Stubbed toes, double pneumonia and PTSD

It is complicated.

Tell me I am sick, and the inner trembling starts. In my complex PTSD brain I-am-now-in-the-crosshairs-of-every-person’s-rifle. Perhaps more than others, I do not like to be sick.

Every. Single. Medical type thing sends me into a flap. It doesn’t matter how serious it is - a stubbed toe, double pneumonia. Migraine. Whatever. Whatever it is, I fear it. Not the discomfort, or the potential of death. It is the vulnerability.

Diseased, my ability to fight, outrun, outsmart the assailant who I ever expect is coming, is lamed. But the terror isn’t. A fear now out of control, aware that I cannot get away. From childhood always terribly vulnerable in life, my adult self is more vulnerable when ill.

So, like an injured animal I may try to hide it, sliding the bandaged toe out of sight, attempting to muffle that pneumatic cough. Praying for lingering dysentery-type symptoms to go away, sinister looking moles to melt into my skin. For my ailing body to just sort itself out. So that no one sniffs any whiff of infirmity.

When asked about my pallor, “I’ve been a bit unwell,” I may confess, omitting the bit about the 2-week hospitalisation and nasal gastric tube, instead placing careful emphasis on the “everything is hunky dory now” end to the conversation. Because…

Once friends/colleagues/associates work out that I am really, truly not mental-illness-mind-manufactured (their default assumption) physically ill, my life suddenly belongs to someone else. Decisions are made for me, my capability assessed. I cannot do/must stop doing what I want to do. A mentally ill person who is also physically ill (they rationalise), can no longer make appropriate life choices. For my own good (they say), I am now under every person’s thumb, every one of these well-meant non-medical souls full of menacing treatment advice.

Unnoticed by others, as my plague drags on, I succumb to a dissociative high fever – a dissociation outside dissociation, where I wander through each day floating in and out of panic induced ‘semi functional-consciousness’. I am hobbled by this thing, whatever illness it may be, any control over my life now gone.

Sickness = Vulnerability.

And treatment. Illness requires treatment. In my subtle dissociation-fever I am suddenly under attack from medical instructions, little black words on a piece of paper I flap around in agitation because there is a growing to-do list on here that requires thought and organisation. Little life skills which don’t fit into floaty.

Then, when an instruction actually dribbles in, there is the resentment laced fear of being told what to do. Instructions must be obeyed. Choice is not an option. The educated medical person’s ‘rules’ come in the childhood-echoed tone of my father – backed with the anticipation of his effective enforcement. So, those instructions must be followed TO THE LETTER to avert disaster. Annoying, I ask multiple times for clarification, ring 24hr pathology information lines for a recap of the rules for collection, again and again and again. Increasingly paralysed by my overwhelmed-ness, I no longer know what I am even thinking (let alone doing). I am vulnerable.

And suspicious.

Doctor, specialist, specialist, specialist, allied health – I tightrope walk between offices, ever grateful that I have a GP who gathers the ropes and ties them together for me, into a safety net.

Lucky, because the more tests, procedures, the more whirl-windy my life becomes, the more my poor brain becomes convinced that there is no one on my side. The ‘support’ of people, any person seems increasingly illusionary, fragile. Suspect. A ‘fact’ which makes me increasingly narky, and difficult.

Especially because, treatment means power. And not mine.

Power penetrates. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Penetration is the ultimate humiliation, shame, fear, ‘victory’ over another person. Under anaesthetic, or wide awake – it doesn’t matter - I do not want anything penetrating me – not anywhere, anytime, for any reason. But, if I want treatment, I have no choice.

Think about it.

Even examinations are often penetrative. That instrument thing that goes into the ear to assess temperature? That triggers me, although no one would twig, their examination concentration fooled by my admirable show of I-am-not-vulnerable-here.

But I am vulnerable here. I am exposed. For those (admittedly therapeutic) minutes someone else owns my body, my control, my power – just like when I was a child. So then there’s the flashbacks, the panic attack in the dentist’s chair, the rapid heartbeat in the waiting room, the nausea during the blood test.

Yet…

Under all of that, insidious and impossibly deep, there is a child’s whisper, curiously full of relief: “He thinks I am fragile when sick. As long as I am sick I am safe, from him”. A voice dotted with dim memories of chocolate on the bedside table to speed recovery, a gentle hand on a burning forehead as I lie in my bubble of sick-safety, confused by that hand, dread-filled at the thought of recovery.

As an adult I am threatened when sick. As a child I was threatened when well.

Either way, vulnerable.

So, if I seem ambivalent about my health, that would be why.

Fear.

But,

it is complicated.

Like any story, there are two sides to it.