Medical Trauma

Medical trauma. Suuuuuuuuuuper fun topic, right?

I'm (obvi) not a doctor, and this isn't an official diagnosis. Or expert advice.

This is one long-running patient who is processing the (unknown, unseen) mental health effects of repeated surgeries and endless doctors who can't find anything wrong.

It takes a toll.

As I prepare myself for shoulder surgery - my third (!!) - this week, I've been processing some medical trauma (again: undiagnosed. And I recognize the term trauma gets thrown around a lot lately, but I do think it applies here. And it is a useful framework for understanding my reaction to the upcoming procedure.)

I kept thinking it must be severe anxiety, or total overwhelm, but the truth is I'm an expert planner, and once I knew we were doing this, I was ready. 

Logistically, at least.
Ready with frozen meals and button down shirts and post op meds.

Yet I found myself checking out at random intervals. 
Feeling both this desperate need to run and this panicked sensation of being frozen in place.

This was not a reaction to the upcoming surgery.
This was a reaction to past unprocessed traumatic experiences.

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Um, I really wish I had a really fun topic to talk about, but I actually decided to talk about something that is hard because I don't think it gets talked about enough and I, whew , I'm having surgery tomorrow is not the topic, but I am having surgery tomorrow. Uh, if anyone's been, if you guys have been following, I hurt my shoulder almost two months ago. I've been wearing a sling. I've been trying to figure out how to , uh, uninflamed. We thought, you know, this is inflammation. I got an x-ray and they said the x-ray was fine. So there was a lot of confusion about what was wrong and how to heal it. And I thought maybe this is tendinitis and a flareup because insurance , um, is a little tricky to get approval to , uh, get an M r I . So I got an m r I two weeks ago. For those who don't know, X-rays show bones. So if you have a broken bone, you need an x-ray, but if it's a tendon or a ligament, you need an M R i . If it's soft tissue and x-rays are way cheaper. And so MRIs require a more rigorous approval process. And so I finally got approval to go in for an M R I and they said, yep , your shoulder is torn like two places. We gotta sew it back up and anchor it, otherwise it's gonna keep dislocating. I was like, cool, cool. So I spent all of last week , uh, processing that and preparing for surgery and planning for surgery. And lucky me, I've already had two shoulder surgeries in my twenties, so I very much know what to expect. Um, I made a lot of food and put it in the freezer. I bought , um, disposable plates. I bought way more cheese, puss and chocolate than I could ever need. And kind of like a prepper. Now there's like a whole section of the pantry downstairs that is just like bulk food because I really wanted to not have to leave the house and have foods that I could eat for the next few weeks. I'm gonna be in a sling for six weeks, but certainly the first week and a half are, I'm hoping those are the hardest. And then it starts to get better. But I actually don't know. Um, I went to the Salvation Army and bought some button down shirts and some cardigans , um, and just setting up my room to be really ready for all this and wrapping up my day job and making sure everything is handed off and has backup and all this stuff. So there's been all this logistical stuff, which honestly I excel at. I this is a benefit side to being a deeply anxious person, is I'm always expecting everything to go wrong. And so I anticipate all the problems that could possibly happen and think about solving them before I even get to the event. So by the time the surgery happens, I'm like, yeah, I'm ready. I've like, I've read the instructions three times. I've done all the things I needed to do. Um, I feel really good about that. So I'm kind of in that place now. And the reason I wanted to talk about it, you know, today is because part of what happened last week was I was having these, I thought they were deeply anxious moments where I just like couldn't get clarity in my brain and couldn't like, see straight and was just like, what is going on? And I finally realized that I really have like medical trauma and it's not a really well-known thing. And I know that the word trauma is now being sort of from never being used is now being used a lot. So I'm not like medically diagnosing this. I just kind of wanna talk about what trauma is, what it looks like, and what the healing process of it is, because that's what I realized we don't talk about. Um, so kind of the, the overview of trauma, it happens. There's kind of like three things. One is that you think you're gonna die. One is that you feel like you have no agency over whether or not you're gonna die. And no , I guess two things. And so a car accident can be traumatic. Um, you know, often we talk about rape and victims of sexual assault feeling really traumatized. And often , uh, the two most associated are women and sexual assault or men and sexual assault , uh, or non-binary. And sexual , sexual assault in general is the problem that causes trauma. Um, and also , um, soldiers and military coming back from war, those are the places where there's like this sense of something terrible is happening and you can't fix it. And what trauma does is because the brain feels so overwhelmed that it has no solution and doesn't know how to like get through this moment, it sort of like steps out of time and locks it in and then afterwards goes back to living. And it's incredibly adaptive 'cause it allows you to go through really overwhelming, terrifying, unbearable things. The problem is that normal memory works sort of like a river. You broke your arm when you were six and it gets like processed and then it becomes the river of your story goes into, you know, when you talk about having broken your arm when you're six, most people are just like, it's, it's a story, it's an anecdote. You don't feel the pain, you don't feel the fear of falling, you don't feel that stuff because your brain has processed it. And the brain takes stories and events and and sort of catalogs them. And chronologically there's a word in there, right? Makes, puts them chronologically. And once they've been filed away, they're , you know, stories and events that you can remember and recall, but you won't have that same immediacy. Trauma is sort of the opposite because your brain shut down and wasn't able to process that. It is out of the river of your chronological storytelling. So when people have flashbacks or when people feel , um, like they're repeating that trauma and it's being triggered in them, they go right back to that moment of complete. It's like more than panic, right? It's more, it's more than anxiety. It's more than panic. It's like life or death. You can't, you're frozen. You can't figure out what to do and you don't feel like you can fix anything about it. So you're just in this state. And what's hard about traumatic memory is that it always flashes in this way that brings the person right back into this state of , um, complete overwhelm and shut down . And They're discovering that, you know, I don't know again that I not diagnosing myself as medically traumatized, but they are learning that, especially people with chronic illnesses, people who've spent a lot of time, it's my third shoulder surgery who spent a lot of time going to doctors and being told nothing is wrong, who spent a lot of time getting poked and prodded , um, and feeling a sense of vulnerability , um, and, and, and panic that my body is broken and nobody can fix it. Or the people who can fix it don't know how to fix it. And now I just feel like panic. I feel, I feel like I'm trapped in my body and I feel like there is no solution. I am just trapped in this body that hurts. And I had surgery 15 years ago on my shoulder and they sent me to physical therapy. And the physical therapy made everything hurt more. And I would tell that to the physical therapist and they said, we don't know why you're doing the most basic exercises. And I said, okay, but it hurts. What do I do? And essentially they said, we don't know how to help you. And so for a year I was on anti-inflammatory medication, which really up your stomach. And I just stopped using my shoulder. Like I just, nobody had a solution. So I stopped reaching for things, I stopped lifting things. I just did what I could do to get through that. And so this new surgery is bringing up a similar anxiety of a lot of pain post-surgery. And then this fear of what if I'm left with a sho ? What if I'm left with a shoulder that I can't heal that nobody can fix that is just in pain all the time? And that to me feels incredibly panicky and overwhelming and I don't, I don't know how to process that, right? It just my, we go into our lizard brain, we go into our animal fight or flight, survive or die brain. It's not logical. I can tell it. Yes. I really like my surgeon. Yes, I really like my team. Yes, I am, you know, doing , um, doing the best research and the best care and the best. You know, I'm going into this aware that there could be a possibility and like the most prepared I've ever been, the most wise I've ever been. 'cause I've learned so much on my medical journey. But the part of me that is freaking the out doesn't hear that. And that's part of what's really , um, hard about trauma. And this is where , um, Bessel VanDerKolk wrote this book that blew up, I think 10 years ago called The Body Keeps the Score. And it was based on his work with , uh, P T S D in Army vets , um, at a VA hospital. And what he was finding was a lot of the group therapy and a lot of the attempts to help people coming back from war zones was to have them talk about it. And he actually found that talking about it more retraumatize them , it put them through that experience all over again and it didn't actually help. And so what we're learning is that just having logical, you've got this, you're safe now doesn't talk to the part of our brain that is in lizard mode that is just fight or flight. I doesn't have language. And I bring this up because there are actually , uh, a lot more tools available to us. We know so much more about trauma and so much more about how to heal it and so much more about what can be done when it's experienced. I think, again, not a doctor, but from my own research and understanding of trauma healing, what we've come to learn is , um, the goal is to be able to bring up that memory, bring up that sense memory experience, and create enough safety in us now that the brain knows it can handle remembering that knows it can handle going through that moment and then rewires it to come out the other side. That's hard work. And the first part of that is actually a lot of somatic. So body-based exercises, because what we also know is fight or flight can't actually connect to the logical brain That right is gonna tell you that you're safe and is gonna go back into that story and see maybe a different way in which you did advocate for yourself, or in which case I did fix my shoulder as much as I could and I did get it functional for 15 years, you know, and all the ways in which , um, I made it through that experience and came out stronger for it. Um, right now that just feels like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I roll. Um, and the reason why is because what needs to happen first is calming that triggered reaction. And so we're learning a lot of these things. Um, and so I realized that I started for myself. You guys know I love a checklist and you guys know I love stickers. And because I was feeling this sense of overwhelm because I felt like I was just counting down the days until someone was gonna put me under anesthesia and cut into my shoulder. And that was super triggering to me. Um, I started a build back better plan and it had all of these things that I could do, like making sure my right arm, the unaffected arm was strong 'cause it's been doing extra work because my left arm has been broken and torn for a while . Um, making sure I was walking and drinking water and journaling and just the things that I sort of do regularly. My brain was having a really hard time like remembering it. Just the experience of being triggered is , um, you fall outside of time. Like you just end up in this space where you fall outside of like who you are now. You, you fall outside of this , um, identification, this recognition that you know, I am a grownup. I pay my own bills, I have decision making , strategy and um, agency in this process. And you revert to whatever part of you was in that situation that feels completely powerless and completely afraid and completely in danger. And so that messes with your sense of time, that messes with your sense of focus, that messes with your sense of being able to deliver on stuff. Um, and you sort of just, for me, it often feels like this. Everything goes white as though like I can't see or hear anything. Everybody thing sort of buzzes. Um, and it always feels like my atoms are about half a foot away from my body and they are just vibrating at such an incredibly fast speed that I can't, like I'm just buzzing in a way that feels incredibly dangerous and I dunno how to sit still. And I don't know how to go anywhere and I dunno what to do and I dunno what to think and let , like all my problem solving capacity is not just for surgery, but everything go out the window. I'm suddenly not able, I don't know how to bring myself back from that. And so what we're finding is that there are a lot of things that we can do. Not one of them on its own necessarily brings us back into our body. It's um, I read this thing that was great and also terrible, which is , um, of all the somatic practices, each one of them maybe brings you 10% back into the ground and into your body. And so it's the accumulation and the compounding effect of doing a lot of these. So some of the somatic practices are yoga, tai chi, anything that connects your breath to your body, putting your feet in the grass, sitting in the sun , um, meditating. And I'll also say some of them work for people and some of them don't. I find meditating not helpful right now. I find pacing way more helpful and getting my thoughts out. Um, listening to music, singing is a really, really good one actually. Anytime that you make vibrations, it could be chanting, it could be humming, it could be clapping, it could be snapping. All of that actually produces vibrations. And vibrations help reset the brain. So singing is really good. I find listening to podcasts easier. I have a hard time reading when I'm triggered. It's just like my brain can't, it just can't connect , um, visually, but it can listen. And I often think of it as if I just play nonstop, you know, self-development , um, uh, podcasts, which for me are the ones that I love the most to listen to and help me feel the most grounded. It like reaches me in a different way than reading reaches me. I find when I'm triggered, journaling just feels impossible. And that's strange. 'cause if you know me, I pretty much journal. Like it's ridiculous how much I journal. It's my favorite way to like really work on my brain and really figure out who I wanna be next and how I'm gonna become that person. And I cannot journal when I'm triggered. I just, I just don't know how. And so, you know, there's, I'm also learning, there's a spectrum of being triggered. You could be triggered at a one or two where it's maybe I could journal, right? It's like things are starting to feel really , um, they call it hyper aroused. Like things just feel a little too much and like, I might explode and I don't know how to handle this situation. Um, or just like being in my body and breathing right now. Um, or you could be like at a five where maybe everything sort of starts to go haywire, but you're kind of able to show up for some things. Or you could be at a 10 and you're just completely like, I'm in bed, I'm turning off the lights. I am , I just talk to me tomorrow, right? Like it does run the spectrum. And part of what I'm learning to do is to , um, check in with where I am on the spectrum so that I'm more available to myself and be like, okay, all I can handle right now is like, sit in the sun. Great. You got a sticker for sitting in the sun. And I swear that's what I do. Like, just to give myself a sense of agency, to give myself a sense of progress, to give my sense of myself, a sense of I did a thing today and I can't remember what, and I can't remember what was happening, but I did this thing. So I really wanted to come today because I feel like, yeah, I was trying to explain this actually to a friend of mine. Like what I was going through and realizing I thought I was just being super anxious. I thought I was just being super like overwhelmed. And I realized, no, I know how to manage my anxiety and I know how to manage overwhelm and I'm actually incredibly prepared for this. I've asked all the questions and I've taken all the notes and I've prepped all the food and I'm ready. And this level of stepping outta myself, this level of, I feel like I just don't know what time it's been. Like I forget what day it is, which is not like me. My brain is always on stuff. It's always super aware of what date and day it is. And suddenly I like couldn't remember this kind of, I don't know if you guys felt this, but this was a lot of what covid for me in the beginning was like , um, the lockdown specifically that utter panic, that utter sense of non-agency, of something dyers happening all around me. And it is killing people by the thousands and there's nothing I can do. And my brain had a really hard time staying grounded. My brain had a really hard time , um, not freaking out and, and feeling like it was trying to run away from a situation without actually moving. Like that's another way that I know I'm triggered is like, I feel like every part of me wants to run. And it also feels like every part of me is freezing in order to protect itself. And that push pull of those two things is unsustainable. And so I just feel like I'm exploding out of my skin. And one of my goals in this podcast and in being an artist in general is to really give language to the experience of some of these more nuanced but also lesser known , um, mental health challenges. I think we all have trauma in our lives. There's what they call capital T trauma, which is often, you know , uh, someone coming back from war or someone surviving a sexual assault or , um, like the things that you were a functional human being before and this thing happened to you and now you like can't remember how to function, you just don't know how to go back. But they also have little T trauma, lowercase t trauma. And that can be things like bullying because our sense of self, especially let's say in middle school, which is where a lot of this happens , um, is so much predicated on our social , um, relationships and to be bullied and exiled. The brain perceives being exiled from a group as death because we still think like animals in a tribe. And if we are exiled from that pack , we can't survive, right? So it might not be affecting you every single day. It might not be stopping , um, as much of your productivity or I hate the word productivity, but as much as your cognitive ability to show up for yourself and be creative. But especially if you get in a situation where maybe you're feeling that again, this is where people have outsized reactions to small, seemingly small situations. Like maybe your coworker says something and you misunderstand it and you have this incredible shame spiral over this incredible, like, you can't see straight, you're just filled with rage, right? People experience triggers differently and what their fight or flight looks like can be something different. And so people explode into a rage. This is why a lot of P T s D and vets is rage explosions because they're having this experience that they don't know how to survive. And their , their system is going into fight or flight and they're choosing flight, they're getting aggressive. Mine tends to be shut down, but everyone's different in how they do it. And it's, it's this thing that I hope we talk about more. It's this thing that I hope we're able to have better language for our insides because everyone looking at someone else's outsides doesn't have a clue that that's happening. And I think that's very much to our detriment. 'cause we're all experiencing some amount of hardship and loss and grief and um, unexpected difficulty. And we're all having to process that. And we're all doing it in our own ways. And there's so much to be learned from each other. And I think this is where the part of going through this experience returns me to what I prize most about being an artist. What to me is the most precious thing, which is how do I communicate an experience that I don't have language for? I'm inside of it. And because I spend a lot of time thinking about my internal experience and really working on healing myself, I forget that others have no idea what this is, have never had trauma, don't have triggers, don't have the same sense of like suddenly. And again, like I'm having surgery, I kept thinking for a lot of people, she's like, oh, I'm having surgery. That sucks. I'm scared I don't want to, but they're just, you know, gonna go about their day and I'm literally feel like I'm falling on my knees or falling underwater all the time. And I'm like, what? You know, it's 'cause it's an outsized reaction to an event that's coming up. It's retriggering so much old , um, medical testing and being stuck in MRIs where I felt absolutely no agency and wanted to run. Um, having surgery and feeling like I got put under the knife. Like there's just so much that my body has gone through. And because I didn't have the tools even of just sitting with my body and letting it process that very animal of the body fear of being cut into, of having pain, you know , uh, sort of like, you know, post-op, like you're inviting pain or you're being put in pain 'cause it was, your body was cut into that. It's, it's terrifying. The body feels that fear. And so it needs that processing in order to come out the other side and be like, oh yeah, this is a thing that I did and now my body is better and now I'm just working on rehabbing and now I'm just working on being this stronger version of myself. So I think also , um, I will bring this back to being kind of an artist in the world. There can be lowercase trauma from putting yourself out there and being turned down right from being, from having something that means a lot to you. Maybe you're have a gallery opening and nobody shows up and it's your last gallery opening that can have little t trauma that can be so overwhelming. And so , um, you don't even know where to begin to process all that emotion and all of that overwhelm and that sense again of , um, rejection, of being exiled from the group is always gonna be processed by our brains as death. Even though in this world that we live in, most of us are really, really safe in terms of at least physical threats. And so you're, you're potentially gonna end up in a place where it's really hard to process to grieve that process and then start the next project. And I see people get stuck, myself included in moments where I auditioned a ton of times and that never came to anything. And now I'm having a really hard time with like auditioning more or having monologues or working on scripts because in my head it interpreted all these times when I auditioned and I could have been amazing and I could have been terrible and we don't know, but I didn't hear anything. And the story that my brain made of not belonging, of being outside of this system of creativity that I really wanna belong to has just caused so much interference in my brain that I don't have a clean slate from which to create a new project from which to go forward. And that's some of the work that I'm doing now. So I don't know that it would clinically be called trauma in the same way, but so much of the same work, so much of creating safety in my body, not just by saying, Hey, you're safe, but let's put my feet on the ground. Let's sit on the floor. Let me put my feet in the grass. Let me do , um, meditative breathing. I do like the breathing, you know, box, breath , um, which is when you inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four and start again. There's a lot of versions of that with like sevens and eights and different numbers, but the act of controlling your breath triggers your parasympathetic system, which allows your whole nervous system to calm down. So all of these are downregulation techniques. All these are ways for your system to go from this place where it just feels complete and utter fear of death to a place where it can kind of come back to this moment in time, come back to this body in time, come back to seeing what's actually happening right now versus living in this moment that got frozen before that is , um, completely flooded with panic and overwhelm. So my hope for you is that you have no idea what I'm talking about and uh, therefore this is my hope that it opens up language for those who are experiencing this, who have trauma from all different kinds of places. Um, and also, you know, if there is something about your journey as an artist, someone who wants to share stories that you've written or is working on their first novel or second novel, maybe their first novel didn't, you know, get published. If there's something about that experience that's really holding you back, I would just invite you to start seeing if there's some way of creating safety for yourself and really thinking about it as this overwhelm that your cognitive brain can't process and therefore needs a different pathway into helping it really make peace with that experience so that you're free to be flexible and creative and flowy in the way that your best work does come from. Okay, thank you for being here. I am assuming all good wishes for my surgery from you guys. Um, I'm incredibly well prepared and I know that I'm going to build back better on the other side. Um, and I just really appreciate you spending the time with me. Take care .