When Disaster Strikes a Trauma Victim

Trauma triggers are everywhere, and it is how you deal with them and move on that is important

Living with Complex PTSD is not easy. Life does not give anyone a pass on the bad times, and as survivors of child abuse, we feel everything intensely. I can only relate this to living everything through a magnifying glass. Every feeling, encounter, and social situations are blown up into 3D mega sharp impact. Survivors feel EVERYTHING intensely! It can be exhausting to live this way but most of us seek help and we manage our daily triggers with coping strategies. I’m talking about normal triggers that happen to everyone in daily life. It can be anything that sets us off and you don’t have to be a survivor to feel affected by a situation. Triggers are everywhere and can affect anyone. What I’m talking about are triggers that affect survivors of abuse and trauma. Those triggers affect us more deeply both psychologically and physically. You only have to think back to an argument or a situation at work where you felt uncomfortable. Somewhere in that conversation, there was a trigger and it affected you deeply. You may have come home with a headache or stomach cramps which are two very common physical side-effects that I suffer from regularly. Trauma triggers are everywhere, and it is how you deal with them and move on that is important.

When Traumatic Events Happen

Survivors of abuse and trauma are not immune to life events. I am sure most of us who have lived for several decades have experienced plenty of traumatic events. The death of an older relative, a car accident, failed an important exam, or divorce. All of these are common in normal life. How do you deal with these events? Most often you have support from family and friends or a counselor who can help talk through these. These are vital networks of safety when life strikes us negatively.

My son got extremely sick over the Christmas holiday. We had been surrounded by our family to celebrate together. In the evening after the family had left our house, to go back to their homes in other states, my son got sick. It happened so quickly, and it felt to me like someone had snatched the very foundation from under me. My world was hurting and there was nothing I could do to help him. We took him to the emergency room and watched him suffer agonizing pain and sickness. The doctors did tests and blood draws which showed a raging infection, but where? How could they fix him before he went into septic shock? My husband and I were in pieces and sat clutching our precious boy between us knowing there was nothing we could do for him in that moment but to love him.

My son was rushed into surgery to try and locate the infection somewhere in his stomach and stop it before it was too late. It turned out to be a ruptured and messy appendix which caused all the trauma, and we thanked our lucky stars that our precious son had been saved. However, that night my body just couldn’t relax. I was in shock myself over worrying and consoling a desperately sick child. I was sat by my son’s hospital bed watching him breathe reassuring even breaths, watching his monitors and IV drips and tubes like a hawk watching its next prey. I was far from relaxed, and my nerves were not wrong. My instincts pointed to something else even though the evidence kept proving otherwise.

Doctors do not run unless it is an emergency

“He’s doing well.” The nurses were telling us, but I knew something was not right. My son’s pallor was turning greener by the hour, and I knew he was not out of the proverbial woods yet. Something was causing him to get worse. I begged the nurses to listen to me and do more tests and draw blood. The results made the doctors come running. Doctors do not run unless it is an emergency.

My son was dying, and he was rushed back to surgery. My husband and I were left standing in the room, childless and watching the space our son had just vacated. We were not allowed to come with him. He must have been so scared in that big adult bed as he was wheeled briskly away from us. I felt that loss acutely like someone had cut off my arm.

My son was in surgery for over three hours and my husband, and I sat in the entrance hall to the hospital where the nurses asked us to sit in and wait. Wait for what? There were no updates. People came and went through the entrance doors with smiling faces to visit loved ones, while our little boy was fighting for his young life with strangers who didn’t know him. Strangers who had healing hands that would save him that day. He came back out of surgery into the recovery room. He was bedded into a cocoon of warm air being pumped into his bed. He had been opened up for so long the doctors had to keep him warm and he was given a blood transfusion. It took a long time for him to open his eyes and we sat and prayed over him for hours. Our son was going to make it back from septic shock, but he had a long road to recovery in the coming days.

Our son was moved to intensive care in the children’s ward where he had a team of nurses fighting over him in the coming days. it was a battle of body versus medicine as the doctors made sure they kept enough medicine pumping through his veins to kill the bacteria which cause this. The doctors were hovering over him, reading his medical chart which was turning into a novel. He was a complex patient, but the doctors were determined to cure him. After fighting the infections for almost two weeks, we started to get our son back. He was able to smile and open his eyes, then eventually talk. He started to drink water and with every step forwards, an IV bag of medicine or a tube was removed. Our son was healing, and he is now able to walk and live normally again. We got him back home and even though he looks pale and fragile, he is also incredibly strong.

Children are incredible in the way they deal with trauma. Our son has been through a life-and-death experience, but he is now back home and being his normal self again. He is laughing and playing with his Legos and his sibling. As survivors of abuse and trauma, we can take notice of this. We were once in life-and-death situations, and we survived. It is how we deal with these events that shape us.

I know that I am far more damaged than my son after his illness but with time and help from those around me, I will be all right. As a mom, I completely understand the power of unconditional love that only a child can give you. I know my own parents did not have that for me and as much as that has traumatized me, I can now understand better why they acted like they did.

There is no comparison to the love you have for a child. I am lucky to have it and I treasure it every day. I refuse to let the trauma that my parents inflicted on me during my childhood affect how I live today. I love my children unconditionally. When they are sick, I’m with them and loving them. I care deeply and protect them like a mom should for her children.

As a final thought, I want you, my readers, to know that each and every one of you is precious and unique. We matter and our lives and feelings matter. We did not have the unconditional love of our parents, but we can go on regardless and be better human beings because of it.

 

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