First, PTSD is a real thing, folks—please stop minimizing us when we express symptoms from it. Second, a disclaimer: this post is not meant to disparage individual health care workers for whom I feel great compassion. They are doing the best they can while working under tremendous stress. Our government and our racial capitalist health care system is to blame for the sense of dehumanization I experienced.
On Monday, I woke up with my right side of my face in partial paralysis. Scary. I was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy and it should resolve in a few months. I feel lucky. My ER experience was tough because as a person who lives with PTSD, medical facilities and especially hospitals trigger a panic response in me. I know this about myself and I communicated this to the medical practitioners who admitted me.
As they hooked me up for an EKG, I started to feel light headed and nauseous, the first symptoms of a vasovagal reaction (which tends to end in me losing consciousness, if I don’t have the space and time to lay down and intentionally relax). I know this because it is a patterned cascade that I experience under extreme stress. My wife also knows this because she has, unfortunately, witnessed me go through this several times—about once or twice a year.
The medical practitioners expressed frustration with me because I was not able to let them complete the vitals quickly enough. I asked if I could lay down in a different room (there was no cot in this room) for a minute and they said I couldn’t until they finished the vitals. As soon as they removed the EKG cables, I laid down on the dirty cold floor and tried to breathe. The nurse said I had to get up right away because they needed to use the room. I apologized and got into the wheelchair. As they started to wheel me to a room, I started to get that ringing in my ears and blurred vision and I told them I was going to throw up. After that, I passed out. My wife said that the medical practitioner kept telling me over and over again that I needed to sit up straight in the chair. According to her, my wife held me up so I wouldn’t fall out of the chair and then she exclaimed for them to look at my face, that I had passed out. I came to with a bunch of strangers in my face telling me I had passed out, asking my name, birth date, etc.—they had moved my wife away from me. I had no idea where I was and my sense of self came back quickly but in those seconds that felt like ages, I experienced the abyss and panic that comes with having no sense of self or context.
I share this story because the added layer of pain from PTSD is when folks treat you like you are making up your symptoms or overreacting. As a childhood sexual abuse survivor, I lived for many years believing that I wasn’t experiencing what I was experiencing or having my pain minimized. I speak now because I can and because it is important to affirm myself and other survivors. PTSD is real. We do not exhibit our symptoms for attention or exaggeration. Our pain is real even if it appears to others to be disproportionate to the situation. Again, the dehumanized feeling sucks, but I really don’t blame the individual health care workers. While a bit of compassion might have helped me to feel less bad about myself and the feeling like I was taking up too much space, I understand that the ER conditions did not allow for the kind of care that I needed. It is the system that we must change and increased education around trauma and PTSD.