Numb.
That’s the best way to summarize the weeks that followed.
But my son’s birthday party did act as a distraction and bright light the day after my involuntary detainment at Facility X. Friends and family were there. I could decompress and get some of the details off my chest. Everyone was understandably shocked. For any worker, this mistreatment was unfathomable. And I was able to get feedback on next steps to take. My dad, who has a master’s degree in HR and decades long career, became a huge support and provided guidance to me that day and in the following months.
The rest of little guy’s birthday was a wonderful time! Seeing his joy and looking back on our journey as parents was the break of normalcy I needed. And extra helpings of chocolate cake were a bonus too :)
But the impact of this experience undid the healing that I had accomplished from two years of therapy. And that’s a big problem. Let’s dive into that.
As I mentioned in my first post, I was diagnosed with Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) after having my son. My childhood was challenging, but that’s a story for a different time. CPTSD forms as a result of years of exposure to repeat traumas. It differs from PTSD which develops from a short-term trauma (ie. car crash).
My CPTSD manifested with dissociative disorder, anxiety with frequent panic attacks, agoraphobia, and major depressive disorder. With therapy, I realized I had experienced all of these conditions my entire life.
When I was little, what I thought was normal daydreaming or deja-vu was actually derealization-depersonalization disorder. It’s a sensation of having an out-of-body experience or being trapped inside of your head feeling like you’re watching your daily life like a TV screen. When in trauma situations or triggered, dissociation occurs involuntarily. It can last a few minutes up to months.
There are therapeutic ways to help ground yourself and exit this state, but I didn’t learn those until I was in my mid-20s. For me, being dissociated for extended periods was either a sensation of safety as I was disconnected from my surroundings or induced severe anxiety with frequent panic attacks — I was trapped, feeling out of control and lacking the tools to learn how to cope in this state while waiting for it to end.
As I learned in therapy, processing and healing from trauma takes a long time. When in high anxiety states, your brain processing is contained in your limbic system; the emotion center that controls the flight, fight, fawn, and freeze responses. You are stuck in this region and unable to process. To heal, you need to activate your prefrontal cortex — the processing center that helps you regulate emotional and behavioral responses.
The goal is to have some anxiety so that you activate the limbic system. Then working in therapy, you learn how to confront your triggers — maintaining stress level of 4-6 out of 10 — so that your prefrontal cortex can be activated WITH your limbic system to create new neural pathways that promote healthier responses to those triggers. If you go above a 6 out of 10 consistently, you fail to continue exercising the healthier connections and they then shrivel out.
So the TLDR: Stay a little anxious, use your treatment plan to get severe anxiety managed ASAP to make sure you don’t undo the healthy pathways you’ve created, then keep working on using your processing center to stay grounded and learn how to manage your triggers.
How did the trauma of Facility X affect my CPTSD?
Ok, for starters my therapist told me any person would have likely developed PTSD from what I experienced. With my pre-existing CPTSD, that means I regressed almost a year in terms of healing. That’s really, really bad. And that means starting from square one to heal again.
I needed a LOT of therapeutic and pharmacologic interventions over the next months to control panic attacks, agoraphobia, depression, and frequent dissociative episodes.
And a new trigger formed — being in rooms with doors that were closed. That was a frustrating one for me because it’s such normal exposure in everyday life. I was taking my renewal classes for my certifications a few months after this incident. I had to be seated right by the door. And that door needed to be cracked open. Even then, I hardly made it through the two-hour class and needed breaks to avoid sinking into panic attacks.
One bonus was that reforming healthy responses does go quicker the second time around. After about six months, I was doing a lot better.
But lordy, I was devastated and so depressed knowing how my regression added stress to our family. My husband remained an emotional rock. I can’t thank him enough for his patience and steadfast support that kept me going during those months.
Now let’s rewind a little.
Back to the week following my son’s birthday party.
We’re not litigious people. In fact, we like to avoid lawyers at any cost. We even cringed going to a lawyer to get our estate planning done. My father-in-law thought lawyers were “snakes” and “crooks” — something to be avoided at any cost. Ergo, my husband adopted that perspective too.
But this was an extraordinary circumstance. We were both angry. VERY angry. I had been so violated and the mental and physical toll was severe. My husband wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine. I kinda wanted him to do that too…But the reality was our only options were to take legal action or no action at all.
We begrudgingly looked into different law firms. I’ll admit I was scared. I knew I was a peon in the corporate medical world and not likely to be successful in court. But I had sat at Rose’s bedside and made a promise I would do everything I could to protect her. And the image of her frightened, tear-stained face was etched into my memory.
So I lawyered up. And Christ, that’s expensive. We had to pay an up-front $10,000 retainer fee. We are your average working-class family. That’s a small fortune for us. But we scrambled, and with some loans from family we paid the fee. And then we worked on scraping together money to pay back our family.
**Problem One with our system — the average healthcare worker cannot afford to get legal assistance with cases like this**
And that’s when the battle started. And to me, the legal world is the Wild West.
I still don’t understand law or the courts. I just know that there are pre-existing biases in cases like this. And I know the burden of proof landed on me — a person who had no witnesses or advocates to assist in my testimonies. Going into it, I had a feeling I would be eating the legal fees. But I maintained some hope that justice would be served.
Let’s go. It’s officially Jane Doe, RN v. Facility X.