I honestly could not have gotten through my own trauma as much as I have to date without the dedicated help I have received from well-qualified mental health professionals since the event. I realize daily that I am still very much recovering from that trauma, and I honestly suspect I might be in some form or another for the rest of my life. Part of this ongoing recovery is learning to “reframe trauma,” or trying to answer the following question: What, if anything, have I learned from those experiences in my life?
Obviously, as with anyone else who has gone through a particularly traumatic event in their life, this has been an extremely difficult question for me to answer over the past two years. So much so that for a long time, probably close to a year, when asked that question by my therapist I would reply, “Nothing. It was just some awful shit that happened that I wish more than anything had not, and that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” Even now when reflecting on that time, I feel an intense sadness and anger, at times at the people involved who had power over me, at times at my family for not advocating in some more effective, forceful way to get me home, at times at myself for “allowing” it to happen in the first place, and at times just in general, that I or anyone else should ever have to go through such things.
However I HAVE worked through some aspects of that trauma and I am committed to keep doing so as long as it takes me. It is in the spirit of sharing this journey and what I learned that I start this portion of the blog, which I have entitled “Lessons Learned.” These posts will focus on precisely what you’d think, the lessons I have learned and that I continue to learn as a result of this experience. For the first of these I will focus on my first post on the blog: Trapped in Hell.
Initial thoughts – the way that I wrote this post. I wrote “Trapped in Hell” in the first person in a stream-of-consciousness manner for two reasons: 1. That is the how I remember it happening to me and how I experienced my thoughts and actions in the moment, as best as I can remember, but more importantly 2. For several months after these events and even now and then these days I had and will have flashbacks of this moment and others from my time in that hospital, and when this happens I quite literally feel it happening as clearly and as vividly as I remember it happening.
This is, as you can imagine, a terrifying thing to experience. Having never had quite as traumatic of an experience before this time in my life, I never knew what flashbacks of an event like this are like. I now feel even more compassion than I could have ever felt previously for others who go through them. I still experience them from time to time, particularly during very triggering events for me, like when I feel particularly disoriented for any reason, or out of control, or in some highly institutionalized or otherwise controlled settings. I have learned several very helpful strategies for coping with flashbacks that I’d love to share at some point, but not in this post.
The main point is that “Trapped in Hell” is written as best as I can to mirror the experience I had at the time. I have since likened this experience to a kind of amnesia, or a kind of “resetting,” if you will of my experience. This was the first major reset that I remember happening in the hospital, but unfortunately it happened many, many times while I was there, and each time was in some ways as startling and disorienting as this first time. And before you think of the obvious question, the answer is yes, I tried many times to speak to the mental health professionals at the hospital about this, but A. I was confused and disoriented most of the time and rarely made sense to anyone, let alone the professionals, and B. they completely dismissed me every time I DID make sense. But this particular time was probably the most disorienting because the room I was in was completely unfamiliar and I could not for the life of me remember how I ended up there.
Even more distressing at the time was the realization that I did not remember where I had left my infant son. Up to that point in my life I had never been away for him for longer than maybe a day or two, so that this feeling was as though I had set him down somewhere, walked away, lost consciousness, woke up and he was gone and I had no idea where he went. It was terrifying.
However the positive that I tried later to take away from this experience and have since reminded myself of in times of distress, is that my love for and urge to protect my son are so strong that even in an event such as this in which I was essentially psychotic, I still had the basic need and where-with-all to question why I was away from my son, even if I had no way of answering that at the time. The fact that I would do anything for my son was completely obvious before this point in my life, but this event (and the weeks after it) solidified this within me more than I can ever explain. I learned in this time what defines the core of me, and it is truly and honestly a desire to provide what is best for my son.
The last thing to mention about this particular event, into which I plan to get much more detail later on, is that earlier that morning I am relatively certain that I was given the drug Risperidone. This is significant because the facility would continue to administer this drug to me for two weeks, despite clear evidence from very early on that I was having very strong adverse reactions to it (perhaps as early as this incident).
Later this reaction would be labeled in the facilities notes as NMS-like symptoms. This is also very important to note because they chose, for whatever reason, to never tell me about this diagnosis, most likely and probably because it looks particularly bad for them, as they caused all of those symptoms from the very beginning and never took responsibility for them. In fact, I originally learned about NMS through my own investigation after my hospitalization several months later, when I was researching side effects of the drug Risperidone since I had so clearly had a terrible reaction to it. I plan to post more on NMS later, but i wanted to be sure that this caveat was added here.
The only other takeaway I could mention from this event is to point to my resourcefulness in attempting to “wake myself” by peeing on the bed. While I’ll admit though that this definitely made me look crazy at the time, in the moment it felt like a very logical solution to this altered mental state I found myself in, and while it didn’t work, I’m confident that this type of thing would have occurred to me prior to my hospitalization – it’s just the way my mind works. (Though I’d hope and do believe that with a clear mind I wouldn’t have actually TRIED it!)
The Absolute Center of Everything 