. . . turning toward what you deeply love saves you.
Rumi
Worried, Ben Goldman, flickr
There are times when it is impossible to explain to others about how trauma survivors see the world. Having a sick child in the emergency room with a potentially life-threatening condition is one of those times. The nurses, the doctors, even my husband, cannot truly understand how terrifying the possibility of losing a child is, when you've already been through that loss before. At least, that's the way it seemed to me early last Friday morning when my husband and I were waiting for our son to go into surgery for appendicitis. The wait, which was probably longer than it would have been in the U.S., seemed to last forever. For long hours, my husband and I were powerless to do anything for our son except hold his hand and wait with him. When I tried to tell the nurse why I was upset, what I really wanted to do was scream something like, "You don't understand. Bad things happen. Things don't always turn out right."
As it was, I did express enough of my fear and anxiety that the nurse got angry with me, my son's heart rate went up, and my husband had to calm me down. That's the way it can be for people with PTSD. We belong to a club that we don't want to belong to: the club of those for whom things have gone wrong, the club of people who have an intimate understanding of the many ways in which the world isn't safe. We understand, from hard won experience, what Maxim Gorky said many years ago: "Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands. But let it go and you learn at once how big and precious it really is." And that's why saying things like, "don't worry," or "you're overreacting" don't help. The only thing that helps is waiting and time. (Photo above, hospital monitor, Annette Ellis, flickr)
This time my son was okay. But it was a very long time before I knew that was going to be true. When I fell into bed after 36 hours of worry and no sleep, I was mentally and physically exhausted. The fact that he had turned 18 about a week before his attack of appendicitis probably didn't help. I heaved a sigh of relief when he hit that milestone birthday. And then, the other shoe dropped, and I thought that his life was threatened.
All things considered, I did better than I thought I would. I almost became hysterical, but I didn't. At the last minute, I turned away from fear and turned towards my son. I held his hand, got him water to rinse his mouth out with, and reassured him. I also quit talking about why it was SO IMPORTANT to get him into surgery RIGHT AWAY. Sometimes it took all my strength to keep myself from leaving, but I stayed put in that tiny, dark hospital room hour after hour. Sometimes you can't fight the storm and you have to let love in your door, as the Wailin' Jennys sing in their beautiful song, Storm Comin'.
As a trauma survivor, how have you dealt with frightening or uncertain times?
