I used to think PTSD meant one big catastrophic event, the once-and-for-all explosion that fracturs you. I imagined CPTSD as slower poison, a drip-drip of cruelty over years. But when I look at myself in the mirror now, I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. My body knows: a car horn, the antiseptic sting of a hospital corridor, my egg donor’s perfume all yanked from the past like a puppet’s string. I don’t just have triggers—I live inside them.

Medical trauma is my seasoning. I have always found myself reading dry medical studies, the kind that make most people’s eyes glaze over. I chased every acronym and comorbidity and now it is because it kept me one step ahead of the dismissive doctors are biased, asinine, assumption based, wearing blinders guttersnipes (I respect some but sadly these are few and far between which is not ok). They’d roll their eyes, whisper “dramatic” under their breath, then leave me clutching the sterile walls of the exam room. It wasn’t rare—it was routine. And yet I learned to argue toe-to-toe, because my life depended on it.

Then came the accident in 2019. One split-second collision, my car spinning out on the highway, and suddenly I was both the wreckage and the wreck-removal expert for my body as my car didn’t suffer overly much the honda civic is what I have to thank for this, these cars are always a win. Retirement wasn’t a choice; it was a sentence. Bills piled up, identity shredded, pride discarded in the ambulance. I left the hospital more bruised by paternalistic doctors of all kinds over the years who assumed I couldn’t comprehend my own X-rays than by any broken bone. That’s when advocacy became my oxygen. I couldn’t stand by and watch my autonomy vaporize under fluorescent lights without fighting back.

For years now I’ve been the patient and the protester, the one clutching hospital bracelets like iron shackles and the one waving medical records like a blood-stained flag. The chaos of my conditions—my alphabet soup of diagnoses—felt like a cruel joke until I realized it was my weapon. I learned to brandish charts in sterile hallways, to demand respect in voices that shook because my whole body was wired for fight-or-flight. They never expected it from a woman. That gave me an edge. That and the AuDHD sure as hell gave me an edge as well because I have great pattern recognition and it allows me to form pretty accurate hypothesis to argue with even when I am not the most familiar with whatever set of letters are in front of me. I did this for years for friends and family and since the accident I have gotten really into it both in Canada and the USA for these people and their circles and so on lol the ol domino effect once again. I may not do the best for myself however push comes to shove and it isn’t the ER I can usually stand my ground.

Childhood wounds run deeper than the cuts you can stitch. My brain is AuDHD—Autistic and ADHD—though my egg donor fought 6 to 9 referrals for assessment like they were insults to her vanity, she even refused to tell my dad (adoptive) about these things and I am pretty sure that is not exactly the most legal of actions let alone the medical neglect and the trauma it has lead to as well as the low self esteem and internalized abilism aka I call myself names such as lazy when in fact I am burned out or it is executive disfunction or another MEDICAL reason and while I know this now the habits formed long before that and still hang on tight as it is instinctive for me. Instead, she shoved me into speech therapy and ABA sessions, convinced that a slur or my halting words needed “fixing.” Only recently did I learn that my verbal speech was a mask, a stunt I performed so people would stop staring. That discovery was both a revolution and a reckoning. I spent decades training myself to sound “normal” while always feeling off-key. I have some posts on that discovery and how I am coping with it. Yes, I have settled into my usual calm and neeeeed to know deep dives and learning ASL.

My egg donor wore narcissism like a crown of thorns, gleefully playing victim whenever the spotlight slipped, including wanting to be the perfect parent of the perfect child. She punished me with silence, with petty cruelty, with the occasional shove or more that left me reeling and terrified at how quickly a small hand could hurt. My father’s calm façade hid a sociopath’s absence of empathy—his eyes cold, unreachable, like shards of glass that cut deeper than any fist. My world was a minefield of emotional landmines, and my only shield was hyper-alertness. It caused many masks to form that I am still discovering, it hid medical issues, it made me self conscious because my mother would call me fat or comment on my diet or amount of food from the time I hit puberty till I cut all contact and kicked her from my life permanently. I was actually dangerously UNDER weight and her doing this could have lead to eating disorders that are no laughing matter. I dodged that for the most part because I learned very early that she liked the lime light way to much and hated that her daughters were smarter and smaller then her. The amount of times I heard this woman go on about being a size 0 now that I look back makes me sick. It still to this day makes me very self conscious about my looks and the tooth that got broke in the car accident and had to be removed makes me cry because I am so self conscious of this detail and hate the way I look even more now. I know many in my life that I hide this issue from and while I know this is not a good habit it is a trauma response and those are hard to manage. The woman who was supposed to build me up instead tore me down because I would not act perfect and would push back, what can I say I am stubborn and thank fuck for that. I can look at myself and go I am pretty however I can’t make myself believe this no matter what I do and I hate it.

Adulthood brought abusive relationships that felt both foreign and familiar. The patterns repeated, the apologies sounded similar, the excuses slid off tongues that once spoke of devotion. Each time I thought I’d outrun the past, I found it waiting for me in a raised voice or a careless word. And all the while, I learned my own resilience—an ember that refused to die, even when smoke filled my lungs. I didn’t know that some of the stuff I went through… okay most of the stuff I went through as a kid was not okay. I thought it was normal and that made it easy for me to become prey to abusers, now though I pitty them because I have a sharp as hell tongue and every year I refuse to hide and embrace more of me and the “don’t like it? Don’t let the door hit your ass as I catapult you out that damn door, I don’t want the mess.” Attitude gets stronger, I am not rude about it I just push back and am far stronger than people know. I can be vicious when needed though as a few people over the years have learned.

Then there was my late daughter’s three-plus-year marathon through the Stollery Children’s Hospital. I practically set up camp in those waiting rooms, watched nurses clock me as “that egg donor who won’t calm down,” saw specialists look at me like I was trouble incarnate. Every battle for her life underscored one brutal truth: if you’re a parent who cares too much, you become the enemy of the system. Watching her fade, clutching her tiny hand, taught me grief so profound it rewrote my cells. I came home half alive, carrying her in every breath. There is a post from March 5 of this year that tells more of this journey. It is hard to touch on still to this day because they wanted to put her on palliative care only a few months into her illness. Her gp and I did not give in and while most of it was in the hospital I got a few more years of memory. Sadly we couldn’t find a bone marrow donor in time to save her and they never did figure out what was going on to this day she is not yet diagnosed aka NYD. If I had known some of my issues that have come to light since my car accident then this may have turned out far differently.

I still carrying my own medical challenges, the hidden ones I’ve posted about before, the ones that flare without warning. My heart still races at the thought of a masked specialist glancing at my chart and sighing, “It’s in your head.” Before I go to an appointment usually days before I am planning out what to say to convince them to take me seriously, what to say to get them to listen, how many times am I going to have to go through this explanation before someone listens and actually checks only to find out I was right. This has happened with almost all my conditions in my alphabet soup, I can’t imagine what people go through who don’t have a medical background. The drive to the appointment I am listening to my harder music, my war tunes so to speak. I get there half an hour early not because it takes me a bit to unload the wheelchair and get in but because I will end up sitting there trying to not hurl from the fear of what I am about to face and this is when it is mild and with a doctor that has learned I am not just google diagnosing myself but actually know what the fuck I am talking about. There are way to many times I have sat in the car fighting tears before the appointment and then before I drive away I spend a fair bit of time trying to calm down and end up with a migraine from the crying after the appointment by the time I get home.

Every trigger is a fingerprint—flames licking the edges of memory. I don’t know if I’m PTSD or CPTSD. I have the snap-fracture of a sudden crash and the slow erosion of a childhood that never felt safe. My nervous system dances on a razor’s edge, caught between that moment my car spun out and the day my egg donor said, “You’re too much.”, the times I was told to be quiet and the next told I need to communicate more and use my words or stop being so quiet go talk with x person, or the timeouts where I was overloaded and couldn’t calm down and spent hours facing the corner before I stopped crying not because I chose to not stop but because I couldn’t which made it worse and the time out didn’t start till you were calm and not moving still as a statue. I recall a few times I was begging to use the bathroom and was told “your time out isn’t done”… sadly there are to many memories in this area and they would make people sick to hear about given they make me sick to remember them and I live with the knowledge. There are also the photos of me and dad that make me really wonder if I have blocked out memories given his body language and where his hands would rest on me. I startle, I tremble, I freeze. I also rage, I rally, I refuse to be silent.

Healing feels like chasing lightning. I know I need EMDR after doing a bunch of research cause of course I have made it to this age without needing support for my neurodivergence so why do you now need to know what you damn well need and for the accident’s visceral replays and deep, tender work for the decades of gaslighting and neglect. I know they call it trauma “work,” but it’s really life rebuilding. I’m stitching together my speech without the mask by using ASL, teaching my heart to trust calm, reminding my muscles to unclench in a doctor’s office. Some days I slip into old survival scripts, and some nights I wake sobbing at the echo of hospital beeps and my egg donor’s voice merged into one. Other nights I wake in a cold sweat or fighting my blankets and falling from the bed, or there are the nights I wake myself with my own cries.

So, I navigate both worlds. I drive halfway across town for a specialist who listens, then tiptoe around the ghosts of my past when I call my egg donor. I hold fragments of myself like fragile glass, aware that they can cut me if I drop them. But here’s the messy beauty: naming both PTSD and CPTSD gives me permission to ask for the tools I need. It lets me admit that I’m not broken in one way but tangled in many, and that each knot deserves its own unraveling. It gives me ammo when I am going up against medical professionals that think they know it all and end up doing more harm or say “it can’t be that bad, your making this a big deal and it isn’t.” You know how often that has been the truth when I hear it? NEVER.

This is my chaos. It’s the sound of a heartbeat overlaid with hospital monitors, it’s the texture of medical charts and childhood photos that still make me question everything. It’s the wild cacophony of triggers and triumphs, of collapse and resistance. And as I sort through the wreckage, I’m learning that the fracture lines that scar me might also be the maps leading back to myself. I have learned ON MY OWN that it is CPTSD, I guide my own therapy and end up most times using my appointment to teach my therapist when they are supposed to be helping me. It is why I do not use therapy any longer and laugh at any doc who suggests it because it causes more harm then it does good when it comes to me. If I wanted to teach this stuff I would have become a professor and gotten paid for what they are getting paid to learn by health care coverage. It is not MY job to teach them how to do their job so I don’t go, instead I learn, I research the hell out of things, read medical journals, write out signs and symptoms and plan how I am going to put concerns in a way that doesn’t damage the delicate snowflake of whatever doctor I am facing. So, as usual I say “Stop being a compliant patient”. There is a whole post on this one. Knowledge my friends is power and in medicine it can be the difference between life and death. I got damn lucky a few times and in one case became a medical study. Not what I want when those times it should have killed me and didn’t.