I "Checked Out" of Everything for Two Years. Here's Why:

Two years ago today my home burned down. My then husband and I had lived in it for 14 years, had just Pebble-tech and retiled the pool and had a beautiful custom kitchen built. Our little dog, Daisy, and one of my parents' dogs were asleep inside and the smoke got them. I remember very little about this day except my DP driving me to get my parents' other dog who was outside during the fire. I remember the way he smelled, of smoke and dog, and I remember holding the phone in my hand and my father was on the other end of the line but I have no idea what either of us said to the other. My husband, Grammy, uncles and aunts were all there at the house, and of course the fire department. I cannot imagine how hard it was for my husband to have to come home to that and to call me and tell me what happened. I remember almost none of his call, except these words “I have some bad news”.

I then spent a brief period in a mental health facility, during which stay my boss of more than 6 years at the time called me WHILE I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL UNDER 24 HOUR SURVEILLANCE AND ON SUICIDE WATCH and said “The firm is going in a new direction” and that I no longer had a job. He and his wife are embarrassingly faux Christians. The kind that use Jesus as the reason/excuse for everything. What Would Jesus Do? Well, I'm gonna guess he wouldn't call me at the mental hospital a couple days after my life went up in flames and I was tranked out and suicidal and fire me. Just a guess. Looking back over documents and emails and stuff I found an email that his wife sent me a couple of months after the fire essentially telling me that if only I had given in to their daily attempts at Christianing me up, none of this would have happened.

The end of 2009 and much of 2010, through the Spring into early Summer, is almost a complete blank. My then husband was very kind in caring for me during this time, even though I was, frankly, out of it and a complete nightmare to be around. He and I have since divorced, but he is a really good person who deserves a normal and happy life, and I want that for him. I spent 2010 in therapy several times per week and on all kinds of medications because I am now suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's very strange to see pictures of myself from this period and listen to people recount places I went and things that I did and have no memory of being there/doing that. I randomly get flashes of memory sometimes, but it's never anything very exciting or life changing.

The doctors all say that whatever my brain has decided to lock away in the “memories lost” vault needs to stay there. They explained that your body and brain often know what you need and that your mind thinks you need to know, but your brain knows better. There is less support for the old school therapy approach of “let's talk and talk and relive the trauma and relive it some more and hypnotize you until you remember everything” these days, which I appreciate. I haven't stopped crying during this entire post, imagine having to talk about the horrible things that happened every day to a doctor who can't change it, and then being coerced to remember MORE about those horrible things. No thank you.

I still have short term memory loss, which is often embarrassing, so I explain the PTSD right away to new people, because chances are I will not remember their name a few minutes after they introduce themselves to me. I am working on learning different systems from other PTSD patients with short term memory loss to assist me in remembering people”s names and where/when we met, because I feel rude and dumb, though I am in fact, neither.

As a “bonus gift” - you know, like what you get when you spend $36 on high end makeup (if I can't make a joke about some of this I could not survive)- I began to have [and notice] paralyzing (LITERALLY) physical pain once my entire brain was not consumed by shock. I would wake up feeling like my arms and legs were burning or that my feet were so cold they were going to shatter like glass. Frequently I was unable to move my arms, hands, legs and/or feet. Sometimes it feels like there are needles poking rapidly over and over into my skin. And the phrase “bone tired” took on actual meaning. Imagine for a minute the worst flu (the barfy kind) that you have ever had, or if you have had mono. Where you feel so exhausted and worn out that if any part of your body has to move one centimeter, you think you will drop dead. That's how I feel all the time. After the psychiatrist and therapist determined it wasn't part of my mental situation, I went to the doctor and had a million tests. Then I was sent to the rheumatologist who determined that I have Fibromyalgia, a chronic, incurable illness and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which often accompanies it. The latter showed itself apparently in my continuous positive Epstein-Barr test result.

Let's do a quick partial recap: Fire, Mental Breakdown, Crazyhouse, Lost Career, Divorce, PTSD among other things, extensive therapy and medications, AND Fibromyalgia and CFS.

Reading back over this post, I still think “This couldn't really have happened to me.” But it did, and this is only a tiny part of what has happened to me since that first flicker of open flame.