New normal life with PTSD

In my book For the Love of Jack, His War/My Battle (published 2002 Xlibris online for free at www.namguardianangel.com) I wrote about how living with PTSD is not hopeless and how we found our own kind of normal. There is nothing normal about living through traumatic events and even less normal about going into combat. We can more easily understand someone changing after surviving a crime or natural disaster, but we find it more difficult to understand veterans of combat having to deal with surviving traumatic events everyday. These men have come to terms with what makes them unique and are making peace with what is now normal for them. They are not ashamed of what they are going through and because of them, others will find the inspiration to seek help.

‘We don’t do normal no more, we do it our way now.’

Wounded warriors visit Telluride
By Kathrine Warren
Staff Reporter
Published: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:11 AM CDT
Post-traumatic stress disorder is something many have heard of but few understand. It’s the result of a physical or psychological injury, and it causes anxiety, depression, mood swings or personality changes to strike like lightning.

“There are different triggers to PTSD,” said Joe Perez, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was injured in Iraq in 2003. A bumpy car ride. A certain smell. The boom of fireworks. Anything can snap a person back to the time and place where they were injured or traumatized.

For Perez, it’s the smell of a broken water pipe.

“I don’t know why,” he said. “We don’t do normal no more, we do it our way now.”
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Wounded warriors visit Telluride