To the story. My first PTSD experience came on November 5, 1962 a warm Tueday... when I crashed a car into a wall and my mouth hit the steering wheel. I was spitting blood everywhere and ran ino the church office to tell the priest whose car I was moving that I had wrecked the car. Funny I was apologetic.. I wrecked your car, I'm sorry. What has followed over the last 49 years has been innumerable dental surgeries, bridges and shame. After all the most important thing on American television is the toothy smile. Without that one is a freak, a toothless racist hillbilly, white trash. Repeatedly, daily, that message hits home.. I am less than everyone else because I have false teeth. The psychological pain is far worse than the physical though I suffer everyday.. ask anyone who wears dentures knows how they hate those devices. So at 16 I began wearing dentures and undergoing dental surgies to have permanent upper bridges fitted. I'm on my third and awaiting procedures that will lead to a fourth.
My second PSTD experince came on April 15, 1990 a warm Wednesday when while pitching batting practice as a girls softball coach I was stuck on the right temple by a hard grounder that took a bad bounce. I was knocked off my feet and as I lay on the ground and my players rallied around me I immediately got up and attempted to shake it off. What has followed has been over 20 years of misery and headaches. After the intial blow I had a month long headache which could not be relieved. I went to the hospital for x-rays and then my family doctor who said I had a dent in my skull, code for a fracture. She prescribed Indurol.. which I took for a week and then stopped because I was essentially a zombie. When I asked my family doctor if she would attest to the line drive as being the cause of my multiplying headaches, she said no... you see I'd had headaches in the past so this wasn't the cause.. and she wasn't going to take a day off to testify. I was and am extremely disappointed in her. There is one long term disability that resulted from that injury. I cannot close my left eye in a blink! Well if that hit to the head was not a work related and a compensation worthy injury why prescribe Indurol. And to top if off, the girl who hit the ball had the afrrontery to confront me about my lack of interest and energy while I was on Indural. But enough castigating the others.
Soldiers injured or shot in war relive their experiences even to the day, the weather, the locale just as I have. PTSD is as real to noncombatants as it is to those injured in war. I have spent a lifetime in pain, discomfort and regret. What might have been had I not cut school on that warm day in 1962, the week that Eleanor Roosevelt died? No use going there and did I ever profit from the injury, did it exempt me from military service in an honorable way. NO. Instead when the intake officer at the Selective Service asked if anyone had dentures I was too ashamed to speak up.. which would have gotten me a medical instead I passed through on a lie. Forever after my exemption will be related either drug use or my father's PTSD. Gutless and stupid what a combination. And what might have been had I not attempted to back hand the ground ball? I was showing off and have paid dearly for it. I will go to my grave with those two injuries haunting me every day! And what about my head injury while coaching, did I ever profit from that. Well no and I never threw batting practic the same. True I had taught those kids to hit,, if they could hit my pitching, they could anybody's. I wasn't that good but I was accurate. Only twice in nearly 2 decades of pitching batting practice did I hit a batter..
That's all I have to say on the subject today.. Fellow PTSD sufferers I salute you. Life after Trauma is never the same! Often if I allow myself I can return to that day in November, 1962 and relive the event, hoping and fantasizing that a second more or less, had a decision to skip school not been made, my life would have been much different. No arguing that, but why think that way. Things are what they are.. the explosive impact comes back to me, the sudden confusion, shock, the blood. Over and over I see it happening I bleed, I spit out my broken teeth. There was no saving them, the teeth, that is, were broken, splintered.. And next the long walk perhaps 6-8 blocks to the dentist.. of that I have no memory. Then the removal of the fragments. I don't remember the dentist using any anaesthetic.. Then later in the day when my parents came home I was there with the bad news. Sad to say I don't remember their reactions.. shock, anger whatever. Each blamed the other.. I blame them both for not being better parents.. but I was and am willful so blaming them is another method of denial. Had I had different parents, had they been more aware of me and my doings. Then there is the priest, whose name I will not reveal. I wonder how often does he think about me, or does he ever? When I try to remember the days that followed, the pain, perhaps the medication.. I don't think there was any. I do recall that I didn't sleep well that first night. My next recollection was going back to school a week later, after being fitted for dentures and the solicitude of a few people, things go blank except for one remarkable incident. There was a girl, a Greek girl who came up to me and told me that she had full dentures and then showed me and remarked that it wasn't so bad. That gave me some comfort but also I suspicioned she was making primitive advances toward me. She wasn't a particuarly pretty girl, certainly not popular. In fact I don't think I'd ever noticed her before. Looking back I guess a high school girl with full dentures was likely to be a wall flower. One other incident stands out about the girl, whose name I will not use. I remember being invited to a birthday party some years later at her parents home. This was during my wild years.. The party was in the basement of which I remember nothing. But I do recall making my way up to the formal living room.. which was a somber place, dark furnishings, plush but dark and univiting. Nothing remains of that experience. There will be more.. but for now I must stop.. it happens that way.. it overcomes me to relive the days following, the months, and even the years, the multiple office visits, the gold teeth attached to my eye teeth.. I still have that bridge as a keepsake? Or reminder?
