It would be April before anyone put the label of "post traumatic stress disorder" on what Joseph was experiencing, but that response was almost immediate.
For weeks, we had to change the way we drove to preschool and my mother's house. Our normal routes took us right past the site of the incident, where Joseph would either start talking non-stop about the events of that night, or he would start to cry and ask for Grandpa, or he would panic if he saw someone try to cross the street.
Police cars, ambulances, and helicopters, things Joseph usually looked for eagerly now prompted questions or terror. An ambulance driving past with lights and sirens made him desperate to follow it, positive that Grandpa was in the back.
Toward the end of December, when Anthony rallied enough to be able to talk on the phone, although he was confused and his conversations were endless round-robins of "I got hit. Did I get hit? I got hit," Joseph would get antsy every time the phone rang. He wanted to talk to Grandpa. He wanted to call him. But he would get frustrated when Anthony either didn't recognize him, sometimes calling him Matthew or sometimes talking about Joseph to him without realizing he was talking to Joseph, or when he didn't understand what was being said. A great indicator of the severity of your brain damage? If a 3-year-old child gets upset talking to you because you don't make sense.
He would also get frustrated when the calls would come about Grandpa, but he was too sick to talk. Anthony was shuttled between several different intensive care units at the hospital as one catastrophic problem would eclipse another. For two weeks, he was on a respirator, sedated and unable to respond as he fought pneumonia. It was around that time that Joseph stopped asking to talk to Grandpa. He still wanted to see him, wanted him to come home, but he didn't want to talk to him on the phone anymore. (He would later, but that's another story.)
The obsessive need to understand what was happening and convey it to others, and the violent sadness would become Joseph's baseline through the end of January. And then it would get so much worse.
1 comment:
Poor little guy. I see the fear on my kids faces now when I leave early in the morning to work. They often ask incessantly to their nanny or other care-givers if I am gone for more than a couple of hours. It is weird how something that was never a big deal like me leaving is huge and met with so much fear. I'm sorry that so much time has passed and he is still having such a rough time. I appreciate you sharing this though! My little ones are healing but it is taking time. It helps me give me understanding what my babies are going through in someways.
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