How even doctors get PTSD after Illnesses

[Cort]

I think I have something similar to PTSD - well earned PTSD I must say. I've crashed so many times after doing too much "exercise" of course I'm wary when anything suggests it's going to happen again. I don't sweat but I think my breathing increases - and deeper breathing helps. This is a good reminder to breath deep and slow

I was in a pretty severe car accident - I was uninjured but both cars were totaled. I was pretty jittery driving for a bit but it quickly passed - it's nothing like being in frequent pain...

This doctor broke his ribs in a bicycle accident - and shows how it can happen to anyone. He got PTSD while driving his car - he wasn't even riding his bike...

The mind sees a situation - immediately matches it up to a similar situation in the past - and then reacts based on how the situation occurred in the past.

A few weeks after the accident, I was driving my car along a slightly curved stretch of pavement when I suddenly started sweating. My heart was racing and I was breathing quickly. I pulled the car to the curb and stopped until I calmed down.

It slowly dawned on me that I was reacting to the topography of the road, which resembled the one where I had crashed my bicycle. Similar waves of panic came over me a few more times over the coming months, though with subsequent events I recognized my symptoms quickly enough to either stop driving or to initiate deep breathing exercises until my fear passed.

In wasn’t until the spring of this year that I summoned up the courage to get back on my bicycle and take to the road.

With regards to a Leukemia patient

“I think about the leukemia all the time,” he told me. “I even went online a few weeks ago to look up the prognosis again.” He chuckled to himself as he acknowledged that we had already discussed the numbers a few times. He continued.

“The problem is, I feel like I’m tied to a railroad track, and see the light of the train approaching. And I don’t know if it’s one mile away, or 500. Do you have any idea what I mean?”

I told him that I thought I finally did.