Someone on a message board just asked : How can I help my husband with PTSD?

(This is also something I wrote a while ago...)

This was my reply...I'd love to hear more input from my friends going through the same thing

Figure out his triggers (you can ask him, I'm sure he'll tell you) and avoid them whenever possible...

Don't try to put yourself in his shoes, you can sympathize, but empathy will bring you down with him, and you'll never truly understand what he feels...and he'll probably tell you that many times if you try.

Make sure that you take time to take care of yourself...if you don't have a hobby, get one.

If you don't have a friend going through something similar, find one...in real life or a message board online...if you don't have someone you feel like you can say anything in the world to without being judged you will feel isolated and alone.

Take time to appreciate and remember the moments when things are okay...hold on to them to get you through the times they are not.

Love him, comfort him when he wants it, give him space when he wants it, and learn to have patience like you never knew you could possess.

Don't get angry with yourself or upset with yourself when you get overwhelmed. This is something so much bigger you have to deal with than you ever imagined it could be. It affects every aspect of your life.

If you need a break...take it...its okay to step away sometimes.

Friends & family may not understand...don't get angry with them, they don't live it.

Fellow soldiers and their families may gossip, call him weak or claim he’s faking it. Ignore them…there comes no good in worrying about what anyone else thinks of you…what is important is that your family is taking care of itself and doing what it can to heal. Again, they aren’t living it …and that’s okay, in fact, that’s wonderful, because it means they don’t have to go through it too.

It’s okay to be angry, sad, disappointed, to mourn what you thought your life was going to be like…if you don’t allow yourself to feel what is natural, you’ll just end up full of self pity.

In spite of everything you do to work it out, you have to understand that there may come a time when you just can't do it anymore. Don't stay in a relationship where you feel you or your children are in danger out of a sense of loyalty. Don't stay in a relationship where you resent the other person for their illness...that just makes it worse for them, and is a horrible situation for you. I hope this doesn't happen to you.

Last, and probably the most important thing I could say...you can't help him, you can't make him get better...I know that sucks, and that's the thing I had the hardest time getting past. As women it's our nature to take care of people who need it...but this is something he has to deal with alone. The most and best you can do for him is just love him the same way you always have.

It's never easy...but my husband is pretty wonderful too...so it's so worth it...And Good Luck =) 

Midnight calls are never good news

That’s exactly what I was thinking when I heard his phone ring and my husband jumped out of bed.  Even still, I fell back asleep.  It was just a few minutes later that he came in and sat next to me, put his hand on my hip, and told me “Joe tried to overdose a few days ago.  He was in the ICU, and was released today.  He overdosed again when he got home and now he’s on life support.  X is forwarding us his wife’s number.  We want you to call her”

*******

I don’t remember it being like this in our pre-military life…caring so deeply about, even loving, people I don’t know.  I mean, I “know” Joe, but in reality, I’ve probably talked to him about a dozen times, total…ever.  But that is irrelevant, because on some level I know him better than I know my own brother.

My husband has given a life to the men he’s served with in my heart and mind.  I mean, I know their stories, sure.  But I don’t only know them because of what my husband tells me.  I also know these guys on such a more intimate level.  I know the battles they’ve each fought, both away at war, and in their own personal lives at home.  The PTSD, the addiction, the marital problems.  

I know them because their hell at home is ours too.  I know them because they fight the same demons my husband fights.  I know them, because each of them owns a piece of my husband’s heart.  His brothers ARE our family.  Period. 

And I know their wives.  Some of them I’ve never spoken to.  Some of them married their husbands long after we were stationed together.  But I feel an even stronger bond to them, because these are the only women in this world who know who know MY hell, who share MY battles and demons.

*****

Tomorrow, when I wake up, I will call Joe’s wife.  I’ve never spoken to her in my life, and quite frankly, I’m afraid.  Will she be annoyed to have to deal with someone she hasn’t spoken to beyond FB?  Will she resent me because my husband isn’t the one in the ICU? Will she hear the fear in my voice, talking to someone living my constant and worst nightmare?

Or will she hear the love I have for her and her husband?  The sisterhood I feel?  The support I’m offering?  Will she know that I really do understand, and I am safe to talk to?

I’m not sure calling is the right thing to do.  I’m not sure it’s what I’d want.   I’m not sure what I’m going to say.  But it’s what my husband and the guys would like me to do, and I would do just about anything to make this easier for any of them. 

And I’ll call her, because despite the fact we’ve never met, she is a part of my family---my great big, broken, dysfunctional, but most of all loved—family.

Letter to the Army about breaking my husband

The only place to start, is at the beginning, right?

My first entry isn’t about the “now.”  It was written long, long ago, and quite frankly, it was written by a different person.  I mean, it was “Me” but that life, that person and that world don’t exist any longer. 

I wrote this letter to accompany my husband’s Med-Board in 2007.  Little could I have known at the time, that things would only get worse.

It’s long….so thank you in advance if you stay with me until the end.



To Whom It May Concern: 

 

This letter is about my husband, how much he has changed due to his service in Iraq and my fears about his future. I understand this may be long, but it is very important to me that you see the human side of this and not just what is written in medical records.  I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to go into detail about how much this has affected our family. Our 6-year-old son is seeing a therapist and has frequent outbursts of rage or crying. My 2 year old has become violent.  I have started to see a therapist.  I believe all of those things are important, and worth mentioning, but they are not the main issues I wish to convey. 

Hubby has always been a very ambitious man.  He sets his mind to something and he achieves it, and expects the same from others.  If he ever had a flaw, it was only that he couldn’t accept mediocrity in himself or others. Since the day he joined the Army his superiors have gone out of their way to tell me what an exemplary soldier Hubby was.  He has always been an attentive husband and father, easy going and fun. His sense of humor and giving heart has always ensured friends surrounded him. Three rotations to Iraq have turned him into a man that doesn’t resemble the man I met and fell in love with. 

I think the best way to explain my fears for his future is to take you through the transformation.  When my husband returned from his first rotation to Iraq he had already begun to change, although it was equally good and bad.  He found humor in things that had happened in Iraq that I found inappropriate, although I saw that in all of the soldiers we were friends with in the platoon and I believe it is probably just a coping mechanism.  On the other hand, he showed an appreciation and love towards the children and myself that was extraordinary.  He saw what he could have lost and cherished us even more.  As the year progressed, the things he and his friends had found humor in slowly began to wear at him and before he deployed again he left with a healthy amount of fear and realization about what he was again returning to face. 

On my husband’s second rotation to Iraq I noticed a change in him during our phone conversations within months.  Honestly, I was surprised about how forthcoming he was with me.  If the things he told me about were so bad, and I know (and often find out from other people) there are things he hasn’t told me, I can’t imagine how horrible those things are.  He worked as a sniper that tour and he told me about being in a hide and how close the Iraqi’s were to him, or that they found him and then he was in danger waiting to get picked up.  He told me about capturing insurgents and how much it bothered him that one of them resembled our oldest son. With each of those things I noticed subtle changes, maybe him withdrawing from me a bit more, being more cautious, but nothing major.  The thing that seemed to have the most impact on him was when he told me about a HMMWV that was hit by an IED; a soldier was trapped inside and burned to death.  This was the first of two major turning points.  After this time my husband became very argumentative.  He harbored an anger that wasn’t quite rational, but wasn’t out of control either.  I spent the next several months worrying about his return home and if he was going to continue to behave the same way.

I was sure when my husband returned home things would get better; surrounding him with our love had to have that effect.  At work he threw himself into his job even more than ever.   At home, he was withdrawing and becoming moodier by the day.  He got to a point where he was so angry he was afraid he would hurt someone and felt he needed help.  He went to the Chaplain who suggested all he needed was to pray.  Less than a month later in a fit of rage he had a seizure.  The doctors and his superiors danced around calling what was going on PTSD.  In the end, everyone decided to avoid damaging his career, they would say he was suffering from stress.  Of course, I’m not trained in anything, but living with him day to day, I was sure he had PTSD from my research.  Still, though, he would get angry and come down from it.  He was able to go to work and do his job effectively.  Most importantly, I wasn’t afraid for the safety of my children or me at that time. 

In March, 2007 Hubby deployed again to Iraq.  He was edgier than the other times, again, because of everything he had seen and what he knew he had before him.  The weeks leading up to it were more difficult than in the past because he was more distant and angrier.  Upon arriving in Iraq things started getting worse almost immediately.  This was during the surge, and the op-tempo was extremely high.  He was living on 2-3 hours of sleep each night and becoming more and more irritable.  After a while the unit tasked him out to work, again, as their sniper.  I had talked to my husband right before his “fall off the edge”.   ((THIS ISN’T ACTUALLY ACCURATE, BUT MY HUSBAND DIDN’T WANT ME TO DISCUSS THE WAY IT REALLY HAPPENED AT THAT TIME, I’LL TELL THAT STORY ANOTHER DAY))  Hubby was sent out on a sniper mission to clear a route.  When he arrived back at the FOB they told him he was going to need to go out with the platoon on a mission on the same route.  He called me to check in and tell me how tired he was but that he had to go back out.  The next time I heard from him was after the incident.  Hubby was inconsolable.  He kept telling me how he had just cleared that route and the soldier stepped on an IED.  He told me over and over again that they didn’t have any body bags with them and the soldier was put in his Bradley to go back to the FOB.    He repeated several times how the solder stared at him the whole way.  Finally I asked him why he had never closed his eyes.  He sounded shocked when he told me it had never occurred to him.  That was the end of normal for us.  My husband has been a different person since. 

The army sent him home a few weeks later on R&R because he was doing so poorly recovering from the trauma in theater.  While he was home he had a massive breakdown. He had already been to the Army hospital here at Ft AnyPost begging for help, but the woman he went in to see fell asleep while he was speaking to her. We were traveling as a family in the car and he went “nuts” for lack of a better way to put it.  He was punching and kicking the car, he was screaming like nothing I’ve ever heard before and hope to never hear again.  We approached our Congressman for help and he referred us to Naval Hospital Florida.  From there we returned home and my husband was hospitalized.  Although things are not as bad as his first few weeks home, I would still describe his condition and our lives since this occurred as awful.  He is not the same person he was when I married him, or even before he went on his last deployment.  

The man I live with now is in his own world.  The thing is, when left alone to do menial things it seems the only time he is at any peace, but only because he’s distracted from having to function in a normal capacity.  Leave him in front of a game of solitaire or working on a car and he doesn’t have to care about anything.  Put a real issue in front of him, as small as working out the logistics of who is going to pick up our child from day care and he is stressed to a point where he may explode in anger.  He sleeps 6-7 hours a night, but I don’t believe he’s ever well rested because of the severity of his nightmares.  He acts out scenes of being chased or fighting, he yells, he pulls weapons on those who are chasing him whenever he falls asleep.  One night I woke up and he wasn’t in our bed.  I found him crying in our living room.  When I tried to talk to him about what was wrong all he could say was “I just can’t go back to Iraq again.”  I tried to hold him and console him and assure him he wasn’t going back.  He replied, “Baby, you don’t understand.  I go back every night.” 

I can’t imagine what his future holds, how he is going to deal with this from day to day.  I can’t see a situation in which he would be able to keep a job when he leaves the army.  Each morning he gets up for formation, and then comes home.  He may have a meeting or appointment throughout the day, and then an evening formation.  Other than that, he sleeps because of his lack of sleep at night and due to his medications.   If he was able to work and stay awake, I can’t imagine anyone would be able to tolerate him.  He doesn’t hear anything anyone is saying to him. While you are speaking he seems to be staring right through you.  He doesn’t comprehend things in full the way they are presented.  He forgets 90% of what I tell him, and if he doesn’t forget, he confuses the details.  If you disagree with him or just say something he perceives is wrong, he blows up.  My biggest fear is he is going to go back into the work force and end up being arrested for harming someone because he is so volatile.  He has told me on many occasions he is afraid he is going to hurt me or himself in a fit of anger.  He is not a well person. 

My children and I walk on eggshells every day.  We never know what will trigger his anger or depression.  We can’t count on him to accompany us on family outings.   We see his pain and it pains us.  Despite everything, he remains the love of my life.  My children and I will continue to learn how to live with someone with PTSD and my husband will continue to learn how to be someone who has to live with PTSD.  When you send your spouse to war, you are afraid.  Afraid they could be injured or killed.  What you do not prepare yourself for are the injuries you can’t see.  My husband was wounded in Iraq the same as any soldier with visible wounds. 

I appreciate that you have taken the time to read this through your review. 

Thank you,

ME