That is tragic, but understandable.
I think we only made it because we had so many good years behind us. I don’t know. I don’t like to think it was that precarious. But it was a bad year.
23 years ago today I suffered a brain injury due to a demyelinating disease. At 10AM I was sitting at my desk on the phone, at 11:30 I was in ER unable to talk and completely paralyzed on my right side.
2 weeks of in-patient acute care, 6 weeks of in-patient rehab, and 4 months of out-patient rehab followed while I re-learned how to speak, walk, and use my right hand. I still have residual effects many years later.
The doctors never figured the root cause so I spent years with a fear that it would happen again. I got past the worry of having it happen when I was alone and unable to get help, but there was definite PTSD.
So sorry you had to go through that, every parent worse nightmare.
That all sounds tough <3 I’m glad you and your husband got through it. Not adopting (I missed that – I was gone from the Dope for a while and I think it was during my hiatus) sounds like it was absolutely the right decision for the child and for you. (Also, majorly side-eyeing that agency!) I love that you’ve never forgotten that kid, though; that he was clearly important to you.
I feel the same way about my son too – the joy of getting to be his mom outweighs by orders of magnitude the grief of the miscarriage. (I also have an older daughter whom of course I love dearly, but thankfully I wasn’t working through any grief experiences with her birth!)
Thank you all. I’ve mentioned my son’s story before on other posts. No one can understand the trauma of losing a child unless you’ve done it yourself. It’s a club no one wants to be in. It ends up defining you in a way. Whenever I’m around people that I don’t see all the time, I know that the first thing they think of when they see me is - her son died. Some ask how I’m doing, some will talk about him with me and some won’t even bring his name up.
I don’t know if everyone that has lost someone is like me, but I LOVE to talk about my son. It touches my heart to hear someone talk about him, tell me a story about him, anything. Because one of the big fears is that he will be forgotten. And I can’t live with that.
“Let me hear the beautiful music of his name. It soothes my broken heart and sings to my soul.”
I was in a car crash about ten years ago. I had no physical injuries at all, but there were several mentally traumatizing aspects:
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I lost control in the rain at highway speed. The car started to spin, and I couldn’t stop it; I knew what to do, and had actually done it before many times, but my brain just froze up this time. The sliding lasted for several seconds, and there was a point at which I was sliding backwards at high speed toward a guard rail and couldn’t tell when the collision was going to happen. There was enough kinetic energy involved for this to be potentially fatal, and I felt my fear level rise up and up and up…and then it plateaued. I’d never had that happen before. It was so remarkable that even while it was happening, I had the realization that “holy shit, I’ve pegged my fear meter.” The blind sliding, followed by the awful sounds of crunching sheet metal and plastic when the inevitable collision finally happened, really seared the whole incident in my brain.
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It was entirely my fault, and I totaled my car. My insurance company paid out about $26,000. I had never before in my life caused such incredible destruction. Yeah, they signed on and accepted the risk, but that huge payout just reinforced the magnitude of how badly I had screwed up.
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With no accidents in the 30 years since I had got my license, I had considered myself a safe and capable driver and enjoyed a reputation as such among my friends and family. In the course of destroying my car, I had ruined my perfect track record and felt like an absolute moron for not being able to correct the skid before it got beyond control, and felt mortally embarrassed having to tell my friends and family what I’d done.
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Although I was uninjured, the damage to the passenger side of my car was horrifying. If I had had a passenger with me, they would have been fatally dismembered. My wife often likes to go out on errands with me, but for some reason she declined that day. If someone had died in my car (or someone else’s car if there had been another car involved), it’s likely that I would have killed myself later.
PTSD? You bet. Thinking obsessively about all of those things moved me to tears repeatedly, and in fact six days after it happened I had to take an afternoon off from work because I couldn’t stop crying and shaking. It happened again two years later: I was watching an auto race when there was a big multi-car crash, and the in-car camera footage during the replay shows cars spinning out of control just like mine was, with collisions coming from unseen directions at unexpected moments, and all those same horrible crunching noises. And yes, another episode of crying and shaking, and I had to stop watching the race.
It’s been many years now, and the PTSD has mostly faded - but I could probably have benefited from some kind of therapy early on to help manage my anguish.
I think I have issues from a crash I experienced when I was a teen. I was driving with my Mom in the passenger seat. My Mom was recovering from major surgery and it was the first time she was allowed to ride in a car again.
I braked kinda hard at a yellow light and the truck behind me wasn’t paying attention and slammed into the back of the car. We went flying into the intersection but fortunately were not struck by any other cars. My Mom made this horrible moaning sound but she turned out to be okay. Other than a sprained neck I was OK. But I was so shaken up I ended up sobbing in the arms of the guy who hit me.
Our car was totaled. The backseat was completely fucked up. Anyone riding back there would have lost their legs at a minimum.
I am a hypervigilant driver to this day, always checking what’s behind me, always stressed when I go through green lights that it might change at a weird time and I’ll have a split second to decide whether to stop. I’m an anxious driver in general and part of it is social anxiety but a lot of it I think I owe to that car accident.
I haven’t been in a collision since but I consider that good luck. I’ve had some near misses, including one slick winter day when a suburban skidded out on the freeway in front of me. It did a complete 180 and and slammed into a guardrail, missing me by feet.
So yeah, I can understand how that would be traumatic.
When people ask how many kids I have I say 3 and change the subject mostly because I just don’t want to explain to strangers and coworkers etc. People know my ex has 2 sons and it’s hard for her when people ask, “Don’t you wish you had a daughter?” My ex use to get her a little cake on her birthday and light a candle. I still make sure her stocking is filled for Christmas (extra candy for the boys). I don’t know if it is more about remembering her (I do plenty of that) or making a statement that she existed.
I am so sorry for what you had to do and what you are still going through. It really doesn’t ever end.
We still all get together for my son’s birthday. We usually meet at the local pizza restaurant - aunts, uncles, grandmas, cousins, etc. It’s a way to keep him close. His best buddies send me texts on his birthday. It means a lot to me.
I’m not sure what you are referring to here - are you referring to the elimination of the “bereavement exclusion” which discouraged diagnosing major depressive disorder if the symptoms began too soon after the death of a loved one or the fairly new diagnosis of “prolonged grief disorder” or something else?
I agree - I had what I felt was a completely disproportionate reaction when I heard about the death of someone I hadn’t even spoken to in nearly 40 years. It hit me so hard I considered seeking professional help. But then I realized that not only was this the first death of a contemporary who was ever important to me*, it was also the death of the person who knew me best during a specific period of my life and it was as if I was losing a piece of myself.
As far as personally experiencing trauma - the first time I was pregnant (at 24) I wasn’t happy about it at first , but I changed my mind. And then I found out it was twins. And then I miscarried one and finally the other was stillborn at 25 weeks. I now understand why they say people with depression are more at risk for suicide when they seem to be improving. It’s been 35 years, and I’m still not comfortable with any answer to " How many children do you have?" . No matter how I answer , it seems wrong.
* of course , other people who were important to me have died, but they were older and other people around my age have died, but they were never more than acquaintances.
Thank you for this – this makes sense to me of what I felt was a completely disproportionate reaction to hearing about the death of someone I had lost touch with for fifteen years. It’s been months and I still am sad and angry thinking about it. Like you, it was the first death of a contemporary who was important to me, and who shared a specific period of life with me.
There’s a moment in Agatha Christie’s book A Murder is Announced where a character’s girlhood friend is killed and Ms. Marple remarks that it’s so much harder when you’re older because you lose all of the people who remember the past you shared.
My whole life I’ve always had my Aunt who was there the entire time and lived through my traumas with me. There’s a comfort in knowing I have a person I don’t have to explain anything to, she just gets it. What happens when she’s gone, when there is nobody left who gets it?
There’s also a poignant story in Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (a masterpiece.) An elderly woman tries desperately to prove to some neighborhood kids that she was once young like they were. They don’t believe her, and she becomes more and more desperate to prove it, but nothing she does, showing them her toys or the clothes she wore, is convincing to them. At the end she realizes she has to let go of whoever she was in the past and she announces that she has never been young and invites the kids to a bonfire in which she burns all her childhood things. I’ve always been moved by the story, but that moment with Ms. Marple helps me understand it better.
I’m so sorry for your losses. I’m so sorry to all of you for all of your losses.
Years ago my brother was in a car accident I never heard anything about. He was sober, but out with friends who were very drunk. He was in the backseat of the car with two drunk friends in the front. The driver fell asleep/passed out and ran off the road. The car rolled many times. He was just bruised up badly but it really affected him mentally. He could not be a passenger in a car after that. The feeling of not being in control was too much for him.
Years later he visited us. I had just put new tires on my Jeep. He needed something from the store, so I offered to drive due to the snowfall that was ongoing. I drove kinda wildly, sliding around on the roads intentionally. Nothing too crazy, but at some point I looked over at him and he was white knuckled holding on and crying. When we got home he told me the story. Our ride was his first attempt at being a passenger.
Fortunately I got away with it and nothing bad happened, but one time on a road trip to get home in time I did 85 in heavy thunderstorms and later belatedly realized I’d been one single slipup away from death.
Stale green lights are the bane of my existence. They fill me with dread and despair. If it turns yellow right now, do I slam on the brakes and risk getting rear-ended and whiplash, or do I floor it and risk T-boning someone at the intersection? Either way, there’s going to be a lot of metal, blood, and fire.
I’m sure traffic lights sense my fear and enjoy tormenting me. They always turn yellow right when I reach the point of no return. Oh, it’s not a coincidence. It’s a deliberate act of malice that traffic lights do, just to mess with me. Just last week I approached a green light that should have stayed green long after I passed (it turned green just milliseconds before)—but it didn’t! The cursed light blinked yellow exactly when I reached the point of panic.
Yellow lights are evil.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I think my husband thinks I’m insane. But he never worries about anything - or at least he didn’t, until he became a father.
When approaching a green light, I look down and to the right. If there is a pedestrian crossing, then I can tell how stale the green light is. White- plenty of time, orange hand with the countdown going- depends on the number in the countdown, and orange hand alone- slow down so as to be able to stop, it’s about to go yellow. When available, it relieves a lot of the stress in deciding whether to slow down or not.
Nothing too harrowing on the family side-I knew my father was going with heart disease, died in his sleep in 2000 an hour after sharing a toilet paper joke with my mom-I was in Wash. state with birth relatives, had to cancel my original flight (the airline refused any bereavement refunds or reroutings), so in a way it was a blessing.
Guess the worst was the father of my girlfriend (we had known and vibed with each other for 6 years up to that point but were only an official couple for like 3 days) threatening me with various crap incl. bodily harm, and thus forcing us to break up. He had promised her in an arranged marriage, you see, but that at least she fought tooth and nail and got him to cancel it. [yes this was in the US, they were Middle Eastern had moved here soon after she was born in point of fact] It was so shattering that I fairly quickly blotted it entirely from my memory, and as of today have no direct recall of any specifics, just know where it happened and what was said in general.
Quick question on that note, since someone else mentioned a baby sitter.
I was c. 8, and my parents came home to news that I had peed on the babysitter (c. 20 years old, college student), while sleepwalking. Apparently dribbled a bit on her shoes. Always wondered if she had yeah…
#1, I recall no other instances of sleepwalking, ever (as in either parent or my sister noticing me wandering around in a fugue at night). #2, why would I pee on her? My pajamas would have caught it all and missed her, right? [note I have no recall of having to clean myself up, see my previous entry about repressed memories…]
All circumstantial, but what do you all think?
All signs point to repressed memories not being a thing, and if they are repressed, you absolutely cannot trust anything you “recover.”
I have a few memory holes I just have to live with. But you don’t have to remember anything necessarily to say, “I feel weird about this” and kind of process that weird feeling on its own terms.
For example, I find one of my memory gaps greatly distressing, and I don’t try to fill the gap but I also don’t try to suppress or ignore the feelings that come up.