions to flush out the disease and sustain him since debridement was so detrimental, blood loss was tremendous. He had surgery every single day for two months. One month's worth of surgeries were without general anesthesia because his body was becoming too weak to withstand it (thus the death issue).
Every day I walked through the ICU watching people say goodbye to their loved ones only to get to the area that held my husband. This was the place people never left. I had to walk in a blue suit that covered every inch of my body (head, face, hands) so I would not become infected from what Ben had.
It was awful...
And then there was Christopher...
He was still a newborn. Ben missed so much. His first crawl. His first pull-up. His first Halloween. His first tooth. And I missed caring and loving for my newborn. I was too busy trying to find someone to care for him so I could spend a few hours with my husband at the hospital.
The worst were the phone calls. Not from friends or family but from the doctor. At 2 or 3 in the morning he would call and tell me Ben wasn't doing so well. I could hear Ben screaming in the background. Blood-curdling screams because they had just done to him. The doctor would tell me to prepare for the worst (death). When I could finally find someone to watch my baby (around 4 in the afternoon) I would get another call from the doctor stating that things were better now...
This happened every day for nearly three weeks...
I know I should be over this because, heck, it was Ben that had all the pain and surgeries right?! But I have never been more afraid of losing it all then I was back then. It's difficult now because I'm sitting here watching my husband buy medical supplies over eBay because free to cheap insurance doesn't cover it. It's difficult to get over it all because I see his body will NEVER be the same inside and out. It's difficult because people even now will still consider me crazy and believe this whole crazy year of events didn't really happen...or at least not as bad as I portray it.
I suppose the only real way to finally overcome this traumatic event in our lives is to learn from it, and I have. I have learned to be more sensitive to those who are having difficult times. I have learned to just help instead of asking what someone needs. Because unless you can fix everything, you don't know what you need help with! I have learned that everyone, EVERYONE is going through something huge in their lives right now and to wait until that's over is too late to offer assistance. I learned that even a smile can help, a hug even, if I have nothing else to give at that time.I have learned that we will probably never fully recover from all of this. I learned that there is ALWAYS more to the story than you think there is...because there is in my case! Most of all I learned what was MOST important to me...my two loves, husband and son.
