Mornings were the worst, when physical and emotional pain would one-two me the moment I opened my eyes. They hammered me my third and fourth weeks at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I never slept much, and the nurses and doctors interrupted my sleep periodically from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. or so as they did their morning rounds. After their rounds I’d try to catch another hour of sleep before breakfast arrived and I stirred. I’d realize that opening my eyes meant facing the day, so I’d try to shut them and will myself back into unconsciousness.

Finally I would be forced to rise, blinking, looking around at the IVs, the tubes, and the bandages. Reality would hit, and I’d start sobbing.

The nurses and corpsmen were unfazed by my tears. I was just one of many on that hallway who had lost someone. The women corpsmen, especially, told me it was tough sometimes to walk into a room of a strapping, tattooed 6-foot Marine who was bawling his eyes out because he just woke up from a nightmare about his buddies. “You never know what to say,” one told me. “When someone who looks that tough and that strong is sobbing like a baby, it breaks your heart.”

Or the corpsmen would find a soldier propped up in bed with tears rolling down his face because he’d opened his eyes in the morning and locked on the stump where an arm or a leg used to be. So the corpsmen would walk into my room with my morning meds, catch sight of my tear-streaked face, and ask, “Anything I can do?”

I’d usually mutely shake my head, and they’d nod, walk out, and leave me be.

When the hearing specialist stopped by to assess the damage to my shattered eardrums, she got as far as “I’m the hearing specialist, and I ... ” Midsentence she saw my red-puffed face and stopped halfway to my bed. “And I won’t be doing your hearing test today,” she said with a small, sad smile. She neatly turned and walked out.

. . .

“So my heart stopped twice?” I asked Pete.

“Who told you that?” he asked too quietly. I’m glad Schieffer had left the building by then. Kiwis aren’t diplomats. They bluntly say what’s on their mind, and Pete would have done just that.

That’s when I realized my own family was keeping details from me. They’d been told I wasn’t capable of handling it, and they believed it.

So I was on my own, holding the line against the medicate-it, make-it-go-away therapy when a team of visiting psychiatrists came to my room to offer me drug therapy. They wanted to discuss my options regarding which drugs might help and why. I was already on an old-fashioned upper, amitriptyline, but not for mood treatment. Dr. Burns had explained that I was receiving a small dose but not enough to have a mood-lifting effect. He said the drug had a secondary benefit: alleviating nerve or neurologic pain throughout the body that comes from the breaks, the burns, the grafts, etc. But I thought even the little I was getting was enough. I didn’t want anything else added to the chemical soup in my system.

“No psychotropic drugs, no antidepressants,” I said. “No Prozac Nation nonsense. All it does is hide the pain, not treat it. That’s not for me.”

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