Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: My Personal Journey

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been in the news many times in the recent years since 9/11 and soldiers coming back from the war in Iraq. The thing is you do not have to have been in a situation such as 9/11 or the Iraq war to develop PTSD. Many people have it and have not been diagnosed. I am such a person who was lucky enough to be diagnosed.

I probably started developing PTSD as a child due to an abusive and neglected childhood. Though my psychiatrist and psychologist both agree that there was one specific trigger that caused me to develop PTSD. This is from what I have researched is a very common occurrence.

In 1988, I was working in a very small town in Mississippi as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for a hospital on their ambulance service. It was a small ambulance service so there were no more than eight of us there. So we are were very close working long shifts of 24 hours and then being on call.

One early morning we received an ambulance call to respond to a motor vehicle accident (MVA). My partner and I responded we were both wearing scrubs as we had spent the night at the hospital. The scene of the MVA was about seven miles from the hospital. We pulled up to the scene to find two vehicles involved.

One vehicle was still on the road with a small dent in the left front fender the other car was rolled over onto its top off the left side of the road into a ditch. We could see that the victim from the car was standing by her car, she seemed uninjured. We also saw a person lying in the grass about 75 feet from the overturned vehicle.

We decided my partner would take the patient on the road and I would take the victim in the grass. It was apparent to me that the person was dead on arrival (DOA). As I came up to the patient, I saw that it was a male. Then I noticed that he was wearing a uniform. Then what hit me as if a ton of bricks was the nametag above his shirt pocket. It read, " Terry Morrison" (real name not used) Ambulance Service."