Rob's Corner

I was in my mid-thirties and standing at the pinnacle of my medical career when the tremors and balance problems first appeared. At the time I told myself they were nothing more than the cost of a demanding profession. Looking back, I understand that chasing my ghosts, the unresolved trauma of military service and the PTSD and TBI that never fully left, had steered me into a career that both fed the disorder and gave me a place where I could still function at a high level.

The strangest part of what I was dealing with is that while I was carefully protecting myself from exposure, my colleagues already knew. They saw the signs. Many of them already understood the diagnosis. I was the only one still negotiating with the idea that I might somehow keep it contained and invisible.

This is the part of PTSD and TBI nobody warns you about. It doesn't just cause symptoms. It can take away your ability to see the symptoms in yourself.

Heather's Translation

I wasn't there for the actual injury. I came in years later, after he'd already lost his identity and the life he once had. I got the stories and the remains of what used to be.

And even then, he still thought we didn't know. That we couldn't see what was really going on. Part of that was because he didn't fully believe he was sick. Part of it was that there was so much happening at once, we missed pieces in the chaos.

Even once you uncover one reason, there are still doors that haven't opened yet. The diagnosis shifts. You fix one thing and two more show up. Just when you think you've got it worked out, you get sucker punched again. Eventually you get used to expecting the sucker punch, even in the calm stretches.

Dealing with one condition, Parkinson's, dementia, PTSD, brain injury, movement issues, aphasia, any single one of them, is already hard. Watching several of them move at once, tangled together, is its own kind of chaos. Then you add doctors, the VA, family, finances, and everything else pulling from the outside, and it becomes a different level of hard.

Some days it's a complete mess. Some days it's just routines and schedules holding everything together. Some days you're simply holding on.

Read the Full Piece

This excerpt is part of a longer piece Rob wrote about hiding his diagnosis for years, and what it revealed about how PTSD and TBI can take away a person's ability to see their own decline.

Read the full article → https://robbinsnestalliance.com/blogs/veterans-1/when-the-healer-cannot-see-himself-ptsd-tbi-veteran​

Robbins Nest Alliance provides caregiver education like this at no cost, because families dealing with moments like this shouldn't have to pay to understand what's happening to them. If this newsletter helped, consider supporting that work: https://robbinsnestalliance.com/pages/donate​