Personal story. My wife is dying.
Stress. This is about stress.
My father was on a ship in the Navy during WWII, when the ship he was on was accidentally rammed by another US Navy ship. His ship was nearly cut in two. He saw his fellow sailors jump out of their bunks.
No one was killed. But my father, soon after, jumped ship. He went to Los Angeles, and got work painting houses. He was caught, and put in a Navy prison on an island called Terminal Island. Look it up on Google Earth. It is in Los Angeles. He spent nine months there. He had his appendix out there. He turned twenty there. He got into body building there.
He never really explained the whole thing to me. But why did he jump ship? I think the collision of the ships was a traumatic event for him, and he was feeling severe stress, from the memory of that event, knowing that he could be killed, just towing targets in Puget Sound.
John Kerry shot and killed a young Vietnamese boy, apparently at close range. When he got back, he told Congress we need to get out soon.
I think that shooting was a traumatic event for Kerry, and the lingering stress from the memory of that event led him to call for an end to hostilities.
Timothy McVeigh, I read somewhere, shot an Iraqi man with a weapon meant to shoot vehicles. It shot his head off.
Maybe one of the reasons McVeigh felt a need to turn against the USA, was stress. Stress from the memory of the traumatic battle scenes in Iraq.
I left my wife in August of last year. Starting on Thanksgiving, I experienced, off and on, severe anxiety and depression. My psychiatrist called it mild. It felt severe. I considered suicide.
I moved back in with my wife in December.
Why did I feel stress so bad I went to the ER three times? I think the it was a combination of loneliness, and the memories of the traumatic events of my father's death and the several times my wife appeared to be dying. I was in the hospital room when my father died. He had never been a patient in a hospital from the time he had his appendix out in 1944, until twenty days before he died of cancer.
The first two times I thought my wife was dying was in 2002 and 2003. I cried my eyes out, like when my father died.
I have a new co-worker. He spent four years in the Marines, six months of that in Iraq. He has post traumatic stress disorder.
Just a few hours before writing this, my wife's doctor told me it is time to make a decision. The obvious decision, I think, is to bring her home, and, no matter what happens, do not take her back to the hospital. If we do that, even if we leave the bi-pap machine on her 24 hours a day, she will die, maybe in a week or two, from co2 narcosis. She will fall asleep, and gradually die.
Will I be in the bed beside her when she dies?