Last autumn, my mother was in a near-fatal car crash, when a massive electric BMW veered across the centre line and hit her head-on. After getting the call, I rushed to the trauma hospital and waited for the helicopter that was bringing her in. In a small, cube-shaped room I sat stunned for what felt like hours, staring at the door’s hinges. When the nurse brought me a cup of tea and handed me my mum’s mobile phone and her bag, the strap cut in half, fear suddenly caught up with me.
After I was led into the resuscitation area, time condensed, and I entered a vortex of panic watching doctors and nurses trying to stabilise my mother. She was hyperventilating and half her face was covered with gauze; her head was in a neck brace. I had no idea how bad the injuries were. Holding her hand, I became fixated by the blood on her teeth, with a distant thought that she might have internal bleeding. But she appeared to hear me as I calmly repeated that she must try to slow down her breathing.
There is a lot I don’t remember about the hours following, but I do remember my brother’s protective presence. He took over because I couldn’t bear to see them stitch together our mother’s split face. I remember his arm around me; the nurses passing me our mother’s jewellery; staring at the clog-like shoes moving about on the floor. I had forgotten where I’d parked my car, and once I started shivering, I could not stop.
It was useful when everyone around us used the word trauma. We were in a trauma hospital; her body had sustained multiple traumas, with breakages to eight ribs, her breastbone, lumbar spine, pelvis and shoulder as well as a trauma impact to her head. The language of the doctors and nurses was validating. After 10 days in the intensive care unit, our mother spent three weeks in the trauma ward with women who had broken bones from falling. According to many of the nurses, it was a miracle she was alive.
But as part of the Baby Boomer generation, my mother didn’t have ‘trauma’ in her lexicon. At times, my brother and I were astounded by how relentlessly positive she was. Despite not being able to move or sit up, let alone walk, she smiled and chatted away, making friends with all the staff. She’d say: ‘I have a lot of be grateful for. Imagine if we were in Gaza!’
It didn’t occur to me and my brother that we might be suffering from secondary post-traumatic stress disorder as we pushed through the crisis and tried to fix everything, until we both hit a wall and started to cry randomly, exhausted and overwhelmed. And yet I felt confronted by the younger generation’s easy use of this concept. I am a university lecturer and had to transfer my workshops online. I worked from my mother’s bedside, feeding her homemade smoothies from a straw while receiving emails from students saying they were not able to come to class because of the ‘trauma’ of their anxiety, or a bad day for their mental health. Increasingly, I was irritated.
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