Liv’s experience with Grief and PTSD
It was over 4 years after my Mum passed away on the 12th June 2020, and much soul searching and various forms of therapy that a counsellor finally took me through a survey over the phone and said ‘I think what you’re suffering from is PTSD’. I didn’t know what to think at first, was I completely over reacting? People in much more life threatening situations than me should be experiencing this.
When I look back now, I can see that actually a lot of things surrounding Mums illness and death were out of the ordinary. Mum was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in February 2020, but when she met her consultant to discuss her treatment plan, he explained that Mums cancer had actually been identified on a scan in 2016, and no one had followed this up. Mums treatment then coincided with the beginning of the Covid lockdown in the UK, and the final four weeks of her life were spent alone in hospital, where she died, having only been allowed to see myself and my dad.
Looking back I do think that there are signs we can look out for that were different from solely experiencing grief, compared to experiencing PTSD. Some that my family and I have identified are:
I was waking up in the night, and I would be sobbing when I woke. This became more common and was often following dreams of Mum. What I found unusual is that the dreams were not necessarily reliving the exact events around Mums death, but would involve Mum and I together but there would always be an aspect that we had limited time before she had to leave again. This would taint the whole thing with this panic that Mum must go again, and we would never achieve whatever we had set out to do together.
An excessive worry about death. I felt that I managed this during the day time (but point 3 will show that I was not) but at night, as soon as I laid in bed I would feel my heart racing. I would lay in bed and ask if my husband knew CPR because I was convinced something would happen to me during the night. Alongside this as I laid in bed I would picture what it will be like when I die and physically picture being in the ground, and the decomposition of my body. This was every night.
I became obsessed with safety. Someone told me that on the smart motorways with no hard shoulder, if my car broke down, I would have 12 minutes life expectancy. I have no idea if this fact was correct but it fed into my panic of impending doom, to the point where I began avoiding the motorway (which I had confidently drove up and down alone since the age of 18).
Linking to the previous point, I panicked in any events where I was not in control. Again I had flown to America on my own as a teenager, and now I was petrified taking any flight abroad. As a secondary school teacher, I would be physically sick throughout the week when I knew we would have surprise drop ins into our lessons because again there was an element of the unknown and I simply could not cope with this.
I experienced a lot of physical symptoms, which often persisted far longer than they should. I simple sty on my eye became so bad that 2 months later it had to be operated on. I was constantly struggling with stomach issues, which my GP felt was most likely due to the stress.
I was constantly tired, and my husband would support me and tell me to rest but I never felt I had relaxed. In hindsight this is because physically I was sat resting, but I had ensured mentally that I was busy this entire time, whether faffing on my emails, looking for various games to distract me on my phone, or scrolling on social media, I hadn’t actually switched off. Also from a social aspect, I would fill my evenings and weekends, sometimes triple booking myself. Again this gave me little time to sit and have to consider my own thoughts.
I avoided and in some ways feared being alone.