Monday, May 14, 2018
I dreamt I killed my mom, and there was blood everywhere! It felt good to finally get out all the rage I was feeling towards her, but when I saw the blood, I was horrified! I thought this had to be a nightmare! I tried to tell myself it was all just a bad dream.
Then I remembered seeing Mark’s blood all over the side of my white house. That wasn’t a dream. Then what I was dreaming must be real life. I felt cold and went. I looked around and saw Mark’s remains all over the yard. I got a bucket to gather it up. Then I went to give it to his mom so that she could put it in the coffin. As I handed her the bucket, it was empty. I must have dropped it. So I went to find it. When I got back to my yard, it was all over worse than it had been before.
When my alarm went off, I was exhausted. There were only two more weeks left teaching preschool, and when it was over, I could sleep as long as I liked. I just had to hang in there until then.
Even though I was tired, I still had fun doing preschool. When it was time for the parents to come and pick up the kids, we went to the front yard.
While we were waiting for the parents, a couple of ladies from my ward walked by. They asked me how my Mother’s Day was. My thoughts started to race. I couldn’t tell them it was horrific because I almost killed my mom. They would never understand! So I did my best to smile and say, “It was nice. How was yours!”
When all the kids had been picked up, I went into the backyard and cried. I started having flashbacks from my childhood, and I was reliving everything that had happened to me. I couldn’t make them stop.
I have flashbacks all the time, but this time it was worse than it had ever been. I felt like I was going to burst from all the pain. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. Mother’s Day was over. I should be fine!
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
All week, the nightmares have been getting worse. I am at the point where I am scared to fall asleep because I know they will return.
I have been living on just a few hours of sleep. I knew I couldn’t go on this way, so I made an appointment to go see my doctor.
Friday, May 25, 2018
When I was done with preschool for the day. I went to see the doctor. I told him I needed sleeping pills. He asked me why, and to tell him what’s going on.
After talking with him, he said, “Sounds like you have PTSD. I will recommend a specialist for you to see,” I said that was for soldiers. I had never been in a war. I have already seen lots of specialists. I just need some pills so I can sleep. Then he said he had recently been reading up on it and that there was much more information on how to help people suffering from it than there had been in the past.
I told him I was beyond help and that I just wanted to get some sleep. He wrote me out a prescription for sleeping pills. Then he wrote me out a referral to a specialist on PTSD. As he handed it to me, he said a person who got PTSD as an adult, there were new ways to help them get through it. When you have been abused as a child, your brain grows differently. You have the worst kind of PTSD there is. If you were to look at a scan of two people, one with PTSD and one without, you would be able to see the difference. If you look at a person who got it as a child and one who got it as an adult, you can also see the difference between those two.
The problem with getting PTSD in childhood is that your brain can’t be altered to grow the way it should have in the first place. But you can get counseling to learn to live with it.
When I got home, I went online to learn more about PTSD. C-PTSD also came up. I thought it stood for Childhood PTSD. I couldn’t believe how much information was available. It answered so many of my questions! Things I never understood about myself before.
I finally understood why I have so much anxiety! People tell me all the time to calm down. It makes me want to scream! Jared would always ask me, “Is it going to blow up?” Johny would say, “Are we all going to die?” There were memes that said, “Everything is going to blow up!” and “We are all going to die!” It made me laugh. I was excited to read that others knew what it was like living this way. I couldn’t wait to tell my boys that in my world, everything is going to blow up, and yes, we are all going to die!
Over the years, I have been told, “Just get over it.” I finally knew why it wasn’t that simple. I finally understood why I got startled so easily and why it was so traumatic for me when I did. My whole life made sense! I felt like I had just lost 500 lbs.
Saturday, May 26, 2018
It’s been hard getting by with no sleep, but I managed to keep it together and be ready for graduation.
I held it on a Saturday so that the parents wouldn’t have to take time off work. It took place in my backyard, so there would be enough room for everyone who came.
The preschoolers who were wearing black meant they were moving on to kindergarten. The ones wearing white meant they still had one more year of preschool left.
I couldn’t believe how quickly the school year had come and gone. It’s been fun watching these precious little ones learn and experience things for their first time.
I hoped to be all better by fall so I could do preschool again.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
I saw the Specialist today. When she was done asking me questions and filling out papers, she said that I had C-PTSD. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. My scores were the highest that she had ever seen. She said she would refer me to the best doctor in Utah and recommended that I see her. She told me that my insurance didn’t cover that doctor, but she was sure that my insurance would approve it since my C-PTSD was so severe.
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