What is trauma? What differentiates a traumatic experience from a difficult one?
One might experience something difficult as being caught in
a very bad storm, frightened by nearby lightning and soaked to the skin. After darting
into a shelter to wait it out, one might feel relief while toweling off the
water. That was hard and unfortunate, but now it’s over. One might even learn
important lessons from a difficult experience that positively influence future choices.
But still, the damage can be repaired.
Unlike a difficult experience, trauma cannot be wiped away
cleanly. Instead, trauma permeates the skin, steeps into bones, dissolves in blood
and circulates through all the vessels, big and small, dissipating relentlessly
into every last nook and mysterious cranny of the body. Trauma settles into all
of the dark and mysterious hiding places: it swells to fill the
pockets of joints, adheres to the ropey surface of ligaments, intricately weaves
into the delicate spiderweb of nerve filaments. Trauma lies in wait, always at
the ready to rush back to the bloodstream and flood the brain.
At the slightest trigger, the legacy of trauma is activated.
Going far beyond memory, trauma unleashes an assault on the senses:
An unstable wobble in the stomach, the acrid taste of bile
rising in the back of the throat, the heart racing at breakneck speed with the thudding
of impending doom.
Your partner seizing in car, seizing again and again in the
familiar red chair. The intensity as he silently held you in his gaze for the
last time.
The sounds. The many, many sounds. Sirens, code
announcements over a loudspeaker, urgent phone calls with dire news and split-second
decisions required, grunts of human suffering and cries of anguish.
Trauma is a full-body, repetitive experience.
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I didn’t realize that I was traumatized for a long time. However,
my dread of phone calls, fear of mail from health insurance companies and the
government, and the indescribable dread that the other shoe is juuuust about to drop
is not characteristic of the typical 40-something person.
It’s watching TV and hearing the sound of an IV alarm in the
background of the show, then being right back in the ER, devoid of the happy
ending that the program will inevitably feature.
Yes, the endless alarms of the hospital characterize trauma for
me. The rhythmic, annoying beep-beep that might simply mean an IV drip has completed
or a sensor was disconnected, or more sinisterly indicate depressed or elevated
vital signs. The sound is dissonant, unpleasant, distressing; like someone is
leaning on three adjacent keys of a synthesizer over and over and over. Two
short off-key signals, then a longer pause.
Enh-enh. Enh-enh. Enh-enh. Enh-enh. Enh-enh.
The patient is powerless to silence the alarm. The family cannot stop it, either. It might be nothing, but it just as well could mean the end has come.
Enh-enh. Dan-ger. Enh-enh. End-time. Enh-enh.
It is impossible to relax or sleep in a hospital when that
alarm is constantly going off.
Still, these years later, it wakes me up from a dead sleep
sometimes.
The alarm insists that bad things happened, are happening,
will continue to happen.
Enh-enh. Enh-enh…
Everyone I love has died or will die.
End-times. End-times. End-times. End-times. End-times.
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This is trauma.
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