My PTS Story

You may think that I missed the rest of the acronym but I really don't think that the D in the whole equation fits my experience very well.

I didn't even know I had it. It actually seems kind of lame to talk about it even now. Why do we talk about difficult things in our lives? Trauma? Are we vying for sympathy? Or is what I feel right now, the feeling that if I tell my story maybe there are others out there who have the same/similar experience that need somewhere to connect and maybe, just maybe there is an institution that needs re-vamping. You be the judge.

On our way home from our honeymoon 3 years ago I was laying in the passenger seat with my teeth chattering. I knew I was sick but thought I had the flu. I just wanted to get home to the apartment, take a bath and go to sleep. Hours later it was after 2 in the morning and I am sitting in the bath crying, shaking, sweating and not able to talk in a coherent manner. My SM took me to the ER where I ended up spending several hours answering questions to a nurse and a student doctor and filing paperwork in-between bouts of not being able to remember things and my chattering teeth. By that point my sweater was soaked through with sweat. I think they gave me 2 over the counter pain killers.

When the doctor finally arrived he asked if I had any idea what I might have I responded that I thought it may be a UTI considering I had just gotten married and it can go with the territory when it is your first partner. (Can I tell I am trying to put that as tactfully as possible, HA, I just didn't want to blast your delicate sensibilities with the fact that many virgins after having sex for the first time go rounds with a UTI.) The doctor briskly told me that wasn't the case, I didn't have a UTI and he needed to perform a vaginal exam. Out came the cold metal speculum, the room was filled with few nurses the doctor and the woman doing paperwork. It was cold and I was terrified and mortified. I had never had an exam. I had always been taught that everything there was private, that I shouldn't let people violate my privacy. I was confused, sick and both SM and I were worried so we didn't say anything. I just cried. After that they finally ran the urine test, the doctor came in shortly after and said "you have a bad UTI", he wrote me a prescription for antibiotics and sent me home. The didn't start me on any and we had to wait through the rest of the night to get the prescription filled as soon as anything opened.

To make a bad story worse it turns out that he gave me the wrong type of antibiotic and only a few days worth when I needed at least 10 days. It goes on with more drama from there but it would just subtract from the original story which was giving you a peak at my PTS realization.

I went in to the ER on Saturday night. Why? Well because I knew I had a bad UTI and of course it was Saturday night so nothing but the ER is open and nothing on Sunday and I knew I couldn't wait until Monday morning. Seriously, somebody needs to get a 24 hour clinic up in this joint. There was hardly any paperwork and there was no one waiting so I got right in to see an RN. When the doctor came in for his 5 second visit he had me lay down so that he could touch my stomach and back to see if there were key pain points. I froze. I started shaking and feeling panicked, when he touched me I flinched.

I can laugh at myself a bit now. The doctor on Saturday didn't do anything, just his job. But on the inside I knew I had touched on something. And now what do I do about it? Well, when a traumatic event has happened it takes telling the story at least 50 times for it to become history. So here is my
story.

After reviewing I should actually add that this is not a diagnosis of any kind but merely a way, with some dry humor, to describe the emotions that I ran in to during my ER visit on Saturday and realizing that I still felt somewhat victimized by the events in the ER 3 years ago.

"Life is like...

... a box of chocolates." Or that is what Forrest Gump would have us believe. So I get his point, "you never know what you are going to get". Very true. That is why I was never a fan of those boxes of chocolates, I love chocolate and there is just nothing worse than biting in to something you should love and finding that someone stuffed full of some kind of gooey or chewy gunk. It is really a terrible experience.

I'm off track now. "Life is like a box of chocolates." Mmmm not so much. Chocolate is a wonderful thing but it does nothing to fill you up, it doesn't satisfy like real food does and an excess of it leaves you over-sugared, under-nourished and leaves you with a couple of extra pounds to carry around. Chocolate is an extra, a treat. Does that sound like life? Maybe. I have met people that seem to treat life that way and it leaves them the same way as a chocolate overdose.

I have always felt that I have lived a wonderful and adventurous life but this summer has opened my eyes in a new way. Maybe it was turning 25 and really having something click that I am REALLY an adult and that there are so many things I want to do in my life and that there is just a set amount of days... but it didn't come with the feelings that life was fatal it came with the feeling that life is to be LIVED, that life is ALIVE, that it is thriving and growing and moving. This has been the theme of the summer. Life.

Life to me is a meal. It is hot soup and a hearty cheese bred on a cold day. It is Thanksgiving dinner. It is comfort food. It is something that I enjoy every bite of and then scrape up the leftovers and something that a take a tiny bit more of even though I am full just because I want to savor one more spoonful.

Speaking of dinner....

The Love Muscle

"I love you" can be one of the cheapest phrases ever to have a price. I have just ran in to a series of circumstances where someone would profess their undying desire to visit or their undying "love" but the odd thing was there was absolutely no action put behind the words. Who hasn't heard "love is a verb", how corny right? Who hasn't heard "actions speak louder than words", doubly corny right? I mean we all hear it, we all know it, duh, we all practice it right? Right?

I purpose that we are all acting under some sort of social rule, a rule that tells us that we have to be "polite" to people that we know, we have to act concerned and we must tell them how profusely we miss them and like them even if we know we are completely unwilling to put any effort in to actual human contact. So what is it that makes us say these things when we really have no interest in connecting with that person? Or is it that there really is interest or some vague sort of desire but we really have removed ourselves so far from the work that it takes to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships that our relationship building skills, our caring, has atrophied?

Love is a muscle and the effort that it takes to exert that muscle is the action and work that we put in to building and maintaining the relationships in our lives.