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Live Through This
Swimming to Breathe
My therapist tells me I have PTSD and I laugh. “No I don’t,” I snort, even though the idea suddenly feels right. It would definitely explain a lot.
“The word ‘trauma’ is so abused,” I lecture him, “it’s not like my legs got blown off in Iraq.” I think about people on social media who use the word “trauma” to describe bad dates, who water down the term into oblivion.
He shrugs. “If you don’t believe me, go look up the PTSD symptoms in the DSM-5, written by guys in suits who don’t know or care about you.”
A few hours later, I sit in my car after my weekly eyelash appointment and do exactly that. For months my therapy bills have had the billing code “F43.10,” and I look that up too: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Unspecified. My mind seizes on “unspecified,” and I decide the term is a hedge; no one really knows what’s going on with me after all. I’m sitting in a Volvo, post eyelash appointment on my way to a manicure, and this does not strike me as the life of a traumatized person.
But then there’s another life, one in which I can’t stop crying no matter what or where I am; in which I sometimes can’t breathe because there is a lasso around my neck or chest, tightened by some invisible force; in which I chain smoke, drink, lash out at people; in which my own health has completely, mysteriously tanked, despite working out (kinda a lot actually).
This all started after my dad died, but it’s not just about his death. Sure, there’s your standard-issue grief. But I strongly suspect — and so does my therapist — that my never-ending spiral is caused by this: as my dad’s health proxy I tried, and yet failed spectacularly, to make sure he didn’t suffer the week before he died. While this failure doesn’t feel like my legs were blown off in Iraq, it does feel like his were, and for a for days I was screaming for help while he bled out, but help never came.
A shaky slideshow of memories clicks away: there’s me, crying in my office, calling Kaiser for the first time to ask for hospice order, after it was clear that my dad wasn’t recovering from an infection that started as a basic UTI. He couldn’t speak, walk or eat. Kaiser took message after message but never called back. Emails were answered by some sort of robotic…
