Some days it’s easy to count your blessings. One of my blessings is great driving karma.
When I was caregiving for Mike, we put over 57,000 miles on the two vehicles we drove to see doctors. This did not count miles to Colby (20 one way) to see his primary care physician. There were no accidents or being stranded only one low tire that we had trouble getting repaired.
For the first three years, I was working as the Oakley Area Tourism Director, and I drove a lot of miles to meetings and events for that as well. On August 3, 2015, I was driving to St Louis, MO in the city’s vehicle. I was about halfway between Columbia, MO, and St Louis when the right rear tire blew. Amazingly the Trail Blazer didn’t roll, and I didn’t hit anyone. I ended up in the median on the cable. The vehicle was totaled. I had chest pain and was taken to the ER.
I was reminded of this by a series of pictures that some of my tourism cohorts and I had posted on FaceBook. Some of them were of the event we attended. Some were places we went to eat. Some were of the tourist things we did in St Louis. The ones that had the most impact on me were taken of the Trail Blazer when we stopped to get the promotional stuff that didn’t go in the ambulance with me out of it on our way home. When I posted the pictures, I mentioned that looking at the totaled vehicle made me shaky. This is post-traumatic stress.
It was also post-traumatic stress that I wasn’t able to recuperate from at the time. Mike had come to get me and on the morning we were to go home he wasn’t feeling well. We called his pulmonologist from the hotel room. He ordered a chest CT in Kansas City on the way home.
This started a month of weekly trips to Kansas City to see doctors with the last one being a hospitalization. On that last trip we got to the hospital around midnight. That was when I realized that I could drive the 350 miles to KU Med Center from our house in five hours.
Post-traumatic stress can be caused by many things. (Read more about other experiences I’ve had with it here.) We tend to think of veterans having post-traumatic stress and indeed they do. What we don’t give much credit to is the things we feel are not as significant that cause post-traumatic stress.
Photo by Kim Beer.
If you listen to your body, you may feel the post-traumatic stress in your body. Mine creates a feeling of shakiness throughout my entire body, I must stop and catch my breath. Don’t dance around the feelings thinking they are not as significant as someone else’s stress.
Whatever led you to that feeling doesn’t need to cause you stress anymore. Connect with me here to meet my healing herd and see how they can reduce the stress in your life.
Sometimes it feels like the hardest thing is Stayin’ Alive.
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Onward!
