I’m getting over my very first case of Covid, which has been unpleasant but tolerable. I mention that because…I don’t know, maybe that helps to explain my PTSD episode this morning. Maybe?

It’s been a while since I’ve had one of those. I still have occasional lightning quick PTSD moments, but they’re mild and not disruptive. It’s like a jolt of static electricity–a sharp moment that passes almost instantly. In fact, the spark of this morning’s episode is my most common trigger: a light shining from under a closed door. I wrote about this…okay, this is weird. I just checked, and I wrote about this almost exactly ten years ago. August 21, 2014. I’m NOT going to read anything into that.

Okay, quick recap. DON’T READ THIS & DON’T CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE IF SUICIDE IS A TRIGGER FOR YOU.

A million years ago when I was a medic in the military I responded to an off-base call involving a patient in ‘respiratory distress’ in the basement of a hotel. The basement was dim, but you could see to walk through the corridors. There was bright light coming from beneath the doorway of the room we were led to. We opened the door to an Asian guy who’d hung himself a couple of days earlier. It was ugly. There’s more detail in the post from a decade ago, if you want that information.

Anyway, light beneath a closed door is such a common trigger for me that when I see it, I’ll usually say, “Dead Asians” and everybody understands 1) why I’ve gone quiet for a moment and 2) why they should probably turn off lights when they leave a room and close the door.

Normally, that’s it. I see the light, there’s a moment of shock, then I’m fine. No big deal. But for some reason, this morning when it happened, I found myself…well, fucked up. It was my own fault; I’d left the light on in the laundry room while I did something and when I started to return to the laundry, it hit me. I didn’t want to open the door. Which was silly, and I did open it, and of course there was nothing in there but the washer and dryer.

But for the next hour or so, I couldn’t shake the…I don’t even know what I couldn’t shake. A feeling, I guess. Not so much the image of the dead guy, which is still pretty clear in my mind, but the feeling of getting ready to open the door and seeing something so awful that it would still be with me decades later. I don’t know about anybody else, but on these rare occasions when the PTSD spanks me, I find myself replaying several of the other awful things I’ve seen and done. It’s like I’m getting all the horrific shit out of the way at one time, so I can get on with my life.

I took a photo of the laundry room because that’s what I do. And then I thought maybe I should write about the photograph, which would require writing about why I took the photo, and what the hell, I might just as well write about the whole thing, right?

Does it help to write about it? Nope, not really. Didn’t help to take the photograph either. I didn’t expect it to. But it seems…not important, but worthwhile to write about it, because that puts it back into perspective. I’ve lived the sort of life in which I encountered a big chunk of horrible shit. Horrible shit is supposed to stay with you; you don’t want to be the sort of person who isn’t affected by horrible shit.

But it’s worthwhile to remind yourself that it doesn’t have to live with you all the time. This evening I’ll grill out some chicken and asparagus; I’ll have a nice meal and a good craft beer and spend the evening with people I love. THAT is what lives with me all the time. The horrible shit…it’ll dissipate. And with any luck, I won’t have another episode for months or years. I’m okay with that.