E03: Critical Reading—pdqlover

Section 10

Today she’s fielding phone calls from a woman whose veteran son was committed to a non-VA psychiatric facility, but he doesn’t want to be at the facility because he, a severe-PTSD sufferer, was already paranoid before one of the other resident loons threatened to kill him, and anyway he fought for his fucking country and they promised they wouldn’t abandon him and he swears to God he will have to kill himself if the VA doesn’t put him in with the other soldiers.

– The author is explaining that the son does not want to be in a regular facility with non veteran patients and he has served for the United States and he struggles with PTSD and wants to be around his fellow soldiers. He feels as though the USA needs to obey his request.

Another veteran’s wife calls from the parking lot of a diner to which she fled when her husband looked like he was going to boil over in rage.   

– Assuming that the husband is suffering from PTSD he might have saw, heard or had a flashback about something from war that made him upset and begin raging.

Another woman’s husband had a service dog die in the night, and the death smell in the morning triggered an episode she worries will end in him hurting himself or someone else if she doesn’t get him into a VA hospital, and the closest major clinic is four hours away and she is eight and a half months pregnant and got three hours of sleep, and the clinic’s website says its case manager position for veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan is currently unstaffed, anyway.

-The dog may have died from not being taking care of. The wife is eight months pregnant and the husband sounds like he needs to get help from a VA hospital as soon as possible.

-The clinic’s website may be telling a lie because the are over loaded with patients already. The clinic may be having a hard to finding someone to fell the position because they know the job is hard work.

The phone never stops ringing. If it does for 14 seconds, Brannan writes an email to help get whatever someone needs, or publishes a blog post about her own struggles.

-Assuming that she never gets a break from the phone line, sounds like that is what she does her entire work shift. Which means that there are a lot of veterans that are suffering with PTSD and need help.

he’s been “sleeping or hiding,” Brannan describes it, 20 or so hours a day for a few days. He leans forward to put his glass of orange juice on the table; it takes many, many long seconds for him to cover the few inches; today, like most days, he feels “like a damn train ran over me.”

-PTSD is making him do things differently such as sleeping 20 hours a day. It is also effecting is motor skills. The images in his mind or flashbacks he has about war affect his entire day.

“Breathe,” Brannan says to nearly every woman who calls, though when I ask her if she follows her own advice, she says no. “If I stopped, and started breathing,” she says, “I would be too sad.”

-Telling each woman who calls to breath is stating that when they all call with urgency and wanting to receive help immediately.

So she doesn’t. If she’s not saving lives on the phone or blogging, she’s offering support via Facebook, where thousands of Family of a Vet users and nearly 500 FOV volunteers congregate and commiserate.

-She wants to help Vets and their family in any way she can, she knows what they are going through because she is dealing with the same situation.

“I am now more hypervigilant than my husband,” volunteer Kateri Peterson posts to her Facebook page, and people comment things like “I know that even if my husband is having a decent day I am still in that alert mode and he is asking me to please relax and for the life of me, as hard as I try, I just can’t, I am still on the lookout.

-She is more hypervigilant than her husband because she cares for her husband and family and doesn’t want anything to happen to them.

-Her husband is asking her to relax because he does not want her to stress about his condition of PTSD. He does not want to put the burden of her.

On a private Facebook group, Kateri tells the story of how her family was at Olive Garden when she started sobbing into her Zuppa Toscana. Just the general overwhelmingness of her distress, of that awful overstimulating hypervigilance, the sort of thing you develop sometimes when you live with someone who looks out the living room window for danger literally hundreds of times a day, or who goes from room to room, room to room, over and over to make sure everyone in each one is still alive.  

-Stating that PTSD is a very serious and stressful condition to go through for that individual veteran and their family.