Revisiting the Nightmares 

Linda Stanley returned home believing all was well. Her deployment had been successful, so she immersed herself in work as a flight commander back at her home base. Her children were adults and her husband was working in Italy. She soon continued to a new deployment in a remote peninsula in South Korea. Within a few months she could not sleep any more. The PTSD symptoms had started.

“I started having nightmares about my deployment, about patients I had taken care of, and I kept thinking about Iraq. I was thinking of people who had died and whether I did enough for them. Eventually I started to change a little bit,” she says. 

The young wounded Marine who died kept appearing in her dreams. She was wondering whether she had done everything she could have to save him. Linda tried to bury her sadness by working even harder, feeling ashamed of her feelings. She decided to look for help. But medicine did not help. With the chaplain she went through the journal she had written in Iraq. The discussions eased her mind slightly. 

But the difficulties grew even after she left South Korea for Italy, where her husband was working. She would be jumpy. She would tremble when she heard the sound of a helicopter, because it reminded her of patients being brought into her hospital in Iraq. She was involved in a situation where a patient died. It brought a flashback of the young Marine’s death in Iraq. She got scared and decided she must work hard to get help. “I wanted to feel alive again. I didn’t wanna sit in my house for the rest of my life.”

Linda found a good therapist that took her on a painful journey to confront the post-traumatic stress disorder she was diagnosed with. Her symptoms fitted the description of this anxiety disorder that affects victims of traumatic experiences. She was repeatedly mentally revisiting traumatic situations during the therapy sessions. She recorded the sessions on her iPod and listened to the recordings 7–8 times in between the therapy sessions. She had to recreate Iraq in her mind through association, like smelling things that would remind her of Iraq. It was painful.

“For the first month you want to quit. You are re-experiencing the emotions you felt in Iraq and worse,” she says. “You don’t want to feel it constantly. But I realized that by avoiding those feelings I was making the PTSD worse.”