PTSD: It happened all in a moment

"It happened all in a moment"
Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 22, 2018

Tia Coleman got onto a Duck Tour boat with her family hoping to have a nice ride. A thunder storm rolled in.

Video captured by a passenger on a nearby vessel shows a duck boat capsize and sink during a severe thunderstorm in Missouri, killing at least 11 people. Source: CNN

Eleven people died. Nine from Tia's family. Duck boat accident survivor mourns her 9 relatives who drowned

"I said, 'Lord, please, I've got to get to my babies. I've got to get to my babies," she said Saturday at a news conference at Cox Medical Center Branson, where she has been hospitalized since the incident that took 17 lives, including her husband, three children and five other members of her family.

Duck boat survivor describes sinking
CNN Newsroom

Duck boat survivor Tia Coleman tells how she survived the incident that killed nine members of her family. Source: CNN

In Los Angeles people were shopping at Trader Joe's. A gunman walked in after his grandmother was shot multiple times, which he is being charged for. Another woman, shopping in the store was killed.

"It happened all in a moment. He came out of the car, the cops were already shooting at him in that instant, right before he came out of the car," said Miguel Jeffrey Trujillo Cerventes, who saw the end of the police chase and the suspect emerge from his car.

That is the cause of every case of PTSD. It happened! One moment the world you live in is "normal" and in the next, chaos. 

For citizens it is the moment you do not expect to come. 

For military folks, it is the moment you dread will happen.

For firefighters and police officers, it is the moment they know may come with the next one.  

Responders prepare to do what has to be done to save the rest of us. They also deal with the same traumas the rest of us do, but the simple fact is, they are willingly rushing to those events for the sake of others.

That is how PTSD starts. That is the only way it happens. The term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder actually says that clearly. 

Post means "after" it happened.

Trauma means "wound" and the "stress" surviving causes the survivor. The "disorder" part seems to the the term people have the most problem with, but that is simply because they do not know what that means. 

"Disorder" means that things were one way one moment and out of order in the next moment.

Nothing is ever the same after you survive a traumatic event. It is not supposed to be back to "normal" moments the moment before it happened.

The key is that you can change again, just as you did from "victim" to "survivor" and defeat what is still trying to kill you.

14 Wounded at Lone Star Community College

Lone Star Stabbing: Suspect Arrested After Texas Community College Attack
(LIVE UPDATES)
Huff Post
By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI and JUAN A. LOZANO
04/09/13

CYPRESS, Texas -- More than a dozen people were wounded when a suspect went building-to-building in an apparent stabbing attack at a Texas college campus Tuesday, authorities said.

The attack about 11:20 a.m. on the Lone Star Community College System's campus in Cypress sent at least 12 people to area hospitals, including four people taken by helicopter, according to Cy-Fair Volunteer Fire Department spokesman Robert Rasa. He said several people refused treatment at the scene and all the wounds were consistent with stabbing.

The Harris County Sheriff's Department confirmed at least 14 people were wounded and spokesman Thomas Gilliland said authorities had one suspect in custody.

read more here

'Trying to Hold On' Amid The Despair of D.C.'s Streets

"You got a lot of people walking around, traumatized or scared or angry or sad," Bowers said. "It's kind of an urban battleground. We never know how people's visions are limited when they live in an environment where bodies on the street are the norm."

'Trying to Hold On' Amid The Despair of D.C.'s Streets
Teen Looks to Dreams of Education, Peace
By Robert E. Pierre and Clarence Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 9, 2008; Page A01

Monica Watts, two months out of high school, buried another brother this week.



She barely remembers her older brother Donald, who was killed during a robbery more than a decade ago. Her baby brother, John, 18, was shot to death July 25 in Forestville as he tried to rob an off-duty officer, Prince George's County police said. He was a year her junior but felt like her twin. She called him "Streets," and he belonged to the cohort most likely to be killed: young, black, male, involved with the criminal justice system.

Since 1989, the year Watts was born, 6,000 homicides have been recorded in the District. By her count, Watts, at 19, has lost more than a dozen relatives and friends to violence since 2003. One was stabbed; the others were shot. Two brothers. Two boyfriends. A host of other young men and women in their teens and 20s.

click post title for more

Dealing with the psychological aftermath of floods

Stephanie Salter: Dealing with the psychological aftermath of rising waters

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

The woman behind the desk was uncharacteristically tight and terse. If I didn’t know her, if I were some stranger who’d just come into her workplace for services, I might think, “Geez, what’s with her? Would it kill her to smile?”

But I do know the woman, so I asked a question that’s fairly common around these parts just now: “Did you get any flooding?”

Her shoulders sagged and she nodded. Then, in a rush, she began to describe the extent of the damage to her home and all her family’s possessions. As she recounted the scary evacuation the family had to make — one minute life was normal, the next minute water was rushing into her house — her eyes filled with tears.

I’m no psychologist, but I was pretty sure I recognized the signs of post-traumatic stress. I also realized that this woman’s experience was one of thousands in the Wabash Valley and south-central Indiana.

As the physical signs of the great flood of June 2008 begin to fade, so will the consciousness of those of us who were fortunate enough to only read and hear about it. The flood’s victims, however, may look like everyone else on the outside, but inside they will be coping for months with its disorienting destruction.

And that struggle just might make them crabby, spaced out, fearful or weird to the uneducated eye.

If only the Red Cross could hand out survivor buttons that say, “Bear with me — I was flooded.” Until then, Michael Urban, a clinical psychologist in Terre Haute, has kindly provided some of the common reactions people have to traumatic or deeply disturbing occurrences like the area’s recent devastating flood.

Urban also emphasized that, while coping skills and healing time vary among individuals, anything the rest of us can do to stay aware of (and sympathetic to) the tough place many of our neighbors will be in for some time can only help.

“Most of these folks will be managing their job and the rest of their life in addition to the aftermath of the flood,” he said. “You know, we often overlook it, but everybody had a life prior to this, and that life doesn’t stop.”
go here for more
http://www.tribstar.com/cnhi/tribstar/opinion_columns/local_story_169195900.html

Tornado leaves Little Rock like 'war zone'

Tornado leaves Little Rock like 'war zone'
Story Highlights
The storm hit parts of Saline County, about 12 miles west of Little Rock
More than 50 mobile homes were reported on fire at a large mobile home park
At least four people were reported injured
CNN) -- At least one tornado ripped through central Arkansas Thursday evening, savaging a mobile home park and sending National Weather Service forecasters into a bunker as the storm roared overhead.
"There's pretty extensive damage in the Little Rock area," said John Lewis, a senior forecaster with the weather service at the North Little Rock Airport.

At least four people were hurt, authorities said, but there were no reports of fatalities.
"We went into our shelter," Lewis said. "We could hear it ... go by."

The storm destroyed hangars at the North Little Rock Airport and tossed numerous small planes. The forecasters spent about three minutes in their shelter.

"The scariest moment of my life," said Mike Aubrey, who was at the airport securing his plane ahead of the storm. "Debris was flying across the ramp. Planes were beginning to stack up."
Aubrey said he saw a Douglas DC-3, an early passenger plane, spin around. The aircraft was nowhere to be found after the tornado passed, he said.
The damage extended from southwest of Little Rock to the northeast. "There's some structural damage in the city of Little Rock and several areas north of North Little Rock," said John Rehrauer, spokesman for the Pulaski County Sheriff's Department. "A lot of trees and power lines are down."

The same storm also caused damage in southwestern Little Rock and the town of Benton, Lewis said. It also pummeled the Hurricane Lake Mobile Home Park in Saline County, about 12 miles southwest of Little Rock. Watch how tornado scares residents »


Again remember here, PTSD is caused by trauma.

5 Women shot to death in Lane Bryant store in Illinois

People in the area are going to need help with the shock of this. I hope they get it and the family members of these women.

5 Shot Dead at Suburban Chicago Store

By MICHAEL TARM
The Associated Press Saturday, February 2, 2008; 5:25 PM

TINLEY PARK, Ill. -- Five females were shot to death at a suburban Chicago clothing store on Saturday, and police were searching for a man they said fled the scene

The victims were shot and killed at a Lane Bryant store at the Brookside Marketplace, police Sgt. T.J. Grady said. Officers found the victims inside after getting a 911 call around 10:45 a.m., Grady said.

Earlier, Grady said "the offender" had apparently left the cluster of stores off Interstate 80 in the suburbs southwest of downtown Chicago.