I don’t remember what happened next or even before this moment. ("Many victims forget the details of the incident, obviously in an attempt to lessen the blow.") I washed her nightgown and sheets numerous times following her mastectomy in December 1989. This time period blurs and mixes into other events, other surgeries, other traumas. I do remember the earthy smell, the slight chilly feel of the water, the oblong shape of the soap, the raw intensity of my scrubbing. I don’t know what sounds radiated in the room around me—perhaps my mom was snoring in the other room. I don’t remember what lights were on or whether I felt overcome by any particular emotion. I don’t remember what I felt in my body.
I do remember the silence that shrouded me after—the dissociation I felt from my self, my classmates. The sense of urgency I had. A friend teased me about how I walked: head bent down but my eyes scanning, always in a hurry, books and notebooks pressed against my chest. I was ready at a moment’s notice to do, to fix, to fight, to flee/isolate myself. My mom’s diagnosis had come at the end of my freshman year, the news bomb of breast cancer.
Our world changed right before my finals and at the humming edge of the Christmas season. My friends had mild dramas about love interests, parties, passing a class, staining a blouse, no longer believing some thread of Calvinist dogma. (I was at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.) I came back in January having witnessed my mother being wheeled into her hospital room, pale and eyes as slits scanning for me, for my reassurance, my presence. Our roles so suddenly switched. Her large motherly, once-nourishing breast only a memory. The Michigan winter a steely death blanket outside. We spent Christmas, where? I can’t remember, but I think she made it home for Christmas or did she stay in the hospital and celebrate later? The potholes in the roads on the way home a significant threat, as pain accompanied each bump. I learned to scan for these new threats, go carefully—ease around or through, pissing off many a driver who followed me. (Increased arousal and hyper-vigilance of those with PTSD.)
The good news, the true gift of that season: they had successfully removed the cancer—a quarter-sized lump. Her lymph nodes were clear. She needed no chemo or radiation. Celebration.
But the circle outlining where her breast had been stayed red and swollen, rises of tender skin oozing and bleeding around each suture. An allergic reaction that surprised all of us—me, my mom, her doctors. Blood stained her gown, dotting it like some heroic but imprecise starry constellation—sometimes with additional wide and elongated comet-like streaks.
Unbeknownst to my mother, I saved that gown and kept it with me as I traveled to Oregon, Idaho, and Colorado between 1993 and 1995, aiming to create some kind of art piece by cutting and ripping it up, rearranging the pattern—finally processing and reconfiguring the grief and trauma. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t let it go—a symbol of the abrupt end of my youth, evidence of what my mom and I went through (and would go through in 1991). I finally threw it away once I moved to my mountain home in 2005—my own health then the top priority. Memories: to be trashed, buried, burned—I was fully in survival mode. My adrenals were crashing. My whole body was in a chronically over-reactive state.
I don’t remember talking to my roommates or friends about what happened with my mom. I do remember arguing about ethics and abortion and whether Jesus had indeed risen from the dead and what the proof for it was. I do remember Bibles and Brownies in the basement of my dorm and how we couldn’t have boys in our rooms except, I think, on Sundays—and only with the door opened at least a foot. I also remember many drunken parties—lights, music booming through the rooms, people roller skating across Victorian-era wooden floors, making out in stairways and dimly lit bedrooms.
I remember laughing with my mom as we tossed her “fake boob,” as we called it, back and forth like a football. Volunteers from the American Cancer Society’s Reach To Recovery program came and spoke with my mom in hushed tones until her laughter cut through like cigarette smoke, twisting their delicate intentions into a spear.
I don’t remember anyone ever turning toward me, to see how I was doing, what I needed—not in a patronizing or overly careful manner but in a way that showed they had an inkling of my toughness, my internal scars, and of the new and terrifying fears and nightmares, of the images I could not erase or smooth out into the present, of the blur.
Trauma shapes the brain, so to recover from chronic trauma or severe emotional trauma the brain needs to be rewired. In particular, when the amygdala is stimulated it causes intense emotion, such as aggression or fear. According to Viatcheslav Wlassoff, of the BrainBlogger, two regions of the brain that regulate responses to environmental stimuli and emotional responses are affected by PTSD and influence activity in the amygdala: “The most significant neurological impact of trauma is seen in the hippocampus. PTSD patients show a considerable reduction in the volume of the hippocampus. This region of the brain is responsible for memory functions. It helps an individual to record new memories and retrieve them later in response to specific and relevant environmental stimuli. …
PTSD patients with reduced hippocampal volumes lose the ability to discriminate between past and present experiences or interpret environmental contexts correctly. Their particular neural mechanisms trigger extreme stress responses when confronted with environmental situations that only remotely resemble something from their traumatic past.”
The other part of the brain affected by severe emotional trauma is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. “Specifically, this region regulates negative emotions like fear that occur when confronted with specific stimuli,” writes Wlassoff. “PTSD patients show a marked decrease in the volume of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the functional ability of this region. This explains why people suffering from PTSD tend to exhibit fear, anxiety, and extreme stress responses even when faced with stimuli not connected—or only remotely connected—to their experiences from the past.”
With these two regions so diminished, that is, the actual volume is reduced or less than that of a non-affected person, the amygdala can go into overdrive. It’s as if one particular muscle, since it is used so often, gets stronger and takes over—it feels, in my experience, like a rut you have a hard time getting and staying out of. The amygdala region of the brain forms Pavlovian associations and “helps us process emotions and is also linked to fear responses.” As Wlassoff explains, “PTSD patients exhibit hyperactivity in the amygdala in response to stimuli that are somehow connected to their traumatic experiences. … The amygdala in PTSD patients may be so hyperactive that these people exhibit fear and stress responses even when they are confronted with stimuli not associated with their trauma, such as when they are simply shown photographs of people exhibiting fear.”
One way this has played out for me in relationship to PTSD is that I, reflexively, map signs in my environment in an attempt to predict if a traumatic event similar to one I’ve experienced before is coming into my life again. And, I tend to plan for and think of the worst possible event or outcome. My whole orientation, at times, is to Fear. Life feels overwhelming and out of control. Shit happens, I shrug. The building blocks of severe chemical sensitivity exist here—alongside the physiological toxic chemical and heavy metal load. The source of an adrenal crash roots here. The dissociation and isolation I’ve experienced relates to this. Humans need safety and calm, respite and recovery in order to form strong bonds with others—to grow beyond fearful or aggressive responses—to become whole. But when most “signs” trigger some level of fear response, it takes a lot of work and safety to rewire this—to keep oneself out of the rut and to keep putting oneself in the way of love, carefully and attentively not recklessly. To know and feel that you are loved and safe. And to literally grow the tools (muscles, if you will) of the hippocampus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Calming the roots, trusting other people (appropriately) and learning to play again, as well as speaking my story counter-act my humming limbic system. I consciously teach myself to scan, look for danger and respond if necessary, and then to calm down if there is no threat. And in this attempt to retrace what happened in December 1989, and the first few months of 1990, I am trying to rewire my brain. I am putting context to the emotional shock of submerging my hands in bloodied waters, swirling with the red juice of my mother’s body. I slot this story into its appropriate place in my past. I feel the fear of seeing my mother’s newly scarred body and of replacing blood-filled gauze pad after gauze pad; I move with the excitement of hearing her laughter return; I withdraw from the anxiety of remembering our fight when she wanted to resume smoking. I speak back to my prefrontal cortex, letting it know that the gown washing has ceased and nothing in my present reality—even scrubbing blood out of a sock from some hiking wound—bears a resemblance to what my mom went through in 1989/1990, 1991 (more on that later), or during her 8-year myeloma battle.
I hope that children and teens who are caregivers for their parents receive more help than I did or others I’ve heard from or read about. I may have looked fairly functional on the outside, but inside the ground gave way—trace the fault lines that run with these rivulets of blood and water. Yes: blood is thicker than water. But sometimes the stain of love needs a mature, healing hand that can help scrub and cleanse it from one’s soul so the love itself can be felt, known, taken in—so healing can come.