Art La Flamme

At 1005 the other morning, I was sitting in a conference room, listening to my heart. It was beating strong. It was beating a bit fast. More than anything, I wanted to put two fingers to my neck to better gauge what it was doing.

In minutes, it would be my turn to speak. No overhead projector, no big screen with my slides. Two senior officers sat at the head table, flipping through slide packs. Buried in there were four slides of mine — Northern Iraq 101. No chance to read from a script — I’d be cold-stone-talking about it, solo.

We all get the jitters before events. Pre-wedding jitters, the jitters before while waiting for the big race, the stomach butterflies waiting for that big test in third period. It’s natural. It’s the anticipation of what is to come, that moment when it will all begin.

I get that a lot. I talk and brief for a living. I don’t write long analytical pieces, I don’t make fancy slides. I do best sitting with folks, and talking them through complex ideas using the simplest of terms.

I should be good at this. I need to be good at this.

So, sitting there, I was wondering just one thing: Would my body drop into fight-or-flight mode, and dump a ton of stimulates. All that endorphin, from when your mind decides that survival is on the line, and it concludes that stimulants are what you really need.

Why? It’s called hypervigilance, and it’s a part of PTSD.

It wasn’t always like this for me — the worrying and waiting not just of what I am about to do and about which I am nervous, but the dread that my body is really sensitive to stress. This is one of those lively byproducts of PTSD — my fight-or-flight trigger has been out of whack. Like a lot of folks with PTSD, it goes off at inappropriate times – too early.

And sitting in a conference room, waiting to talk about a topic I know well, is not an appropriate time. Jitters, yes — my body getting the sudden sensation that it’s time to get up and go? No.

It is a wildly shitty sensation. Waiting to do what is a key part of your very career and capabilities, and waiting to see if your body is going to illogically go postal on you.

Can I influence it? Sure. Is it a problem? No. Do I have it under control? Yep. But it’s a daily struggle, something for which I start every day with just a clean slate. In a flash, it could be back, and with the stress levels up being back here, I am ever vigilant about it. If I had a good day yesterday, that’s fine, but I start all over again today. And I don’t see it ever going away.

It is, as I understand it, the kind of daily struggle that recovered alcoholics face — one day at a time, with a very conscious effort.

I don’t normally talk about this stuff, but I am going to try and write more this year, and specifically talk about what it’s like to come back to war with PTSD. I don’t think it’s something that people talk about, mainly because I know I don’t talk about it. It’s my own quiet struggle, something I have to live with and something for which there just isn’t a reason to talk about it.

(PS — I kicked ass at both briefings)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 7:56 am and is filed under Army, Iraq, Military, PTSD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.