Canadian Nurse with Combat PTSD talks about falling through the cracks

Stigma of mental health disorders in the military remains
Veterans with PTSD falling through the cracks might not be the ones you’d expect
OTTAWA CITIZEN
BY DRAKE FENTON
AUGUST 5, 2013

“I’m an ICU nurse. I couldn’t just be sitting behind a desk.”

Despite showing signs of what would later result in a medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, McDowell says, she “sucked it up” and returned to Kandahar for another six-month tour in 2008.

OTTAWA — There is a small framed photo of the Canadian War Memorial hanging in an office at the Royal Ottawa’s Operational Stress Injury clinic. Christine McDowell points to it and begins to cry.

“It hurts. Looking at that picture hurts,” she says. “When I see that and when I see people in uniform, I feel a loss. That was a big part of who I was.”

For an hour and a half she talks about her past life in the military, her three tours in Afghanistan and the thousands of casualties she treated as an Intensive Care Unit trauma nurse.

She can remember with striking clarity who she was and what she went through. She says those memories don’t fade.

They’re ever-present.

“I wouldn’t even call them flashbacks. I would call them ghosts,” she says.

It’s a slide show of faces: Canadian, America, Afghan, and even Romanian. At a base in Kandahar, in a hospital constructed of plywood, she looked down at all of them as they laid injured on one of the six ICU beds in the facility.

“We’re seeing hundreds and thousands of casualties,” she says. “I don’t know any civilian environment where one staff member would see as many amputated limbs as anyone who worked with us for six months.”
read more here