Here we are, deep into 2018, and It seems like it's the same circle of highs and lows that I've been going through for 26 years. Well, maybe "new twists on old problems" is a better way of looking at it.
It was late August, and once more I started cycling towards the leaner end of my tolerance scale. Life stress, relationship stress, and the discovery of a huge trove of documents buried away brought my world to a screeching halt.
I had begun to feel a little overwhelmed and under-involved with a lot of aspects of my life. The studio was still plugging along, but my drive was waning and I just couldn't get past the feeling that I was just "going through the motions" and pulling away more and more from a sensible, stable life. I chose a local mental health professional that was highly recommended by several people. What I needed was"soul therapy", I thought. Friends agreed. Someone to talk to that didn't treat me like a number. A new take on therapy with a spiritually-centered focus. I needed to get in touch with my Spirit!
Over a few months of this new therapy, I had taken part in a "spiritual release" ceremony, to rid myself of the negative "entity" that was bending my ear and feeding false and harmful information to me, causing interpersonal struggles and leaving me with little sense of peace. After the "ritual" I was told, "Avoid negative images. Don't play violent video games. Don't listen to rock music." Above all, my favorite: "Don't kill yourself..."
Huh.
Don't kill yourself.
I hadn't planned on that being a problem. Seemed pretty easy, after all. I'd made it 49+ years without killing myself. I'll avoid stabbing, shooting, or drugging myself, and the rest would work out just fine.
Easy peasy, right?
Well that, my friends, is where things started to take a spin that opened whole new paths of existence, and brought old ones right to the forefront. I became almost OBSESSED with the idea that I couldn't, shouldn't kill myself. Don't even think it. That just can't happen... No matter WHAT happens.
So, I had a bizarre encounter with my father one morning in June. I was informed that while I could remain at the house "forever", my girlfriend was causing too many problems with the family, and she had to go. Never in my history, as a member of my family, was ANYONE asked to leave, for any reason! No choice was given, so I told her to pack a bag of essentials and stay with friends. Four days later, I was pulling the bits and pieces of our life and packing them into a box trailer to stash in a friend's two-car garage. I left the family home and went to live with those friends as well. No big deal. Life goes on... Denial in full effect.
While trying to sort out all of the furniture, clothes, tools and other "life stuff", I found a box of vital papers. Old shop bills, records for taxes, and copies of paperwork from the military and veterans' hospitals. I retrieved the DD-214, my official document of military service, and when I bought a new car, I proudly applied for veteran's plates. I was feeling somewhat nostalgic for my military service. Hell, I served and was discharged with honor, with a decent stack of training and service commendations. I worked with distinction in the ER at Naval Hospital Groton, CT. After all, I was a good medic. a REAL good medic. The record clearly showed that. There was nothing wrong with taking a little pride in military service!
September 2, 2018
Although I can't remember many of the details, I can say that somewhere around 11 am on Monday the morning of September 2, I took that new car and headed North. The goal was simple - make it to the VA Hospital. I had spent the night before sleeping on a massage table in the studio. I couldn't stand to be around ANYONE, especially the girlfriend. I tried watching movies and TV to snap me out of this sudden "funk". I tried to put recent arguments aside, and all the while a panic kept growing larger and larger, squeezing my chest, fogging my thoughts, and leaving me with few options.I couldn't make the pain stop. I couldn't stop my thoughts from racing. I hurt all over, inside and out. It took me 2 hours to come up with this plan to drive to the VA, and now I was on auto-pilot, headed North.
I sat in the parking lot for nearly two hours.
It wasn't until the phone started ringing in the car that I had any idea where I was or what I was doing. Soon, my friend and fellow veteran came to meet me. I remember saying something like "I can't get out of the car!" and a whole bunch of other things that made no sense to him or me. He managed to convince me to go inside, and helped me check in to the ER. I couldn't remember my SSN, barely knew who I was, and was so hyper-vigilant that my own senses overwhelmed me. There were nurses and doctors and people coming and going for hours, and all I could do was whisper, "I'm sorry!" I didn't know what day it was.
Four days of the seven that I spent on Ground East, under lock-down, I couldn't tell you what happened. I simply don't remember. I do know I went to groups, but I barely spoke or made eye contact, and only reluctantly did I offer any information to anyone for any reason. I was nearly catatonic. At one point I apparently went screaming in terror from a floor machine -- the noise has triggered something and I completely dissociated. I was gone... Days blurred, panels of Psych interns and doctors, nurses and administrative staff came and went. Slowly, I managed to pull myself back together enough to resemble a functional person, more or less. A week later, and the discharge instructions were to take meds as directed, see a doc and a therapist, and start the slow climb back to normal function.
Well, for those familiar with large, unwieldy bureaucracies, it should come as no surprise that it took THREE WEEKS to get access to a competent therapist, and a "permanent" doctor to monitor meds and my general level of function. Despite the very real possibility of pseudo-schizophrenic and PTSD-related problems stopping me cold AGAIN, I was left to manage on my own...
***
Now, flashing back to late July, my veteran friend had suggested that being re-evaluated by the VA would be a good idea. Let them see the difficulty I was having dealing with life, business, relationships and the struggle to simply survive. Maybe some benefits or programs could help me get a handle on my life. I'm now sleeping on a couch, as I can't sleep in a bed with my girlfriend. I move too much, and sleep too little. My worldly possessions are disorganized in hundreds of boxes in the garage, and I am trying to be proactive. I looked through the paperwork I had found, and discovered I had kept a copy of my service medical records, and copies of records from my earliest VA encounters.Imagine, if you will, you find several hundred pages documenting your every low point, every stressful encounter, every comment, every test result, every opinion of medical and psychological care.
Some was brutal. Some was speculative. Some was patently wrong. Twenty six years of documentation highlighting the lows of dealing with combat-related PTSD. The repeating cycle of crisis and coping. All in black and white. Reading the descriptions of retelling my story, again and again, to a different audience each time:
"I was a Corpsman. I was in Bahrain. I was on watch. A big missile dropped on us. The End. "
Ok, there's a lot more to the story, but I'm not getting into it. Not without therapeutic guidance. That's enough of the story to get the gist, for illustrative effect. For 25 years I have experienced a whole host of physical and psychological issues that make "normal" life a challenge. Civilian therapy, borne out of mistrust for a VA system that repeatedly let me down, was insisting that the things that I was afraid of needed to come to light - open those tightly locked boxes and let out all those old demons!
Therapy continued to be more and more painful, and I'd go into a funk and shut down for days after. The "exorcism" was the push over the edge. Maybe dark things really were coming out of me! Maybe there was a part of me that was truly evil. These things started to make sense to a mind going sour, as sanity itself started to slide into the dark... I really needed answers, and REAL help. For that I needed to go back and figure out where these problems started. I knew where I was - I needed to know where I'd been. I went way back - to the beginning. 1993-1994, the first encounters with the VA as an organization.
I had already had the foresight to copy my military medical records, and I made friends with the clerk in records at the first VA hospital, and filled out the consent and request forms to get a copy of my VA records. These I received, locked away in a box, and promptly forgot about them. Now that I had discovered them again, I began to review the documents and records forensically, as if I was reading another patient's charts:
"Here is a 24 year old man. He's sick all the time. His gut doesn't work correctly. He can't think, has memory problems, trouble relating to people, and seems angry all the time. It must be adjustment disorder. Some people aren't cut out for the military." (I had been in for 3 years without incident. My first psych intervention on active duty was a month after returning from the Gulf). "He's malingering. He's immature and narcissistic..."
My birthday - July 7, 1994.
At the VA in Manchester NH, I saw a Doctor in Internal Medicine, specializing in Environmental Medicine. Seems there were a lot of vets coming back from the Persian Gulf that had physical symptoms like mine. He was going to Congress to testify to the need for research and help for returning veterans - something was wrong. Something about being there was making vets sick.
While, on one hand, this specialist had diagnosed me with "Gulf War Syndrome", assured me it was real, and placed me in the Gulf War registry database, the Administration is telling me I was wasting their time. "Migraine headaches? Take a fucking aspirin! There is no such thing as 'Gulf War Syndrome'".
Well, there is now, and has been since the testimony before Congress compelled lawmakers to fund research and support for veterans who served and got sick. It's considered "presumptive" now, meaning a host of undiagnosed conditions or symptoms are assumed to be exposures to chemicals or environmental hazards while deployed, and medical care and compensation are being granted NOW for the same things I was diagnosed with in 1994!
I kept digging through the records. Page after page of crisis management. Trouble with relationships. Trouble with marriage. Trouble working. Trouble with temper. Trouble with alcohol. Married and divorced, TWICE. Employment terminated. Quit job due to anger. Alcohol use through the roof. Unable to eat. Unable to sleep.
PTSD was obvious, apparent, and DIAGNOSED around 1994., and diagnosed again (?) in 2003. I was denied compensation for the host of other health issues, and there was a deliberate effort to make it look as if my problems occurred either before, or after leaving the Navy. I didn't find out about the PTSD diagnosis until 2009, during a therapy session, when he managed to pull up some of my prior records and mentioned it as a matter-of-fact.
I was incensed.
More importantly, I started to realize that my copies of my records were the ONLY COPIES IN EXISTENCE. Numerous references to "Records Missing", or "Unable to Locate" or "Facility did not send records" appeared throughout the docs that the VA did have. There were NO paper copies, as the system had gone digital in 2008. My official records had disappeared some time between 1994 and 2003, leaving me with the ONLY records of my care and treatment in the early 90s. (This is a rampant and pervasive "crime" of both military record keeping and the Veterans Administration. Soldiers and sailors are equipment, not people.
To us, the VA was an extension of the military mind set, and would ridicule or ignore anyone that represented and inconvenient truth to the system. )We knew, as members of the Medical Corps, that records were prone to disappearance (especially post-discharge) and it was a good idea to request copies, if you were friendly and patient. Having done so, I was now holding documents that prove that I was evaluated, diagnosed and... sent on my merry way!
//To Be Continued...
