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I have medical PTSD, meaning that I have PTSD as a result of medical traumas I have experienced. I suspect that my tendency towards anxiety may have predisposed me to developing PTSD if given a reason. And with all my physical challenges I have been given many reasons.
My most recent traumatic medical event was a nosebleed. I’ve had hundreds of nosebleeds in my life but I was always able to get them to stop on my own. Until this one nosebleed a few weeks ago. All in all I bled for about 1.5 hours and had to go to the ER in order to get it to stop. This was by far the worst nosebleed I’ve ever had.
This one negative event has really shaken my confidence in a significant way. I feel unprepared to handle nosebleeds on my own now. I’ve had a few more since the bad one, each one less severe than the last, and still as soon as I see blood my body immediately goes into panic mode. My fight or flight kicks all the way on. I get that hot/cold feeling all over my body and I start shaking. My bowels decide to evacuate everything and my brain starts making contingency plans for all of the worst case scenarios. All that happens in a matter of seconds and minutes. I can do all the calming self talk in the world and not be able to combat something that happens nearly instantaneously.
Once I’ve gotten the bleeding to stop I then have to spend several hours getting my anxiety under control. As an example, one night after a minor nose bleed my legs kept shaking violently enough to wake up my sleeping husband for an hour or more. It took about 2 hours to calm down enough to sleep and even then I woke up in the middle of the night feeling anxious again due to hypervigilance. Clearly this is an over-reaction for a very minor nosebleed. Before the traumatic experience I would have brushed it off in about 30 seconds flat. But my body is primed for fight or flight.
The thing I find the most frustrating about this whole situation is how one bad experience seems to have wiped out hundreds of good experiences. Statistically speaking I have a very good record for getting nosebleeds to stop. And yet, this one traumatic experience has completely overshadowed all the other experiences. I know that it’s not actually true that one bad experience wipes out hundreds of good ones, but when your brain is wired to focus on the negative it can feel that way.
I hope that over time I can get my anxiety surrounding nosebleeds to slowly become less and less extreme. I hope that I’ll get my confidence back and that I’ll feel empowered to handle mild to moderate nosebleeds on my own again. But for right now, it feels really hard.
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