Page 278 - Total War on PTSD

and almost every weekend. We even got married while I was in the hospital. Eventually my time for discharge arrived, and I was nervous. I was unsure how my life would unfold. That I learned my third life lesson, just as a person can be sick, but not sick enough to go to the hospital; a person may not be fully healed, but can be well enough to leave the hospital. It was then I began to experience what it means to have PTSD.
This is the physical side disability I am living with, and although I did experience some emotional issues when I left the military in 1996, I recovered quickly and without any major incident. This experience was a different matter. Having your life placed in danger changes your entire life perspective. Most people don’t think about how dangerous it can be driving on the freeway, eating in a restaurant exposed to any crazy person who can come in through the door and let loose a spray of bullets, or how similar a sledgehammer being operated by a construction worker sound oddly similar to a machine gun. I believe PTSD does not even occur when your life is placed in danger, because for the military person, we are trained to cope with those situations. Our lives are in danger more often than most of us realize. If we were to know how many meteors almost strike the planet during any given decade, we would all be constantly nervous. How about how many car accidents we almost get into, things happening beyond our field of vision that we don’t even see? Our lives are in danger almost all the time. It is that moment when we become unsure whether we will survive an ordeal, when we are faced with the real possibility of death, due to causes outside of our control, that we will eventually experience PTSD. Because we have experienced a situation, some of us many situations, where we really questioned whether our lives would continue, we become hyper-vigilant to every other aspect of our lives that we can control. Along with our hyper-vigilance, we become extremely reluctant to place
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