I have always thought trauma during illness exists in a similar way as trauma following an assault, with the same anxieties, the same need for grounding or reconciliation, with triggers that are sensate in nature (a scent, a song/sound) and though I cannot really elaborate on this feeling I know it is there when my face starts to tingle or I recall something obscure from the past that, when placed in its context, jars me. Or both. Or simply when I stub a toe and wail helplessly even though I clearly will be okay!
Last month was CMT Awareness Month and on the last night of the month I had a dream that really shook me. I should add that vivid dreams are a frequent effect of the medication that helps me sleep at night, though most of them are ordinary. I do not recall the context of this dream but I was going on some type of tour or vacation with a group of people, most of them were adults. I think my husband was there. I do not think my sons were there. We were in California so we stopped by Claremont.
Claremont was supposed to be the chasm to my dream life (false, it never got to be that) and Pitzer College was going to be the channel to that means (truthish)... but instead it was the catalyst to the hardest, most bitterly painful period I have gone through so far. It was supposed to be my giant FU to every person, mainly professional, who encouraged me to stop walking, it was supposed to be the FU to my neuropathy. I was supposed to bask in the warmer tempuratures (non truth, the desert gets cold and the Midwest stays unseasonably warm at times; even if the evenings in Claremont never dipped below 30 degrees cold is cold is cold) and walk in that super tiny, could fit in the palm of my suburbian childhood atmosphere (truth, it was the size of my parents' ranch style, 1960s built, Ladueish, neighborhood), college campus.
And in my dream we were in the main hall on the academic side, overlooking the parking lot, where I introduced my "audience" to the College and said "... here is where I took my last steps." And with that realization the dream sequence ended.
When I was ten and barely knew what was "wrong" with me (those parentheses are to emphasis that this is, unapologetically, something abnormal and that being aware of that contrast is prerequisite to healing, not the super sugar coated idea that everything is okay, let's talk about the bad stuff) I had returned home from India to realize I literally could not walk without the full support of a walker - as in my left leg would not lift up, move forward, and plant itself down. My right leg could do this synchronized activity but I would wobble on my left side. No one told me my condition was progressive and no one warned me that inactivity was the abusive step parent of degeneration. After that and the repetitive assurances that this was my normal (false, how is that reassuring? Do doctors stop and listen to their proclamations?), I not so secretly avowed to make walking, in this eclipsed form last as long as I could - which was longer than most expected it to persist.
As I approached the end of high school I thought if I could find a college that was small enough, and I could spend the years between eighteen and twenty two consumed with, and therefore maintaining the muscle, bone, nerve, and blood vessel memory needed in walking, the hardest part would be over. After all graduate schools and work spaces would be smaller distances and more supportive of my not-very-ambulatory lifestyle.
I barely walked in college; the only time I walked around the campus was when I toured it for the first time before ever applying -while in college I only walked briefly in my freshman dormitory hall. And when I did it felt so foreign to me. I packed my bags and moved away from everything I knew, without considering what could happen if things did not go my way, and without realizing that in moving across the country, I had left the place where walking was my second nature. I had a blank canvas in my modified single room at Holden Hall but with no familiar nooks or infrastructure to support walking or to catch myself on when I lost my balance for the hundredth time. The realization that when I thought I was moving toward walking, I had actually moved myself away from it, that I left the only context where it made sense, was too painful.
On a barely understandable level I knew that IT was over, but I had spent so long fighting for it and cherishing it, and perhaps unwillingly forcing it at the end, that the emptiness turned into a deep, charring anger. I made decision after terrible decision that could have jeopardized my future, because that was easier than facing either the idea that this (non walking business) was as inevitable as everyone had told me it would be, or that I had not done enough. That I stopped fighting and let myself be carried downstream by my neuropathy and gave in to that undercurrent of inevitability. And I left Pitzer only to never return.
I started healing and good things happened. A lot of amazing things happened fast. But it took me eleven years post freshman year to realize that Pitzer still leaves me with a face-tingling, nagging feeling. And I have been dealing with that for two years now.
Whether it's minor details like remembering which curb cuts worked for me and which did not, being able to pin point routes I took across the five Claremont colleges, or the way the five academic buildings interlock on the second floor... Or a dream like last night where I do go back but all I remember is compulsively photographing everything. It's all trauma and I wish to someday return to either reconcile the pain and the memories or to transcend them.
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