Author Archives: Campbell D Meyers

PTSD

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Anxiety is a normal feeling for a person to experience, and everyone will experience it at one point or another. People can feel nervous or anxious about a variety of things like interpersonal relationships, work, a test and any problem whether big or small can cause anxiety.  It becomes a problem when these anxieties consume us and interfere with our ability to complete normal tasks. This is known as an anxiety disorder.  These disorders have many types including social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an overall generalized anxiety disorder or can take shape in a particular phobia.

My cousin is a Marine who had fought in Afghanistan for four consecutive tours. Before going overseas to fight for our country, he was your typical 20-year-old young man with an easy-going, wherever-the-wind-takes-me, relaxed kind of personality.  After his second tour my family realized something was different about Brandon. He became a lot more reserved and jumpy at the littlest things. He would worry about whether his car was completely full of gas; if there was half a tank he would panic and be afraid he would not reach his destination and he would be stranded in downtown Savannah.

We knew as a family it was not uncommon for military personnel to suffer from PTSD given their circumstances. However, nothing could have prepared us for his return from his final tour in Afghanistan.

Brandon was very quiet about what he had seen and experienced over seas. But in his letters home he wrote of terrible things like seeing his best friend get killed while standing right next to him, seeing innocent people hurt and killed, the unimaginable list goes on and on.  The war definitely took a heavy toll on him and he constantly was reliving the experiences through nightmares and flashbacks. He was unable to sleep and became detached from his family and girlfriend.  He began experiencing anxiety’s ranging from not having the right cereal to thinking the mailman was attacking the house when he delivered the mail through the slot. He was anxious about everything. He tried to get back to school after sometime and that proved more detrimental when exams came around. He was not the guy our family knew.

Since then, he has been more relaxed and is learning to cope with PTSD. It does not consume his entire life nor define him; it is just a part of him. We have all learned to recognize the symptoms and be understanding and not terrified when and if he has an episode. He fought for our country and for him to have seen the horrific things he saw on a daily basis, there is no question as to why he suffers the way he does.

 

Sports and Short Term Memory

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From the time I was five years old until I was 18, sports had always been a huge part of my life. I played on every team I could and enjoyed my time on the field or in the pool. But it was contact sports like soccer that not only took a physical toll on my body, but also a mental. This past unit focused a great deal on various aspects of memory and how our brain processes different injuries and consequences that follow.

If you are or at one point played a contact sport, the probability of you experiencing or have experienced a concussion is high. I have personally had five concussions, four of which came from playing soccer. According to my doctors, concussions make up 2-3% of all injuries in soccer. Each time I had to get them checked out by my trainer and then the hospital because I either lost consciousness or had other symptoms at each incident. The concussions resulted from hard impact from striking the head of another player or when the ball was kicked from close range, allowing no time to react.

Short team memory loss is a typical thing that results from concussions and I have experienced this more times than I care to admit. One of my first concussions was a result of clashing heads with another player in order to head the ball. This knocked me completely to the ground, unconscious. The next thing I remember is waking up lying on the field with my coaches, trainers and team members around me saying my name. I was having trouble focusing and I remember hardly being able to open my eyes because it was too bright. It was 5 in the evening and the sun was setting. I didn’t remember going up to head the ball, falling, hitting the ground, or even the score of the game.

Later that night my parents took me to the hospital where I got a CT scan, and they referred me to a CHOP concussion doctor the following day. This doctor put me through a series of tests to measure the extent of damage caused by this incident. He asked me detailed questions about my injury and then performed a neurological exam, which checked my memory and concentration, vision, hearing, balance, strength and sensation, coordination, and reflexes. The doctor told me I did have a concussion and that short-term memory loss was and would be a continual problem for the next few weeks. He was right and I had trouble remembering if I had brushed my teeth in the morning, or if I had taken my medicine, the simplest things you think are second nature to yourself by now. It would drive me crazy but I did recover and by the time the next concussion happened, I knew what to expect and how to cope with it.

Unfortunately, not everyone is as fortunate as I was to recover with minimal or no permanent damage to my brain. Our brains are very fragile and we have to take extreme care of them. A blow to the head or upper body can lead to bleeding in or around your brain and this bleeding can be fatal. That’s why it is critical that anyone who experiences an injury to the head is monitored right away and goes to the hospital if symptoms of a concussion get worse.

Second Brain

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Have you ever experienced a gut-wrenching encounter? How about butterflies before an athletic event or nausea after hearing of a tragedy or hardship? The gut has been referred to as the “second brain” and has very similar characteristics to the brain. The gastrointestinal system and the brain are intimately connected and that is why our psychological factors, social and mental stresses, and nerves can tear up an individuals’ gut.

A year ago my family and I received a phone call telling us our cousin, Paul, had suddenly passed away due to a heart condition. The feeling I got was in fact gut-wrenching, like my stomach had dropped 100 feet, like I had been continually punched in the stomach. This is because the digestive tract (gut wall) is lined with an interactive nerve complex communication network known as the Enteric Nervous System. This system connects and communicates with the brain, through the sympathetic nerves that pass to and from the gut through transformers. These nerves connect to the spinal cord followed by the brain. The parasympathetic nervous system, which is the division of the Automatic nervous system that calms the body and conserves energy, links to the brain base through a nerve in the upper gut. Between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain the use of chemicals called neurotransmitters are sent as electrochemical messages to one another by way of these nerves. In short, the Enteric Nervous System is influenced by the connection held between the spinal cord and the brain, which allows neurotransmitters, hormones, and connections to the central nervous system.

When you feel it in your gut, its literal, it’s real. Neurotransmitters are chemicals, which enable the transmission of signals from one neuron to another during the process where the ending of one neuron connects to the endings of another, otherwise called a synapse. Due to these neurotransmitters a hardship like a death can cause you not to eat or keep food down. The digestive tract is intimately attuned to a persons state of mind and emotions, therefore the gastrointestinal tract has more receptor sites than our brain and that’s why when we experience a gut-wrenching situation and have butterflies or nausea, it’s a real feeling, not something we dream up. These receptors allow us to feel it first in our guts.