Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (32 page)

4.2.12

Good morning, Alabama.

“Remember, if you do this story, it’s not so you’ll get worse,” Nico says in the car. “You don’t have to absorb it to understand,” he says last night, stroking my hair. “Because you have the same.”

This morning I ask where my hugs are. “Where’s my hug?”

“What?”

Repeat.

“What? I’m sorry, I was speaking French in my dream, I need one moment to switch.”

This relationship is a certain failure
, I think.
You will never be diligent enough or free-time-having enough to learn French, and a relationship cannot survive this language barrier.

Oh, no. I woke up crazy.

I shuffle frantically through my toolbox—breathing? No. Some kind of mantra? Yes. “This will pass”? No. “Do not be seduced by your thoughts.” Propels me to the bathroom. “You need to relax,” he says at breakfast. “You can’t be like this. And if I can feel it, other people can too.”

False. Sources find me universally charming,
I counter internally, though out loud, I say the marginally less friendly, “Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job.” Bleh. But it’s too late, he’s put his hand on my leg and extended his calming presence and now I’m more grounded and can feel what I really feel like.

I feel sad.

Cures at this point still kind of limited to crying it out through my face or drinking it down. Visualize dropping tears into the hotel cheddar cheese scrambled eggs. That seems right. But I don’t have time for that shit, so I’m gonna wear it.

Brannan would understand. But I’m not here to tax her.

*   *   *

Before we left for Alabama, I had been taking it way easier than I had during my previous schedule now that I was part time. Haiti I was eighteen months in the past. The last story I’d reported was the undercover work in the distribution warehouse, before I left for Guadeloupe—five months ago. But I had to work again sometime.

As I’d been pursuing it over the months before Nico moved in, the content of the secondary-trauma story had started worrying the people around me. One morning, I’d talked to a veteran’s wife. She had a handful of young kids in the house and a husband who, after Iraq, looked out the window more than a hundred times a day. For the past couple of weeks he had been sleeping in the garage he boarded up, which was sort of fine with her since during the nights he started screaming or hitting “things.” And more than once had sexually assaulted her. A lot more than once.

“You need to quit!” my father yelled at me when he called later that day and I happened to be crying about this. The next day, he admitted he’d been drunk and apologized for being rash. “You cannot get enough distance from these subjects, and it’s tearing you apart!”

He was extra-mad that day because of how upset I’d been earlier that month, when I e-mailed Chris, my marine buddy, my validation hero, who’d shared his symptoms and told me to fuck all what anyone said about me. I hadn’t heard from him since we’d been scheduled to talk on the phone. Though that wasn’t a big deal—he was busy, and I figured he’d changed his mind or wasn’t up to talking about his psychiatric secrets—I wanted to let him know I’d been thinking about him and was still ready to talk whenever, if ever, he was. It was his wife who wrote me back. She said she knew that we’d been talking, and she thought it was helpful to him, so thanks for that. But she thought I should know that he was dead.

“No, no,” I said to no one, sitting alone on my bed reading her message. It was shortly after Nico had left his first visit to San Francisco, the previous fall. “No no no no no no no.”

Breakdown. Normal-person breakdown: totally appropriate breakdown. I dropped into a quick deep hole of grief, shaking my head, gasping and sobbing, wondering what had happened. But I knew what had happened. Every day, the VA said, eighteen veterans committed suicide. One every eighty minutes. It was the pinnacle of bullshit: The very things that made the ones with PTSD want to die were the symptoms their body produced because it had so badly wanted to survive. Chris had PTSD, and PTSD was regularly fatal. They never said it like that, and I didn’t understand why. When you had cancer, they told you that you had
x
percent chance of dying, especially if you didn’t get
y
and
z
treatments. No one says that unresolved trauma can kill you. If anyone did, maybe people would take it more seriously. Serious as cancer.

I Googled a news clip, and indeed, Chris had committed suicide, after barricading himself inside his house and engaging the Tucson SWAT team in a standoff. In the story, his ex-wife was quoted as saying he’d called her from inside and sounded like he’d lost his mind. “All they give you is pills,” he hollered at the officers outside, railing against the Department of Veterans Affairs. I looked at the dates on the clips. The day before, he’d asked me for my phone number. The day of, he’d e-mailed me, saying, “Just give me a day or two. Please”—no ending punctuation. He’d written it hours before he shot himself in the face.

I called off work. I stayed in bed even more than usual that September.

“I can’t tell you not to do this,” Nico said when we talked about my continuing to work on the story. “But I’m glad your father said it.”

I knew I needed to watch my limits. But I didn’t know what my limits were anymore. There seemed to be nothing within my limits. It wasn’t just the horrors my war sources were dealing with—or, say, one of my sources from Congo updating me that a colonel had cornered him in a grocery store when he went to pick up bread and mentioned how
eeaaaasy
it was for people to disappear around there. The story I’d done undercover was not about war, or genocide, or murder. But though it was about working in a warehouse, I had still started crying—just for a few minutes, but still—one night after a ten and a half hour shift. The job involved laboring in ergonomic conditions that should’ve been illegal, and I cried because it hurt, because everyone I worked with said it hurt, and because they all had to do it for real and for almost no money. I cried because the company had fired this one guy because he’d missed work the day his baby was born. That was perfectly regular life, that people treated people like that for maximum profitability, and still, it was enough to break me down.

This was why Dr. Shere had said that for her money she wouldn’t think I’d get better as long as I had a job, unless I could find a job that paid enough to live but produced zero stress or grief and let me take hours and hours off every week for therapy and for yoga and for the days when I lapsed into psychosis or depression. This was why Dr. Shere had suggested that I not work at all.

“Ohhh,
fuck
that,” Denise had said when I’d passed this advice along.

Alright. So, not
everybody
around me didn’t want me doing the secondary-trauma story.

Denise didn’t take kindly to anyone, least of all me, acting as if I were an invalid. She wasn’t against my working. In physical therapy, you had to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little; you couldn’t heal your post-surgery knee just sitting around. You had to exercise your muscle to make it work right again. You had to take it easy, but still try it out. Denise supported my doing the emotional equivalent. But she wasn’t without her concerns. “We need to take really good care of you,” she said every time I saw her in the run-up to leaving for Alabama. I’d been with her for nine months by then. “We need to watch how you’re doing, and make sure you have all the tools and support you need.”

She thought there were some encouraging signs that I could handle it. One being the vast amounts of time and money I was pouring into recovery, but also more internal signs. That I’d known I wasn’t up for Haiti, for example. That I’d done it anyway was another matter, and a matter of employment, but having recognized that I was too burned out for the assignment at the time and resisted it, and that I’d given myself at least one day to take it easy when I got there rather than running around from the moment I landed like I was supposed to, and forced myself to go swimming when I didn’t want to, indicated a good baseline of instincts for my needs. When I’d got home, I’d recognized I had a drinking problem, and at least tried to stop. I’d tried to take care of myself back in San Francisco, by immediately going to therapy. And by cooking. If I couldn’t bring myself to do many things then, I did walk back and forth to my neighborhood grocery store to make pot after pot of wholesome, elaborate soup. “Well chosen for a post-Haiti PTSD pot,” I wrote in my cookbook above the recipe for Black Bean With Rice and Guacamole, just days after coming home. “Still a little watery with modification but a delicious and warming lunch,” I wrote a month later next to Cauliflower Vichyssoise.

My history of self-care plus lessons learned equaled the potential to work with my PTSD, a necessary if not ideal partnership. It’d been a year and a half since my diagnosis. Since PTSD can alter your physiology indefinitely, I was going to learn to work with some extent of it or another eventually, or maybe never work again. And I had to work to eat, of course. But that wasn’t the only way I needed it. It was also kind of the only thing I had left.

A partial list of things I was terrible at for the moment: Sleeping. Sexing. Breathing. Not turning into a maniac without warning. I was a constant disappointment to myself, the cause of endless gut-wrenching derision, that I’d become this way and would always be this way. But work! There was something I could do. Something I loved to do. Assign me a story, and maybe there would be some nervous breakdowns in between then and the deadline these days, but I would get it done, and it would be good. When Denise had had me put the things that were important to me, that made me who I was, two fingers’ widths below my navel in my somatic core, to be pressed on and remembered and invoked in times of groundless insanity, there’d only been a few things in there. One of them was Nico. One of the others was work.

My job was important to me. I didn’t have any illusions that I was saving lives, but part of me still believed, especially after being inundated with letters from people who said my admission of post-trauma sex dysfunction made them less inclined to feel like killing themselves, that good stories contributed something. Information, awareness, solidarity, the seeds of acceptance or movement toward change. My refugee roommates in Thailand hadn’t got peace from war out of my writing a book about them, but it brought them some personal relief. They just wanted a witness. They just, at least, wanted someone to
know.

I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself for a cause. But neither was I interested, in the case of this story in particular, in getting better at the expense of turning my back on other traumatized people. One of the members of my impromptu e-mail support group, who himself had felt like no one understood him, was dead. He had done what he could for a stranger despite his own suffering. I had to do what I could. Plus I didn’t care to be ruled by fear, which I’d never let govern me before. I wasn’t being reckless. When a magazine editor got in touch to offer me an assignment in Iraq (“I don’t think the story would involve an active war zone, but it would probably involve witnessing some gruesome stuff”), I didn’t fool myself for one second into thinking I was ready for that. Though I wanted the job—and hated myself for not being capable of taking it—I turned it down.

“This is your conviction,” Nico would always concede when we argued over Skype about whether I should still be professionally chronicling other people’s problems. (“You don’t have enough problems of your own?” was one of his lines.) “This is who you are. I have a lot of respect for it. And,” he’d add, “it won’t be as hard as when you were alone.”

So with Denise having trained me and committed me to monitoring myself in the run-up, and Nico in tow with me on the ground, I was back in the field for a couple of weeks. Back to work on the Gulf Coast.

*   *   *

Brannan Vines picked me up outside our southwest-Alabama Homewood Suites while I was scribbling the previous diary entry onto a piece of paper. If she noticed that I was in emotional free fall, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she drawled, “Aren’t you cute!” like a grandma, though we were the same age, and I was five inches taller than she was.

Over the past year, Brannan and I had conversed about intimate topics even old friends might not—failings at sex, sanity, optimism, personal maintenance—but we were seeing each other for the first time. She was pale, with well-styled, chin-length, dirty-blond hair. She wore loose clothes, baggy top and pants, but lipstick. Her nails were done. I was amazed that she managed to make that happen, since Brannan had several jobs. One of them was taking care of her husband, Caleb, who was three years older than she was, but since he’d come back from his second tour in Iraq had frequent falls and walked with a cane. That was not a job figuratively: Recently, the Department of Veterans Affairs had started a program to pay spouses of veterans who ended up as default but essential caretakers. After a lot of paperwork, home visits, and assessments, given Caleb’s level of disability, the VA paid Brannan to take care of him full time. In the VA’s estimation, that was worth $400 a week.

The first thing Brannan and I did together was drive to Florida. Every week, she and Caleb drove to the Pensacola VA hospital, because though there was one in Alabama, it had once prescribed Caleb a drug to which he was allergic and he’d nearly died. He didn’t trust the place now, and Brannan hadn’t been able to get him to set foot in there since. So every week, at least once, they drove an hour to Florida for doctor’s appointments. Speech therapy for Caleb’s traumatic brain injury, or TBI, from the twenty-plus explosions he experienced between IEDs, vehicle-born IEDs, and rocket-propelled grenades. Physical therapy for the degenerative joint disease he came back with, that lots of guys were coming back with for reasons they said they hadn’t figured out yet—missing cartilage in one of his knees, several disintegrating spinal discs. Appointments related to the twelve medications he was on—antidepressants, sleep aids, anxiety meds, pain meds, nerve meds, stomach meds. Tests for mysterious cysts, tests for his lungs, which were mysteriously only 48 percent functional. Usually Brannan and Caleb drove together, but today he had group therapy after his appointment and then lunch with the small handful of old ’Nam guys from therapy after that.