It's 00.28, I'm lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I think the best thing to write about right now is the nightmares and flashbacks. I thought only soldiers in war only experienced trauma but I experienced a trauma of falling. When someone has a trauma of this kind, it takes them two years to fully recover. I'm only on week 5 of 104 of recovery so my accident is still very prominent in my mind, which in turn has taken a toll on my mental health. I suffer from flashbacks and nightmares as a result of my injury.
The nightmares are definitely the worst and very night I have an anxiety attack about sleeping. In my dreams, I relive the experience of having my leg reset over and over and over. The background to my dreams are the shouts of the lady who was next to me in the ward. Her shouts were always the same; "mamma help me, mamma save me, what are you doing to me? Somebody help me, they are trying to kill me". There's nothing else to the dream, it simply repeats until my mind moves onto something else. I don't normally wake until noon and when I do, I'm exhausted from the night.
The flashbacks, whilst not as bad, still take me by surprise. When my ice skate was removed by paramedics the day I fell, I let out a scream (and my friends will testify that it was a piercing scream) because I was in so much pain. Sometimes, I'll be watching tv or eating my dinner or doing anything when my mind will take me back to that point and for a few seconds, all I can hear is that scream. I'm helpless until its over and it's terrifying.
It's possibly that I'll need Cognitive behavioural therapy but the medication I'm on does increase anxiety and nightmares so I'm hoping my mind will settle down.
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