PTSD II

This echoes my past post on PTSD. I'm no expert, but this guy is. From the NYTimes:

 

What others view as a mental disorder — post-traumatic stress disorder, that is — Dr. Shay prefers to see as a psychological injury of war. Initially, when a service member returns from war, he or she often retain the behaviors that they adopted for their own survival while in a combat zone, he says.

"Most of it really boils down to the valid adaptations in the mind and body to the real situation of other people trying to kill you,'' he said.

Doh!

My whole family currently has a cold.  First it hit my partner, two days later me, two days later my stepdaughter. So this past Friday evening as we are all sitting around feeling miserable my stepdaughter has this to say:

 

I need to go to the ER

 

For anyone who knows me at all, you can understand the sinking feeling in my heart when I heard that statement. One third of my own household doesn't know that ERs aren't for colds. Especially not on Friday evenings in one of the lowest-income neighborhoods in the city.