PTSD. It’s a party.
I suffer from PTSD for a variety of reasons. But it never ceases to disgust me when I get triggered. I mean, it has been a long time since many events have happened. I get annoyed to realize that I can be shut down to a sobbing, shaking pile of nothing over a series of events, a sound, a smell, or any combination of those.
Today it was a client taking his first nitro tablet and calming the spouse. I managed to hold it together until I left them (he is fine btw).
I am so tired of feeling. I am good on my feet and in the moment. I have helped people on the side of the road after a car crash, helped a 16yr old get through a seizure and go with her in the ambulance, walked several people through cancer treatments, and lost the man I loved to a personality change after a massive set of heat attacks. It is the heart attack that gets to me.
And somehow a nitroglycerin tablet brought it all crashing back today. People say that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. I am here to tell you that that is fucking bullshit. If you never loved, you wouldn’t know what you lost. That grief is the worst pain, I have ever experienced.
I will never ever forget the last moment of fear in my husband’s eyes and him trying to say ‘help me’ before his eyes rolled back and he lost consciousness. I wish I could forget it. I would take whatever drug they came up with to erase that.