In my many attempts at trying to find some sort of peace during sleeping hours, I’ve seen a sleep specialist at a major medical college in the Milwaukee area. On my 6th visit they’ve only come to this conclusion: when I sleep, I look like I’m being chased and even the strongest of seizure medications taken before bed cannot calm this.
On this, my 6th visit, I get the pleasure of first talking with a foreign medical student studying under my primary sleep doctor. She speaks broken English and starts to drill me with questions without any type of warm greeting.
“You have PTSD?” she asks with surprise. I respond with the same surprise and say yes as I nod quickly.
“You have fought in war?” she asks in an almost mocking tone.
My face twists in horror and confusion and I tell her that I have not fought in a war.
“PTSD comes from war, no? How do you have PTSD if you have not fought in war?” she asks as she continues to stare at her computer screen and rapidly clicks her mouse. She has not looked over at me. She cannot see that my face has twisted into horror in reaction to her closed mindedness. She hasn’t the slightest clue that the two hours that I’ve been awake before my appointment I had to spend distracting myself back into a functionable reality. She has no idea how incredibly hard it was to walk through the halls of her hospital to get to her office without literally losing my mind. The hospital she works from is a major trigger to a painful memory that constantly threatens to swallow me whole.
Because she doesn’t know this, nor does she take note to the distress that she’s causing me, she leaves me in a thick fog by the time she walks out the door. She has unknowingly made my entire day become ten times more challenging than it normally would be. That’s all it really takes.
My sleep pattern goes something like this: a night filled with horrible dreams in which I wake 5 or 6 times, a second night with the same, a third filled with sad memories of those lost in which I wake up with swollen eyes from the tears I wasn’t even aware I cried, and by the fourth night, I’m forcing myself to stay awake and get little to no sleep so that by the fifth night I am in such a fit of utter exhaustion that maybe, maybe, I may sleep sound enough that I don’t remember my dreams.
