Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (24 page)

If none of that was enough to trigger his old trauma and reduce him to a quivering mound of post-traumatic stress, backing up local police forces could have been, particularly when it involved recovering dead bodies, like dragging the body of a woman out of a river in New Caledonia one night alone.

Previous trauma wasn’t the last match Nico had on the list of risk factors. He also—evidently—had a parent with “mental health issues, including depression.” And Nico’s sense of safety as a developing child was threatened way more often than mine; while his father had a terrifying hair-trigger temper, mine was a bucket of hugs. Both of us were clear of the rest of risks. He did have me bested on most of the “resilience factors,” though. Those were elements and activities thought to reduce the risk of developing PTSD. Did Nico feel good about his own actions after he faced danger? Yes. Was he capable of overcoming fear to react and respond effectively in those situations? Sure, by precisely that kind of training. His test to join his unit involved a long and exhausting obstacle course in which he had to complete complicated tasks both before, and then after, being assaulted by a guy whose job it was to assault recruits. The vessels in Nico’s nose burst when the guy punched him in the face. Blood poured down his mouth and shirt for the rest of the exam. Once, I asked him on Skype, “What did you do today?” and what he did that day was get punched in the face some more; he had regular training days that involved face-punching, so nobody would forget what it was like, how to move past the shock of it and get on with their duties. And did Nico have coping strategies for the negative events he encountered? Yes, he did. He pointed out to me once that when
he
had had a violent or upsetting afternoon at work, he did his daily 400 push-ups (half with his feet on the ground, half with his feet elevated on a chair), ran between five and fourteen miles, and talked it over with his unit buddies.

I, you know, got drunk by myself.

But by these measures, I did do some things right. I reached out to friends and family. I took up therapy or a support group. Resilience factors aren’t guarantees, either. And like the risk factors, they can sound a little victim-blamey. As if certain people should never leave their houses, and that if they do and something bad happens, they had PTSD coming. And as if certain other people should’ve better employed great reserves of coping skills and self-care knowledge—which, if they were raised in most modern cultures, they never would have learned. And as if those same people should have accessed and practiced these tools in a society that was hostile both to mental illness and to victims. Forget risk factors and resilience factors. The National Institute of Mental Health puts it best when it says, “Anyone can get PTSD at any age.” Or as the Mayo Clinic explains simply, “Doctors aren’t sure why some people get PTSD.” It was impossible to know if I could’ve somehow prevented my own post-traumatic condition. It was impossible to know why one moment in Haiti had kicked off a disorder that would change my physiology and my future. And at this point, who cared?

Well, my insurance company did. Dr. Shere concluded that for whatever else had happened to me in history, it was indeed my rolling into Haiti on an atrocious day of that atrocious earthquake year and working on an atrocious story that had been the “sole cause” of my emotional destruction, according to her official report. Given the strength of my dissociation in Haiti, I’d been a likely candidate for long-lasting PTSD. Given the strength of my symptoms, I’d been in need of a lot more therapy before doing anything else. In Dr. Shere’s opinion, I had continued to be, as I embarked on new assignments in Haiti II and Europe and Africa and Ohio, “severely impaired.” Drastically more impaired than I was giving myself credit for, she told me in her office.

“PTSD is like a football injury,” she said, chiding me. She’d stared at me in wonderment—and, I felt, judgment—as I recounted the progression of events and assignments. “Once you incur an injury,” she said, “you need to stay on the bench until it’s a hundred percent healed.” With veterans, the incidence of PTSD increases with the tours and amount of combat experienced, and the longer and harder they serve, the more vulnerable they are.

Dr. Shere’s professional speculation was that by not going on indefinite leave the moment I’d got back from Haiti the first time, given the severity of my symptoms, I’d exacerbated my disorder. In Dr. Shere’s opinion, rather than submerging myself in more atrocities, I should have been trying to get on disability and letting myself get better. Repeated exposures to trauma can affect how difficult it is to recover as they accumulate. And Haiti Part I had arguably been multiple traumas, already. “Though I understand you may not have the resources to stop working,” she conceded.

Maybe working in the field had made the initial condition worse. Maybe not. PTSD sufferers often move between intrusive symptoms (the berserk ones) and constriction (the numbing stuff). My periods of calm post-Haiti Part I could have been that containment that naturally sets in, when trauma turns sneaky because you think you’re OK now that the screaming and sobbing is over. When you’re fine, if a little empty, or just prone to more pedestrian symptoms such as outbursts of anger, fear-fueled jealousy or intimacy issues, self-harm or nagging malcontentedness. When you wouldn’t present as PTSD symptomatic in a way that would make you go to the hospital but just in little life-ruining ways, persisting for so long after the incident that you might get misdiagnosed as depressed or anxious, but probably you’d never bother going to get diagnosed at all. You might move back into intrusive symptoms sometimes. On traumatic anniversaries, or because of particular triggers. Or because of nothing.

Anyway, Dr. Shere diagnosed me as alcoholic and suicidal. She diagnosed me with comorbid major depression as well as PTSD. She strongly advised full-time medication. Hers was consistent with Denise’s assessment: Though I’d had some pretty good shakeups in the past, I was fine and functioning before Haiti I, and I might have otherwise stayed that way.

Officially, my previous trauma was cleared of culpability. I had strong previous trauma recovery and a stellar track record at life. I was clearly, visibly, and only disturbed, Dr. Shere’s notes said, when she made me talk about Haiti, as opposed to anything else in my history. Still, regardless of whether it disturbed me daily—whether I “needed” previous trauma to have reached this traumatized state, whether anything was previous trauma’s “fault,” whether any of those events had been traumatic enough to qualify as trauma at all—all that stuff
had
happened.

And now it was coming back up.

*   *   *

“A secure sense of connection with caring people is the foundation of personality development,” Judith Lewis Herman writes. “When this connection is shattered, the traumatized person loses her basic sense of self. Developmental conflicts of childhood and adolescence, long since resolved, are suddenly reopened. Trauma forces the survivor to relive all her earlier struggles over autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy.”

Suddenly, ten years after my parents’ divorce, Denise and I were talking about it. We talked about it, and then we were done with it, or thought we were, and then we needed to talk about it some more. I’d done heavy crying about it when it happened, and had some rough days then, but I’d recovered. My relationship with my father had recovered. And I’d even covered it again, just to be thorough, with Meredith when we were talking about my own divorce. Now here I was crying about it all over on Denise’s table, and harder than ever.

If I’d known that was going to happen, I’m not sure if I’d have been better prepared, or if I would have quit before I started. “How are we still
talking
about this!” I yelled at Denise as I started sobbing about my dad, or my divorce, or other old, already handled news. “Seriously, Hurricane
Ka-TRINA
?” It was one thing, then another thing. My sister’s screechy guinea pig? Come on. It was like we were playing Whac-A-Mole.

My obstacles to mental health had seemed formidable enough. The more I learned, and the deeper we went, the more impossible my task seemed. I sunk into a parallel depression of dauntedness. Where I used to look nice for my hours-long Skype dates with Nico, checking myself in the mirror and perching myself in a broken street chair at my crappy donated kitchen table, I now took them in my bed, propped on pillows like an invalid, laptop in my lap, lacking the energy to sit up. The only times he saw me dressed and vertical were when our schedules aligned such that I had to talk to him while I was at the office.

“Hi, gorgeous,” I would say, my voice soft with exhaustion and affection, still enunciating very carefully. “How—was—your—day?”

“Hey, my baby,” he’d say. “My day was good.”

“What did you do at work today?” I would ask, slower and more deliberately than to a child.

And he would tell me about his deployment guarding the American embassy in Paris. Or evacuating the Eiffel Tower for a bomb threat. Or doing security at the G8 summit. Lately, he was on a long mission again, in Montpellier, supporting local police with the extra crime that came with the summer tourist season. He talked to me from stark dorms that housed his unit, trying to find moments away from his bunkmates. I attempted to talk to him about what I was going through, sometimes. A particularly frequent bout of Oklahoma flashbacks one week was an opportunity to give him details about the things that had scared me there. But I was shy. I was lying down and wearing pajamas most of the time, yes, but I still tried to give him the impression that I had some semblance of stability.

“What’s going on?” he asked, searching my cheerless eyes.

I hesitated. “I don’t want you to think I’m stupid.”

“I need to know what happened to my girlfriend.”

I felt like such an idiot when I started crying. But he was patient, and listened quietly when I whimpered, “They could’ve broken every bone in my face.”

I missed him.

Again. Still. Always.

The thing about being disconnected from yourself is that it accommodates great amounts of denial. All kinds of denial. That, for example, missing half your human feelings is not actually a good or cool trick. And you only have to disconnect a little, just stop listening, to ignore the things your bones are telling you: That your marriage is over. That your father was spending more money than he made, despite his having denied it when you asked him once whether someone might come to repossess the furniture. That you are a person who is vulnerable. To the world, and to a particular Frenchman, who is your touchstone, the pebble that you placed deep in your belly to grab onto when you got swept away, though he was far away from, and had never been, your home. That your love is oversize enough to threaten heart explosion—threaten everything—and that with all the tortures you are currently acquainting yourself with, equal to any of them is the distance between you, and that to reduce that distance permanently, everything in your life will have to change. Starting with you.

10.

“J’aime bien mieux etre malheureux
en t’aimant, que de ne t’avoir jamais vu
,” Nico wrote on a card he gave me in Montpellier when I arrived to meet him there, quoting a seventeenth-century French writer. It was our third meeting after Haiti, nearly a year after we’d met. We hadn’t seen each other in person since Paris, three months earlier. He was talking about how hard it was to be apart all the time.

I would rather be unhappy loving you,
he was saying,
than never having seen you.

Well. He had no idea.

*   *   *

I was in Montpellier because everyone was in agreement—my dad, my friends, Denise—that I needed a vacation. I had been barely holding it together. I had arguably been not holding it together. I’d asked Nico during a Skype chat if I could join him in Montpellier.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re welcome, my beauty.”

The flight between San Francisco and France encountered rowdy turbulence. People clutched and gasped around me. I sat patiently, realizing that I would be more relieved than disappointed if we went down. That made me sad. The only reason I cared if we pulled out of it was that I would’ve liked to kiss Nico’s face another time—it’d been so few times—before never doing anything again. But other than that, I was 90-some percent resigned to our imminent death. When it became clear that we were going to make it, I was left with the sorrow of that peace.

On the ground, my symptoms stayed fairly well behaved. Conveniently, during that week, we were drunk all the time. Not in the PTSD way, but in the cocktail-before-dinner, then split-a-bottle-of-wine-because-it’s-August-on-the-Riviera way, which, however different the motives, produced the same results. It kept me loose and open, so that I was touched deeply by the sex we were having, but the steady stream of booze assisted a light dissociation that kept my rawness to below-freak-show levels. Only small amounts of it seeped through. One night when Nico was inside me, I clutched him and begged, “Please don’t ever leave me.” A sentiment I’d never felt for anyone, even the man I’d married, uttered to a guy with whom I’d spent a total of eight days. Another night, next to his warmth, buried under blankets despite the humidity outside, I wilted, losing the rigidity that kept me put together, and cried. But Nico had just been telling me that when he pictured his father’s face, he could often recall only how he looked hanging dead from a rope, so crying after a conversation like that gave me the appearance of a still possibly normal person.

Ditto my behavior when he came to visit me two weeks after I left Montpellier, in San Francisco. His deployment was over. He had some time off. He’d never been to America, and I’d been urging him to come since our first e-mail. Finally, almost exactly a year after we’d met, he arrived. I kept myself moving and kept myself busy with the task of impressing him with California’s majesty.

“This cheese is made here,” I said of the artisanal varietal I set out in front of him when he arrived. “And this wine. And these figs were grown here.”