Jensen Journey

“Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…”

Many of you will recognize that as the epic description that “Grandpa” gives before reading “The Princess Bride” to his sick Grandson.  As one of the most quotable movies of all time, it is a fine film that many have thoroughly enjoyed for several decades now.

“As you wish”

Unfortunately, and far less enjoyably, that description also applies to what I experience almost every night when I close my eyes.  My particular experience with PTSD has less to do with my waking hours than it does with my non-waking ones.   There are some manifestations that take place when I’m up and about, but the worst ones are the ones that play out across my synapses while I sleep. I might talk about the causes of my PTSD at a later time, but I’m not up for that right now.  Suffice it to say that I have it.

It is a fact of human biology that we MUST sleep.  And those moments are pure torture for me.  As soon as I close my eyes I’m almost always whisked away and placed in some form of danger.   I’m being held captive somewhere, I’m being tortured, I’m watching people operate on me while I’m ‘awake’, I’m in a house surrounded by people trying to get in to kill me, etc.   Those dreams are pretty bad.  I toss and turn while asleep (also not good with my back), wake in sweaty panics, and just find no rest.

But those aren’t the worst ones.  Part of my PTSD comes from an individual who made some very descriptive threats against my family.  The nightmares where those are played out, or where my brain expands on them, are the worst.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen my wife raped, or a child killed, or been frantically searching for someone who has been taken,  have tried to escape some potential tormentor who is giving chase, or in some other horrendous way watched the mutilation, violation, torture, or deaths of a family member at the hands of some villain (who I occasionally know) that I was unable to stop.  Those nights are the absolute worst, and they come far too often.

I wish there were some better treatment for this.  Since getting here in SLC sometime in November I’ve been regularly seeing someone at the VA.  Supposedly over time things might calm down or stop.  It’s been 8 years since I left the Army though, so I’m not holding my breath.   Other vets have told me that they find some of the more intense therapies very useful, but they usually entail going over the very raw experiences and reliving/retelling them, and I just don’t feel like I’m up to doing that.  Perhaps with time.

For now the best the VA has to offer is medication.   At first they gave me something to relieve my complaint that I couldn’t sleep (I guess I failed to leave out that the nightmares were the reason for that) and so I received a medication that was very good at helping me stay asleep.  But it made it impossible to wake from the nightmares, so that medication was a serious no-go all by itself.

So they added another one to help with the nightmares… except that they don’t have one that affects the actual nightmares.  They give me a blood-pressure medication so that I “will still have the nightmares, but your blood pressure won’t go up so you won’t care about the nightmare.”  So I still have the experiences every night, but the drug tries to take the terror out of it.  How well would your psyche handle that?

My psyche isn’t exactly in pristine condition.  Julie dragged me from the house to a choir/band concert at Caitlin’s middle school (same one Julie attended) a few weeks ago.  We sat in the very back (so I wasn’t surrounded by people) and I went through my regular (though probably not normal) habit of marking exit doors, high traffic areas, persons of note, etc.   I tried to act nonchalant with Julie and asked her if there was an exit at the end of one corridor and then questioning, “I must be turned around, how would I get from that door back to the car?”  I knew where I was, but wanted her to play out the escape path in her mind.  I’m sure she knew I was just being psychotic again.  :/

But if that wasn’t psychotic enough, as I was scanning the crowd and finding exits I suddenly found myself mentally crawling between seats involved in a gunfight with a group of masked attackers.  While everyone else was shuffling in and finding a seat, I was busy returning fire as I tried to push civilians toward some cover, apply pressure to an abdominal wound I took, make my way toward where I thought Caitlin might be on stage, and try to kill some mythical masked SOB with an AK-47.

Of course in real life I was sitting stiffly and starting to hyperventilate about the fact that I was in fact unarmed because I was in a school.  Julie could tell and just helped me breathe.  She takes good care of me like that.   My brain follows that track so frequently while I’m asleep that it easily falls into that pattern when I’m awake sometimes too.

So while the need for sleep is a biological fact of humanity, it is a psychological terror for me that bleeds into my life at inopportune times.   It might sound like a simple phrase, but when I add to our family prayer, “please help us all sleep well” you can understand how selfish a request that is.   I plead for it every night.

I wish upon the rest of you sweet dreams as well.