Why life sucks

Tonight, I admitted the nicest man. He was a cop, 18 years on the force, when this asshole he was trying to apprehend got the drop on him and clobbered him with a pipe. Now he has a traumatic brain injury and one of the worst cases of PTSD I've ever seen. He's done all the right things. He still has nightmares every single night. He still sleeps with his gun. He relives the attack every single day. For the past two years. Every. Single. Day.

My med student kept referring to it as "the accident." UM. Not an accident. A criminal. Who had been maced. More appropriate words? Assault. Attack. Offense. Horrible, evil, life-altering disaster. And this guy totally blames himself for what happened.

Anger turned inward equals depression. And this guy's got his anger aimed in the wrong place.

That's the thing about trauma, you know? It's like a car wreck. One moment you're driving along, everything's right as rain (or, you know, the daily life version of that), and then, BAM, you're in the ICU with tubes hanging out of orifices that didn't exist two hours ago and you have to spend the next year learning to walk again and spend five years regaining your ability to speak correctly. And you never are quite the same. You have scars, your body's changed, the healing itself took a toll. Everyone understands that, conceptually.

Psychological trauma is exactly the same way. You're going along. Life's generally okay. And then someone assaults you. Someone puts their hands on you. Someone takes away - in the blink of an eye, in the space of a heartbeat, in less than an instant - your control. Suddenly you're surrounded by darkness and chaos and the screeching of twisted metal. Suddenly you're learning how to walk - live, breathe, dance, walk, work, function - all over again. In a whole new way. And you never quite recover. The healing itself takes a toll.

Sometimes, life just really makes no sense.