Post by Caylus Ark on Nov 17, 2016 21:31:30 GMT
I am reading a book about trauma at the moment. There is a chapter about a woman whose anesthesia didn't work properly so she woke up and was conscious for a portion of her surgery, about 45 minutes. Harrowing stuff. The chapter talks about how she spends a long time wrestling with confronting her recollection of those 45 minutes and the pain of being operated on and paralyzed without being able to tell anybody that she was conscious. At first she blocked it out entirely, and began to recall only hazy and fragmentary blocks of emotions and pictures of memory. She is eventually able to weave it into a coherent story with a beginning middle and end, but this fails to resolve it for her. Even though the torture experience itself was no more then 45 minutes, it haunts her persistently for years and years. She described something I found rather interesting about "dual" states of existing both in her experience and outside of her experience which I think is something unique to people who have been through forms of traumatic experience which they have difficulty moving beyond.
these are some of her words which I found rather impactful, and it gave me the desire to put them in this thread:
"There is a strangeness, bizarreness to this dual existence. I tire of it. Yet I cannot give up on life, and I cannot delude myself into believing that if I ignore the beast it will go away. I've thought many times that I had recalled all the events around the surgery, only to find a new one.
There are so many pieces of that 45 minutes of my life that remain unknown. My memories are still incomplete and fragmented, but I no longer think that I need to know everything in order to understand what happened.
When the fear subsides I realize I can handle it, but a part of me doubts that I can. The pull to the past is strong; it is the dark side of my life, and I must dwell there from time to time. The struggle may also be a way to know that I survive - a re-playing of the fight to survive - which apparently I won, but cannot own."
these are some of her words which I found rather impactful, and it gave me the desire to put them in this thread:
"There is a strangeness, bizarreness to this dual existence. I tire of it. Yet I cannot give up on life, and I cannot delude myself into believing that if I ignore the beast it will go away. I've thought many times that I had recalled all the events around the surgery, only to find a new one.
There are so many pieces of that 45 minutes of my life that remain unknown. My memories are still incomplete and fragmented, but I no longer think that I need to know everything in order to understand what happened.
When the fear subsides I realize I can handle it, but a part of me doubts that I can. The pull to the past is strong; it is the dark side of my life, and I must dwell there from time to time. The struggle may also be a way to know that I survive - a re-playing of the fight to survive - which apparently I won, but cannot own."