| The
following book excerpt is reprinted with permission
from author and AAETS member Allen R. Kates, BCECR.
To order, please call toll-free 1-888-265-2732 in
the US and Canada. Foreign orders, write Holbrook
Street Press, Box 399, Cortaro, AZ 85652 USA.
Not long after Christine got home
from the hospital, her brief, troubling dreams escalated
into full-blown homicidal nightmares. When she closed
her eyes, she saw herself descending the dark stairs
to the platform, getting on the train and being
attacked by the razor-blade man. She told me her
desire was to stop thinking about it because she
wanted to get better and return to work. Then, a
cop friend unwittingly helped her sabotage herself.
"Christine, listen,"
he said. "If this stuff has upset you emotionally,
you better not say anything to anybody because they'll
get you off the job."
"There's no way," she
responded. "This is my life, this is my career."
From that moment on, Christine
clammed up. She refused to tell anybody how she
was feeling or even admit to herself she had major
problems because she feared her bosses would take
away her job.
Oddly, once she made the decision
to hide her feelings, the nightmares stopped almost
completely. When she did have a bad dream, it was
minor and controllable. This change reinforced her
belief that she was doing the right thing. In that
mind-set, she attended the mandatory two meetings
with the police department psychiatrists. Convincing
them nothing was wrong, her determination to appear
psychologically healthy backfired. After seven months
convalescing, the Transit Authority doctors gave
her an ultimatum.
"'We're putting you back so
you won't become too mentally detached from work,'
the doctors told me. 'Otherwise, you might become
afraid to go back.' I said, 'How can you put me
back to work? I'm still not feeling well.' I didn't
say emotionally I was not well. I was still on probation
and afraid they would fire me."
At the prospect of being forced
to leave, Christine tasted copper in her mouth.
Pains shot across her chest. She couldn't get air.
Her left arm tingled. Yet she agreed to return to
work immediately. Still enduring physical therapy,
she performed light-duty jobs in Operations for
a couple of months, answering phones, handing out
guns, and disbursing money for toll booths. "I
put 110 percent into it no matter how menial the
job. I wanted to prove 'I'm fine. I'm just as good
as anybody else.'"
Christine struggled to keep up.
To not forget instructions from her superiors, she
wrote everything down on "many little pieces
of paper." After a while, the lieutenant assigned
her to the Operations Desk to perform high-profile
tasks working with the Chief of Police, Transit
Authority officials, inspectors and the press. The
job was considered a plum assignment and usually
only officers who performed well and had spent considerable
time in the unit merited it.
She felt proud of herself that
her boss had confidence in her ability. Those who
believed the job should have gone to them and not
to a rookie treated her with hostility. And the
pressure started to mount.
Around this time, about ten months
after the attack, Christine, along with other police
officers, was honored during Medal Day in a ceremony
at police headquarters. As she climbed the stairs
of the stage to receive the Distinguished Medal
of Honor and the packed auditorium burst into clapping
and cheering, she had conflicting feelings. She
had heard that some of her fellow officers were
not convinced she deserved the medal, but others
concluded she earned it. The result was that rather
than feeling heroic for what she did, she worried
that she "was not worthy of the award."
Uncertainty contributed to growing
anxiety when, a few months later, she was moved
again, this time to Dispatch, a part of the Operations
Unit. She told her supervisors she "needed
to feel capable and useful." She got more than
she wished for in a job that became more frightening
than the subway.
She sat in front of an immense
board pinpointing where police officers allocated
to her were located in the subway system. Sometimes
she would cover all of Manhattan or all of Queens,
Brooklyn or the Bronx. Receiving calls for help
from 9-1-1 Emergency operators, she would radio
the jobs to the nearest police officers. She was
their life-support system. If cops were in trouble,
they called her. She was their only hope, and the
responsibility was crushing.
While her other police department
tasks provoked little stress, this job became a
source of dread. Contradictory stories were still
circulating about what happened in the subway tunnel,
and Christine felt she had to prove to other cops
and to herself that she was capable of doing anything
anybody else could do. "A nervous wreck,"
she was forced to take sick leave several times
to escape the intolerable pressure.
Whenever she heard a "1013,
Officer Needs Help," coming from another dispatcher's
station, Christine would "freeze up" with
fear. The calls made her flash back on her own life-threatening
attack, now one year past, and relive it. The nightmares
returned stronger and stranger than before.
"Some nights when I would
have the nightmares, I would be in the subway system,
in the same place where it happened. But then it
didn't have to happen in the subway. I mean, I'm
dreaming I'm in a store and all of a sudden I would
be fighting with this guy like I was in the subway."
Christine's nightmares occurred
almost every night around two or three in the morning,
preventing her from getting back to sleep. She would
go to work by six-thirty, exhausted. Her ability
to function began to fail. She started to stutter.
When she had to concentrate on a call or watch the
board, without warning a flashback would completely
distract her. She had difficulty remembering things.
"I couldn't remember simple
things, like they would say, 'Call him and tell
him to be there at four instead of one.' I couldn't
remember what I was supposed to tell them. I would
have to write everything down.
"Sometimes I would go through
a day and wonder if I got a phone call or went to
the store or dreamed that I did. I couldn't distinguish
the difference. I couldn't remember what was real
and what was a dream. The taste in my mouth... the
coppery taste, I'd get that all the time."
Other police officers I talked to have described
similar tastes when they've been under stress. One
described it as metallic, another as iron and another
as the taste of blood. A couple of officers said
they could taste the greasy brake linings from the
black and white cruisers or sometimes smell decaying
flesh when they were nowhere near a dead body. During
flashbacks, people who suffer from PTSD often report
they taste something that reminds them of a traumatic
event.
Realizing it was more than a year
since the attack and her ability to cope was deteriorating,
Christine turned to a police friend for help. He
advised her to see a counselor outside the force.
After two to three months of tests and therapy sessions
at the Diagnostic and Counseling Services Center,
the doctor gave his assessment.
"He said, 'You are destroying
yourself. You have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,
and it's totally taking over your life. I don't
think you should be performing as a police officer.
You should commit yourself to a psychiatric hospital.'"
Christine told me she stood up
and said, "Sal, if you ever bleed a word of
this to anybody, I will sue you, because I won't
do anything else but this. Nobody's going to take
this job away from me. I'm going to be okay. I'm
just stressed, that's all."
I asked Christine, "After
you were diagnosed with PTSD, were you able to function?"
"I had something to take my
mind off it," she said. "Robert and I
were going to get married in about ten months. We
were planning the wedding ourselves and it took
a lot of time out of my day, off time, on time.
I was excited and I was able to force down all my
feelings."
Christine's method for suppressing
feelings worked. The nightmares became occasional
again. Nearly two years had passed since the assault
and everything seemed better. But with the wedding
over and nothing to distract her mind, a tidal wave
of feelings washed her away. The nightmares intensified.
Accompanying them were cold sweats and a racing
heart. She was up every night for months. Everyone
at work noticed she was worn out. She couldn't concentrate,
and they couldn't depend on her. At home, she was
irritable and short-tempered.
"Every little thing would
bother me. Robert was having trouble accepting what
was happening to me, and it was hurting our marriage.
And I stopped doing things. I stopped cleaning the
house. The wash was piling up. I stopped cooking,
which was something I loved to do. I stopped playing
piano. After I'd gotten hurt, I went on shopping
sprees and I was still doing it, only more. I had
enough of everything, but I would buy and buy and
buy. I have clothes I haven't worn that still have
tags on them. I have shoes that are still in boxes."
I asked Christine why she went
on shopping sprees.
"Depression and the necessity
to feel something. I mean, this had taken away every
bit of self-esteem. Shopping made me feel good."
"Did depression affect the
way you acted in other ways?"
"One time I was on my way
to work, going up the stairwell from the subway..."
"How were you on the subway?"
"The first thing I did once
I was able to walk was go out on the subway platform.
When Robert was available, he would walk me to the
turnstile and come back for me after work. But I
thought if I waited any period of time, I would
grow frightened of it. So by the time I went to
work, I was okay."
"You were going up the stairwell..."
"I was anxious every time
I rode the subway... There was this young guy. You
know, it's five-thirty in the morning, the subway's
totally empty. I'm the only person there, and a
guy wants fifty cents? I don't think so. He wants
my whole wallet."
"Were you in uniform?"
"Civilian clothes and I had
my gun on me. And he goes, 'I want fifty cents.'
And I say, 'No, my man. No money.' His shoulders
move up and down and he's positioning himself like
in a dance so he can have leverage. And he says,
'Yo! Just gimmie fifty cents, okay!'"
"What did you do?"
"My gun was in a belly band
and I went to get it. Like, they know. They already
know if somebody's going into their jacket, what
you're gonna take out. You're not going to take
out a 'Congratulations! You're a winner!' card.
And I told him, 'Step back. Get the hell away from
me!'"
"Did you pull your gun on
him?"
"No, but I almost did. Then
the copper taste came into my mouth and like this
whole thing dropped from my head to my toe, like
a blood rush. I was also angry because I realized
I was unable to make a clear decision. Afterwards,
I kept asking myself, What should I have done?"
Christine attributed her overreactivity
- going for the gun - to depression and being anxious.
She felt less in control, vulnerable to attack and
more prone to act quickly to disable a perceived
threat without considering the consequences of her
actions.
"Were there other times when
you felt threatened?"
"It would happen all the time,"
she said. "I was consumed by people. Especially
in the subway. I was taking the subway every day
to work and these homeless people, they were...
they were destined to kill me."
She laughed. "It sounds crazy,
but some of these people would leave that impression
on me.
"If a homeless person came
near me," she went on, "I would get the
copper taste. I couldn't get air. My hands would
start to tingle and sweat. I'd lose feeling in my
fingertips and get lightheaded. I'd feel my heart
pumping and get really bad migraine headaches."
"Had you had migraines before
you were attacked?"
"Never. And I was getting
them so badly I was vomiting."
"In these encounters with
homeless people, what were you thinking?" I
asked.
"I was saying to myself, Oh
my God. Am I ever going to be able to do
this? I mean, look at the way I'm reacting.
Just a homeless person. As time went by, I was slowly
getting worse."
"Did you try to alleviate
your stress? You were a runner. Did you work out
again?"
"I tried running again, but
I was hurting myself. Probably because I wasn't
healed enough yet. I tried a lot of things. You
see, I wanted to be the same person that I was before.
You know? I was battling myself because I couldn't
understand why I was going through this. I was looking
at myself as a loser. I saw myself as a weak person,
and I could not face not being a cop. I've asked
myself, Why can't I accept this damn
thing that's happened and let it go?
No, it was taking me under."
"Did your friends try to help?"
Christine sighed. "I couldn't
talk to people anymore. Nobody could understand.
I have friends who are female cops. It frightened
them to hear about this, and I was embarrassed to
admit I was having problems. And I have friends
who aren't cops. They couldn't understand it. And
how could I relate my feelings to them when they
couldn't even comprehend what I was feeling?"
"Before the attack, were you
a strong person?"
"Very strong. And I felt I
had to work harder because just by looking at me,
people didn't take me seriously as a cop."
"Because you were a woman?"
"Yes. People would try to
make me appear as if I wasn't intelligent. It was
important I knew where I stood. To let people know
I was feeling vulnerable, this would acknowledge
something I didn't want to admit. I didn't want
people to think I was damaged. I wanted them to
feel I was strong."
"What about your husband?"
"We were having a lot of problems
in our relationship. For a long time I felt dead
inside. Robert did everything for me. He paid the
bills, did housework, went grocery shopping, everything.
But he couldn't understand either. Who could? If
I myself couldn't, how could I expect him to?"
"And your family?"
"My parents were supportive,
but there was nothing they could do to help."
Now married and back at work with
no wedding to plan for, Christine made an error
in Dispatch for which she cannot forgive herself,
and even today it makes her hands shake when she
thinks of it. A female officer called in a "1013,
Officer Needs Help," but the transmission was
fuzzyand Christine wasn't sure what the officer
said.
"I'm not sure I didn't hear
it because the transmission was poor or because
of the fear it caused in me."
Having no way to contact the officer
who made the call, Christine panicked. Fortunately,
the officer called back, informing Christine that
the problem resolved itself and there was no emergency.
Christine's lieutenant castigated her for not responding.
Missing a "1013," the call that saved
Christine's life, was a little too close to home.
Christine said she felt sick after
that and couldn't continue working. "It killed
me to think that, God forbid, if anything had happened
to her I would be responsible. It was a very bad
thing, very shameful for me. I never wanted to hurt
any of my fellow cops. This makes me feel like I
wasn't a good cop. In reality, I wasn't well."
The 1013 incident brought back
violent memories of the slashing. Her mind replayed
the images continuously, giving her little sleep
or respite from pain. One week later, her feelings
reached a climax. The Police Self-Support Group,
which Christine had attended sporadically, invited
her to join several injured police officers on NBC's
the Today show. "Before this, my mental
breakdown was very hush-hush. This was the first
time I outright expressed myself on how I felt."
During the interview, one of the
other officers described PTSD reactions similar
to hers. Tommy said he couldn't concentrate or remember.
He cried for no reason. He had nightmares, cold
sweats and was always irritable, exhausted. Although
he experienced flashbacks, he denied he had problems.
Like Christine, he overreacted to innocent situations
and people. And like Christine, he was in an intermittent
state of unreality. He wept openly on the television
show, and his account made her realize the unreal
was real.
"After the television interview,
I went home and broke down," she said. "That
unleashed everything, like opening Pandora's box.
All of these feelings that I had suppressed all
this time. Everything was exposed. Within a week
or so, I wouldn't go outside the house. I lay in
bed all day and I cried."
I asked Christine, "You didn't
go to work?"
"I had to go out sick from
work because I wouldn't leave the house, and I was
crying all the time. I was totally withdrawn. I
didn't want to go shopping for clothes or even food.
My mother or Robert would have to bring food in.
I didn't want to socialize. And I was drinking a
lot too. Drinking at night to fall asleep."
"Did the alcohol help?"
"No, and during the day I
didn't sleep either. I sat in bed and cried and
I had the blinds closed and rocked myself. Sometimes
I would sit in a chair or sit on the floor in a
corner of the room, in the dark room, rocking and
crying. You must realize that I was the person who
everyone would call to ask 'What do I do?' or 'What
do you think of this or that?' I would always give
advice. I was the strong one. I was the capable
one. Now what was I?"
Knowing she was in trouble, Christine
called Tony Senft from the support group. Tony could
not drive because of his injuries, and he couldn't
get a driver at such short notice. He convinced
Christine to come to him.
"I can't tell you what it
was like to get into the car," she said. "I
fought with Robert. He had to take me by the arm
and then pick me up and carry me to the car. I was
paranoid about everything. Every little noise startled
me. Even the sun, the sun was hurting my eyes."
Christine put the front seat down
so no one would see her in the car. "I lay
down crying the entire way there while Robert drove."
Realizing she needed professional
care, Tony advised Christine to see his psychiatrist,
a therapist experienced in helping veterans with
PTSD. The next day her mother drove her to see his
doctor.
"I sat in front of him and
cried," she said. "I couldn't tell him
what happened to me for almost three sessions. And
then he told me he was going on vacation and I came
apart.
"I really feel like I want
to kill myself," she told Dr. James J. Cavanagh.
"I can't stand crying anymore. I can't stand
what this is doing to my life. I'm killing my marriage.
I'm killing everything. I don't know how much more
I can take."
"If you feel as though you're
a danger to yourself," the doctor said, "I
think you should let me admit you to the hospital."
"The hospital! Absolutely
not," she said. "If I was hospitalized,
I would never be a cop again. They'd consider me
mentally unstable."
The doctor and Christine decided
it was better if she made the decision to go. "Can
you imagine what would have happened if they forced
me? It would be like being arrested. They'd have
to call the police and order an ambulance. People
would come and take away my gun and shield."
Christine returned home to her
dark room, crying and rocking to try to soothe herself.
Suicidal, she called a friend who sent her to another
psychiatrist. Dr. Joseph Benezra advised hospitalization.
Again, she refused.
"I went home from that session
and had a terrible argument with Robert, and he
left to go to work. He could not comprehend what
I was going through. I was scared to death of everything
and I was afraid to go out. I was a prisoner of
something that happened to me and he couldn't understand
that. I wondered why that guy didn't just kill me
and save me and my family from all this.
"After Robert left, I went
into an hysterical fit of crying and couldn't stop.
I took medication the doctor gave me to sleep and
some Scotch. I was hallucinating. I took my gun
and I sat down on the couch in the living room with
the TV blasting and I was crying, rocking back and
forth, and I brought it up to my mouth and I was
screaming- "'God please take my life from me!
I've been through enough! Please help me. I didn't
do anything to deserve this. I failed as a person
and I failed as a police officer and I failed at
my marriage and there's nothing else in this life
I want. Forgive me for what I'm about to do. Please
help me take my life!'" The phone rang.
At first she wasn't going to answer
it. She did, and the call saved her life. It was
Tommy, the officer from the Police Self-Support
Group who spoke of his PTSD reactions on the
Today show, calling to see how she was.
She said to him, "I'm sorry
I can't help anybody else because I can't help myself.
The pain is too much for me to take. Everyone will
be much better off without me around."
He listened, and he talked to her
until she promised to put down the gun. He wanted
to drive out to see her, but she said no. He told
her next time he might not be there to stop her.
This motivated Christine to return to the psychiatrist.
In tears, she told Dr. Benezra she just wanted to
go back to work. He told her he wanted her to go
to the hospital.
Once again, she fought the doctor,
unable to accept that she had moved from care giver
to care needer. A few days later, she finally agreed
to be voluntarily committed to North Shore University
Hospital. On the way, she took several anti-depressant,
anti-anxiety and sleeping pills. She said, "I
didn't want it to be a reality for me."
Before admission to the psychiatric
unit was granted, Christine was required to subject
herself to a medical examination in the emergency
room. "This was the greatest humiliation,"
she said. The resident performed a gynecological
exam. Christine felt it was an offensive and unnecessary
intrusion but didn't think she was in a position
to protest.
Afterwards, an aide took her upstairs
to the eighth floor, the Psych. Unit. She's not
sure what she expected, but when she saw gray, steel
doors with tiny windows, doors that required keys
or beepers to open, doors that slammed shut behind
her, she felt panic. She couldn't reconcile how
a cop could be locked up like a criminal.
More indignities were to follow.
The nurses directed her to undress and then took
her clothes away. Ironically, her attacker, an escapee
from a Connecticut mental institution, had failed
to kill her, but succeeded in reducing her to his
level, and she couldn't do anything about it.
Locked away, stripped of everything
she associated with the outside world-clothes, shoes,
a pen, a telephone-she felt abandoned. "I felt
like I lost my battle. I lost my career." It
was two in the morning. For a few hours, loaded
with drugs to fight off the reality of where she
was, Christine slept.
The next morning, she met with
a room full of doctors, nurses and aides. Weeping,
she told them the little she could remember of the
incident. By this time she was blocking out many
details. Never looking up from the table, she had
no idea what the staff members looked like. She
sat there, hunched over, plucking tissues from a
box.
The days in the hospital passed
slowly while she received medication, one-on-one
counseling and engaged in group therapy. She kept
a diary of her ups and downs. Rereading the entries
gave insight into her frightening misadventure.
After earning "points of improvement"
for following rules like taking medication and attending
counseling, she was allowed to watch television,
do crafts and use an exercise bike. From the moment
she was assaulted, she started losing weight and
was now down more than 25 pounds, weighing 88 pounds.
Christine said the staff was very
protective, too protective. "I couldn't shave
my legs without a person outside the shower watching
me. They were afraid I'd hurt or kill myself."
She was angry that her attacker
had put her here, locked in with people like him.
"It was horrifying," she said. "I
was in with a lot of really sick people who were
chronically mentally ill, people who had been in
and out of mental institutions their entire lives.
It was very degrading."
The status of the people locked
up with her affected how she responded in group
therapy. She would not open up because several patients
were under arrest for drug offenses. They were people
she was ordered to apprehend and here she was facing
them as an equal.
Her shame and powerlessness revealed
themselves in headaches and troubled sleep. After
the first night, the nightmares returned. During
the day, despite taking several medications, migraine
headaches caused her to throw up repeatedly.
About two weeks into her hospital
stay, Christine's doctor suggested a method for
breaking her mental block about the attack. He wanted
to administer sodium amytal, a short-acting barbiturate.
It was supposed to help release inhibitions. Although
she was still having nightmares, they were not about
the incident itself. She wanted to relive it one
last time. She thought, If I can get it out,
then that will be the end of it.
The day the drug was to be given,
the medical staff and several interns assembled
in a room to observe the procedure. She said she
felt like a laboratory specimen under a microscope.
An IV bottle dripped solution into her arm. The
doctor told her to recite numbers backwards. After
the drug took effect, the doctor asked her questions
about herself. Then he asked her about the incident,
questions like, "Do you know you did everything
you could to come out of there alive?" She
cried and answered Yes and wanted him to
go on. He hesitated.
She pleaded with him, "Please
don't stop. Please take me back." He refused
to delve into the details of the assault, and for
two days after the procedure, she sobbed uncontrollably.
"I was angry because I felt
he left me hanging. He made me think he was really
going to help me and he didn't. I couldn't understand
why he did that. And I was angry because it was
like I didn't live it. Do you know what I mean?
I thought that if I went back there subconsciously,
maybe when I awoke it would have been more realistic
to me, and I would be able to deal with it."
I asked her, "Did the doctor
tell you why he didn't take you back?"
"He said he didn't feel it
would have done any good."
Coming to terms with the unreality
of the attack was one of many hardships Christine
tolerated in the hospital. The news that she was
hospitalized in a psychiatric unit caused her disgrace
in the eyes of her friends and family.
"I've lost friends over this.
I've lost cousins," she said. "When I
was in North Shore, a cousin of mine had a baby.
She was on the maternity floor of the same hospital,
and I went to visit her. They looked at me like
I had some infectious disease or I was going to
pull out a gun and kill everyone in sight. They
were frightened over where I had been."
After a month in the hospital,
Christine was allowed to leave. Initially, while
still on medication, she saw her main therapist,
Dr. James J. Cavanagh, three times a week. However,
her therapy seemed unsuccessful. She had waited
such a long time before seeking help, denying her
problems, that the symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder held on tenaciously.
Christine told me she left the
hospital with more "unexplainable" issues
than when she went in. She was overly suspicious
and forgetful. She'd forget what she was saying
in the middle of a conversation and while driving
would become lost.
But she had made progress in the
hospital. At last she was facing the aftermath of
the assault. Feelings she previously ignored were
in turmoil. She was getting better, only it felt
worse.
Reprinted from CopShock,
Surviving Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
472 pages.
ISBN: 0-9668501-0-6. $19.95 US
Copyright © 1999 by Allen R. Kates. Excerpt
From
CHAPTER 1: ASSAULTS
©1999 by The
American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress,
Inc. |
