In continuation from my failed Spinraza experience.

I noticed the effects of PTSD almost immediately but not in waking hours at first. Of course I was grieving the loss of a treatment. I felt like I had lost my future all over again, but that was separate from PTSD. Where it was immediately evident was in nightmares. Most people have an intrinsic barrier in dreams. If a person receives damage that would cause a significant amount of pain, they often wake up before feeling anything. The threat of damage is the nightmare and nothing more. In my case, that barrier seems to have been broken completely. I, of course, had a few replica dreams of the lumbar puncture but overall my dreams were drastically more violent. I was stabbed, drowned, mangled, and violated in my own dreams. I was often tormented with visions of beloved family, friends, and pets dying gruesomely. My brain had experienced extreme pain in the waking and was now armed to use it on me asleep. Fear was particularly easy to feed off of to turn into a haunting nightmare. I had issues with nightmares when younger but those were simple bad dreams in comparison.

I had to find a way to cope. Funny enough, the one method that seemed to help paradoxically was playing horror games. I would flood my brain with the fear response while in a position of safety and control. I learned to maintain calmness. This calmness carried over into sleep and gave my brain less to feed on reaction wise. Dreams were less likely to become nightmares. It didn’t get rid of the horrific nightmares completely. Sometimes one still sneaks up on me but it’s incredibly rare. Of course this method might not work for everyone but for me it was a Godsend.

The other main symptom I experienced was harder to fix and more insidious. A few months later I accidentally got dropped on the ground at a pool and hit my head. It triggered something in me and I begun to dissociate. I felt like I was just watching my life like a movie. My actions caused no meaningful change. I was a passenger in a car with no destination. I lived like this for a year. I went to college and was seemingly fine but really wasn’t. It was only when I was taken on vacation to the mountains that I began to feel real again. Even therapy wasn’t doing anything to break me out of it prior. Thankfully this symptom disappeared completely.

The final smaller symptoms were forcefully recalling the medical trauma. It would send a jolt through my body as my brain recalled it. Mildly unpleasant but went away with therapy and time.

Over time my brain has cushioned the memory of the trauma until I can no longer recall in detail. There’s always the threat of the memory returning but as I am now I’m fine.

I am very comfortable with my current mindset and am hopeful for the future.