My View

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

Dear Reader,

It has been three long weeks since my first confessional bare-it-to-the-world blog post. Here comes the second.

I am going to share a story with you, one which I have shared with few. Years ago, when I was a wee bairn of a radiographer, my Mam’s friend developed a chesty cough and was referred to chest clinic at my hospital. She sat in the packed x-ray waiting area, alone in a sea of other patients, not wanting to take the next revealing step of her care; the cold fingers of terror plucked at her voice and took the strength from her legs. She wasn’t the only terrified patient there; she saw one patient refuse to go into the x-ray room, and watched as the radiographer sat on the floor in front of him and quietly spoke to him through the cacophony that surrounded them. She saw his expression change, saw his shoulders relax; he turned to his wife and nodded. The radiographer took his hand, helped him to stand, talking quietly to him as she lead him into the x-ray room. He left the room a few minutes later with a small chuckle and a wave to the radiographer inside, and my Mam’s friend prayed that the kind radiographer would be the person to x-ray her.

That young radiographer was the person to x-ray her. It turned out to be me.

I share this with you not out of self-indulgence, and without any hint of get-me-I’m-great smugness smeared all over my now collagen-deficient face. My Mam told me her friend’s words because she was proud of her daughter; I remember them because it was a lesson in how far the ripples from my behaviour can travel, that it is not just confined to those that I directly interact with, that the impact has an undefined border.

‘Kind’ is as under-rated and under-valued as ‘nice’ when it comes to describing a human, it being so much more de rigeur to use words such as ‘sexy’, ‘savage’, ‘shit-hot’, and ‘savvy’.

Kind + Nice = Boring + Sensible.

‘Savage’? Really? How is that good? What Society have we become?

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

I was diagnosed with Chronic/Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder two years ago, as I stumbled away from the ruins of my marriage, and I don’t mind confessing that PTSD is a monumental pain in the sodding derriere. It manifests as a malevolent, malignant monster silently stowed away in my psyche, before abruptly roaring through every screaming fibre of my being at any given point during the day or the night. My sleep is interrupted by the worst nightmares my imagination can create; predominantly my daughters are dying or dead, and I am helpless to save them. I jolt into the dark, real world bathed in sweat, sobbing, screaming, sickened, terror-stricken, and helpless with grief. It is safer sometimes, for my sanity, to simply stay awake.

Daytime is a different beast; I look normal, I am normal, I behave normally. Most of the time. Certain stimuli (the list is seemingly endless, but it’s quite often related to other’s behaviour) trigger flashbacks; a smell, a word, a tone, and a look can all immediately transport me to a memory that I would rather forget forever. I have absolutely no control. None. In company, I can mostly maintain a calm demeanour on the surface but be imploding inside. Sometimes I don’t have the strength, and can visibly disintegrate; it can (understandably) seem irrational, volatile behaviour to the vast majority.

I don’t like sitting with my back to a room of people, or standing with my back to a door, and I find choosing from a menu a minefield. My constant hyper-vigilance is exhausting, but I can gauge the topography of a situation in a heartbeat. I keep myself busy; I am Donkey in ‘Shrek’, jumping up and down asking to be picked to do something. I control my eating, lapse, control it again. I have collapsed many times over many years, and twice been hospitalised, the most recent event resulting in five months off work with intense, incapacitating ME/Fibromyalgia type symptoms, the physical manifestations of PTSD.

Like Domestic Abuse, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a taboo subject that few openly discuss. It cloaks individuals in shame and burdens them with guilt. I read an article highlighting a recent surge in sufferer numbers, inflated by individuals who claim their PTSD is a result of, for example, an argument with their boss, not as a consequence of combat trauma or abuse. They are labelled ‘snowflakes’. I am no soldier, but I am no snowflake either. My PTSD has been acquired chronically, and is as real as Ronaldo’s manicured eyebrows. I have been through my own battle, and at some point (my consultant informs me) I have been in fear for my life. Last year, whilst working through a night in ED, one of my patients told me that he had PTSD as a result of combat trauma. I told him that I understood, that I truly understood. He looked me directly in the eye, and said ‘I know’. At that moment, at two o’clock in the morning, with a mad, mental ED swirling outside the x-ray room door, the world contained just the two of us; he held my hand and we cried for each other’s isolating pain. Kindness.

PTSD is utterly, utterly crap, but it’s not cancer, MS, or any of the other terrible diseases that I see every single day that I work. It is not depression and it is not work-related stress. PTSD will not kill me, although I know that it has claimed the lives of so many. I do not live in the past, do not dwell on it, but I understand the damage will take time to heal. I struggle with that. I have help with that struggle. Again, kindness.

So, Society, you can keep your ‘savage’ and ‘sexy’ adjectives.

Give me ‘kind’ every day of the week.

It’s the foundation stone of Humanity, and a highly prized human characteristic.

And that is all I have to say about that.