PTSD from medical trauma is REAL

I HAVE PTSD

And I shouldn’t have had to diagnose it myself.

I still find it unbelievable that, in all that has happened to me since the chest pains Feb. 4, 2017, not one medical person has 1) asked me how I was doing mentally, or 2) warned me that I was at risk for PTSD.

I even, at one point recently, called the cardiologists’ office, and asked if they had anyone on staff who handled, you know, the psychological side of things. Nope.

I do want to state first and foremost that I am grateful to be alive. Grateful that medical personnel eventually managed to figure out what was wrong with me – a 95% blocked artery that was causing the chest pain, I assume, since the pain went away when they finally put that third stent in on the third catheterization in two weeks. It would be churlish not to be grateful for being alive.

I am also lucky to not have been visibly damaged – no heart surgery scar, for example.

It doesn’t help.

‘Trauma’ includes medical trauma

There are a lot of websites out there dedicated to what I’ll have to call ‘classical’ PTSD: the reaction some soldiers have to being in combat, the reaction some people will have to being raped or mugged. The classical form, if I may, includes things like flashbacks and nightmares, and has been popularized on TV as almost an alternate reality, where the person with PTSD almost has an excuse for overreacting to loud noises by re-enacting the original trauma.

But medical procedures can be intensely stressful, and medical procedures done on an emergency basis even more so.

A couple of quotes might help:

From Medical Disorders as a Cause of Psychological Trauma and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder:

Research has increasingly targeted serious or life-threatening illnesses as traumatic events, and a growing literature on PTSD among medical patients has developed (e.g. cancer, myocardial infarct, HIV diagnosis).

and

From When Treatment Becomes Trauma: Defining, Preventing, and Transforming Medical Trauma

Trauma experienced as a result of medical procedures,
illnesses, and hospital stays can have lasting effects. Those who experience
medical trauma can develop clinically significant reactions such as PTSD,
anxiety, depression, complicated grief, and somatic complaints.

Women are more than twice as likely to develop PTSD

The numbers in general are 10% of women and 4% of men will develop PTSD during their lifetime (fuzzy numbers – not sure of the PTSD definition used), which probably reflects that women have more stressors such as problems associated with pregnancy (Caesareans, miscarriages, and even ‘normal’ birth can be quite traumatic) and rape, as well as being socialized to ‘not make a fuss.’

From Facts About Women and Trauma:

Although the majority of individuals will be able to absorb the trauma over time, many survivors will experience long-lasting problems.

Approximately 8% of survivors will develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Many survivors currently living with PTSD experience symptoms that are both chronic and severe. These include: nightmares, insomnia, somatic disturbances, difficulty with intimate relationships, fear, anxiety, anger, shame, aggression, suicidal behaviors, loss of trust, and isolation.

Psychological disorders may also occur in conjunction with posttraumatic stress including depression, anxiety, and alcohol/substance abuse problems.

…

Research indicates that women are twice as likely to develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), experience a longer duration of posttraumatic symptoms, and display more sensitivity to stimuli that remind them of the trauma.

And cardiac events in women can be extra stressful

From the HeartSisters blog (where you can find a large number of articles by searching for PTSD):

By the latest account, one in eight heart attack survivors experiences a reaction called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although PTSD is usually associated with extreme trauma such as war, rape or a natural disaster, heart attack survivors can experience the same key symptoms: flashbacks that occur as nightmares or intrusive thoughts. As a result, the survivor actively tries to avoid being reminded of the event and becomes hyper-vigilant worrying that it will happen again.

It’s a high price to pay for having your life spared.
…
In the three studies that reported clinical outcomes, heart attack survivors with PTSD had double the risk of dying or experiencing a second heart attack as those without PTSD. The work was published online in the journal, Public Library of Science One.
…
Identifying PTSD early is an important step to coping with it. The sooner treatment is started, the more likely it will be successful.

My own risk factors should have warned someone:

Since my energy runs so low from CFS, almost anything extra will overwhelm my already-limited coping skills. I cannot suddenly manufacture more energy to cope with a crisis.

For whatever reasons, I experienced a particularly clumsy set of medical procedures which took over two weeks, three cardiac catheterizations and a nuclear stress test, and nine days in two different admissions to two hospitals each time, before they found and stented the right arterial blockage. Instead of going in for chest pains, having the catheterization, and waking up with the proper place stented – which should have happened on the first two days, the procedure was prolonged beyond anything reasonable. I still have no satisfactory explanation for this.

And, because of the same CFS, and which I warned them about, I have had a constant and continuous string of side effects from the medicines prescribed – and eventually withdrawn. I told them I always overreact to meds, and usually can’t tolerate them, but I was required to prove that by doing so. Did I get smaller doses than they would have given someone else? I don’t know. What I do know is that my body has rejected every drug so far with violent side effects, physical AND mental, and I am still experiencing some which may be related to the last drug they really want me to take (we’ll see about that).

‘Opinionated, over-educated female suddenly experiences total loss of control’ – that would have warned even me! Loss of control, by the way, makes any of the ‘consent’ forms I signed under those conditions meaningless. As well as the fiction that you actually get to choose any of what happens; I found that fiction – unwillingness of the doctors to say what I should do as if they stood behind their ‘recommendations’ – added incredibly to the stress.

Introvert suddenly having to deal with literally hundreds of new people – duh!

And the unfortunate major side effect that the meds kept me from using my main coping mechanism for stress: 3-5 half-hour naps/rests daily during which I spend most of the time doing yoga-type breathing which slows my heart rate and removes stress and allows me to process away the mental debris. Add the meds causing an increased heart rate for a nice recipe for PTSD simply from sleep deprivation.

Oh, and the pain. I cope with a large amount of pain normally on a daily basis; the increase – and them not wanting me to take additional pain medications I normally use – made excessive pain a constant companion, to the point that it was difficult to separate the pain into parts I could cope with – and all the rest. At one point I realized that I was putting up with a whole host of side effects making me a non-functional zombie, simply because those side effects didn’t hurt!

None of this is prescriptive: how do I know I have PTSD?

Here we go back to some of the symptoms and assessments, of which there are many on the web, with the caution that many if not most are for the more classical form.

From Screening for PTSD:

• I am troubled by having experienced a life-threatening event that caused intense fear and helplessness.
• I reexperience the events by repeated, distressing memories; and I have intense physical and emotional distress when I am exposed to things that remind me of the event.
• Reminders of the events affect me by avoiding activities and places or people who remind me of it; blanking on important parts of it; losing interest in significant activities of my life; sensing that my future has shrunk; and feeling my range of emotions is restricted.
• And I am troubled by problems sleeping; irritability and outbursts of anger; problems concentrating; feeling ‘on guard’; and have an exaggerated startle response.

What will I do about dealing with PTSD in myself?

There are a number of ways of dealing with PTSD which have been developed for the classic forms (and which can be, I read, amazingly effective for those who will seek help). They include talk therapy, some interesting procedures, and medications.

I am brought right smack up against my limitations again: I wouldn’t try a drug for this if you paid me, not after all the problems I’ve had with drugs recently; leaving the house another time a week to talk to someone – for a therapy which would probably take many weeks – isn’t a real possibility unless nothing else works; and I’m not new age enough to try things like the eye movement thing.

I will do as much as I can to handle this myself, now that I have a name for what is going on.

From HeartSisters again:

* UPDATE, August 13, 2013:  U.S. Staff Sargent and military Medal of Honor recipient Ty Carter has launched a campaign to remove the D from PTSD: “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is really a formal diagnosis for natural stress that one experiences after a traumatic event. The formal title of PTSD sometimes gives a false impression that the ‘disorder’ is something associated with a disease or a chemical imbalance, when in reality it is simply a biological response.

Three steps are necessary to successfully treat the condition:
•    acknowledging one has symptoms
•    communicating with others about it
•    seeking treatment without fear of judgment

This post is the review of the first step – acknowledging my symptoms and what they mean.

The second step (yes, I told my husband, and I will tell the doctor this Thursday when I see her, trying very hard to not be judgmental) – I am communicating with anyone who reads this. And I’m hoping it will prevent distress in someone else when they realize how easily PTSD can happen, and how common it is. And that it isn’t just the classical war and rape form.

And I will, if I cannot handle it myself, seek professional help. Because those activities I used to enjoy, and my ability to write, are what was making life bearable for someone with a chronic illness and zero energy, and I’m not going to give them up without the fight of my life. For my life.

I don’t feel sorry for myself, and I’m trying hard not to feel too angry.

As always, comments are welcome. It isn’t really communicating unless it’s a two-way street.

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