Soul Mosaic

Oxygen ping-pong

I’d sent my son downstairs to sit in the sunny atrium and call his friends. He needed a break. This was one time when I was glad for teenage friends on cell phones. A tiny touch of normalcy for him from the last couple of days.

All morning, we’d watched Ed’s oxygen numbers bounce up and down on the monitor. It was like watching a race where the lead was uncertain yet, but our “runner” might just bolt forward at any moment. Clearly, his levels were trending up. If they could just break through to normal….

I watched my husband sleeping in the bed. He was still on a lot of morphine to keep him quiet. However, given that his oxygen levels were inching toward normal, they started to bring the morphine dose down. As soon as his oxygen levels stabilized for sure, they wanted to get him off the respirator and bring him out of his coma.

The respirator had been a lifesaver for sure. But leaving him on it longer than needed risked infection. On the other hand, bringing someone out of their coma and removing the respirator is uncomfortable for the patient and excruciating to watch.

We wanted to be there to greet him on his “return from the coma”…and see, Was he still “Ed?” His brain swelling had not gotten any worse and was starting to improve. But the moment of truth would only come when he was awake. Then we would learn what all of this trauma had done to him.

The place out of time

There is something about the ICU waiting room that I wish could be captured and spread throughout the world — unconditional love.

The ICU waiting room is a place out of time. While everyone hangs in limbo for an outcome, for a hoped-for word on a loved one, for relief from the intense pain of not knowing either way, life, as you know it, stops.

In that room, you enter the land of pain, fear, and sorrow – the great equalizers. No matter what walk of life you came from, rich, poor, or famous, no matter what color or race you are, when you enter the ICU waiting room, each one of you is the same — a hurting, terrified human being.

“Your husband’s blood oxygen has dropped. It’s hovering around 47% right now. Below 50% we usually see brain damage.”

The words hit me like a rock against my skull. All of us went so silent that the quiet crushed against my eardrums.

“Is my husband going to live?”

Those were words I never expected to hear coming out of my mouth at this point in life. Especially given Ed was only 47.

The doctor hesitated.

But I was blunt, direct, to-the-point, with words that meant I wanted no fluff answers. I had been in the medical field too long. I knew how doctors and nurses sometimes sugar-coated things or used evasive words so as not “freak the family out.” I didn’t want coddling or patronizing. I couldn’t bear “uncertainty.” Tell me now – Is he dying or is he going to make it?”

What is happening to me?

It was one of those warm, fall afternoons, not sunny, but still, the array of colors splattered on the trees across the pond dazzled.

On the TV, my son was watching the old movie, “The Trouble With Angels.” It was a 1966 comedy with Rosalind Russell and Haley Mills about life in a Catholic girls’ boarding school, where Mills is the determined troublemaker, and Russell is the equally formidable Mother Superior. It is a funny movie, especially if you had the nuns for teachers as I did, and one that we played now and again for comic relief.

I was sitting at my painting easel in the corner of the living room, near the window that looked out on the pond. By all accounts, it should have been a serene afternoon. At any time in the past, with a similar setup, it was. And today started that way. But then, it suddenly changed.

The longer the movie played, the more afraid I became. Dread, foreboding, and this overwhelming sense of …guilt…being in trouble…bad things about to happen, flooded through me.

I tried to shake it off. This is stupid, I remember thinking. I mean, what the hell was wrong? Yet the longer I sat there trying to paint, the more afraid I got.

Worse. I had never experienced anything like this before. I mean, sure, when I was a kid at home, and my father was raging. But I was a 51-year-old adult woman having a peaceful afternoon with my son in my own home. So what was I suddenly so afraid of?

I tried to summon all that rigid strength I’d always had at my fingertips, to quell the fear. I could always depend on being strong. But that day, for the first time in my life, that strength failed me. Shocked, I realized I had no control over the intensifying terror racing through my body.

All I could think was, What is happening to me?!

Before I get into today’s segment, just a moment of gratitude and celebration. It is my husband’s and my 38th anniversary. It is always a day of joy for us. But I will simply add that through the months of writing this book draft, and seeing all the struggle and pain, I find it an especially wonderful thing that we are together and thriving. So, to my husband, my partner through it ALL, my soulmate, thank you, and I love you.

Tara’s permission

After the large break in the family, the next few years had their ups and downs. For a couple of years, I stayed away. That was hard, especially when my uncle, my mother’s last sibling and a favorite uncle, died from cancer. I just chose not to attend the funeral, which, in my family, was no small absence. But it was also a time when Ed’s parents were sick, and his mother was dying, so my excuse was that we were taking care of their needs.

In fact, her death came the very next year, and his father’s death 3 years after that. The awareness of life’s mortality for our parents slowly brought me back into contact with my extended family over the next couple of years. As it had helped me to stop hating God, Buddhism, as well as my work on a medical ethics board, provided me a path toward a reconciliation of sorts with the family.

The naming ceremony

We stood quietly in the Temple, waiting in line as the Buddhist monk approached each of us in turn. We each had a “kata” – a traditional scarf meant as an offering to the monk – draped over our folded hands.

He stopped in front of each person, looked into their eyes, then wordlessly selected a small piece of paper with a Tibetan name on it and gave it to them. Whatever the monk saw in each person’s eyes determined the name he gave to them.

Finally, it was my turn. He moved slowly, with much peace. I was always amazed at how deliberately he executed even the simplest movement, as if he had all the time in the world. He looked at me, REALLY looked. His focus was like a laser boring through my eyes and into my soul. His expression was soft, and his own eyes were like clear, still pools of water. I felt serenity emanating from him.

His scan of me lasted only a moment. But he showed no hesitation as he sought out one particular decorative slip of paper and handed it to me. Whatever he saw in my eyes, apparently, he was very decisive in what name I should have. Handing him my kata, I bowed in gratitude.

It was only after he moved on to the next person that I looked to see what name he had chosen for me. Neatly printed on the paper were the words, “Tashi Dolma.”

The woman next to me saw my paper and said, with some level of irritation, “*I wanted that one!”*

TRIGGER WARNING – DESCRIPTIONS OF FEAR AND VIOLENCE IN NIGHTMARE DESCRIPTIONS

Unaware

I didn’t know it at the time, but bubbling deep beneath my surface was a huge, roiling well of trauma. And it would be another 10 years, with events in 2006-2009, before it would surface and blow me apart. Until then, I would live “unaware.”

I was unaware that my intense fear reaction to my father’s “look” in the hotel that day was an emotional flashback. I didn’t know there was even such a thing.

I was unaware that the intense anxiety I always felt on Saturdays and Sundays were “body memories.”

I was unaware that the rage that would flare up in me instantaneously if someone held me back even gently, or if my shirt got caught on a doorknob, was a reaction to past abuse.

I was unaware that my intense fear of darkness, of driving on dark, rainy nights, of inexplicable body pain or tension, or a deep sense of foreboding in unexpected moments, were trauma reactions to “things only my body remembered and knew why.”

And I was unaware that there was even a thing called “trauma,” much less something called PTSD.

I will write more about these in the next book section about what I’ve learned over the years, and what it all meant.

But at that time, I was unaware because I was too busy taking care of life. And because medical science itself was only starting to understand all of this.

If there was any hint or premonition of the trauma reaction to come, it was in my nightmares. They really ramped up in this period, with many recurring scenes and themes. While nightmares continue to this day, which I will write about later, there is one difference now — the nature of them. Now, they have evolved to give me more power and let me fight back. The ones in the 1990s until very recently, though, were all about being the victim.

Summer, 1995 – The weekend of flashbacks

In 1993, Tears for Fears did a song called “Break It Down Again.” It was about recognizing that things are not what you thought, but are instead a time bomb building. And your only choice is to face it, and yet again, tear it down and start over….

The same was true for the cycles of Dad’s “promises.” Another family gathering. Another round of “seeming too familiar,” and too “in control of the situation.” Things that just seemed wrong.

On this trip, we were gathering to celebrate an uncle’s anniversary. Everyone was arriving and checking into their hotel rooms.

Stepping out of my room, I encountered him in the hallway. He was smiling, happy, and in a hurry. Commenting that he was going to arrange for a cot so that one of the kids could sleep in his room, he turned to rush down the hall.

“What?!” Fire flared through me. I had to have misunderstood him.

“What do you mean sleeping in YOUR room?!”