The essential feature of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury… Symptoms include: …Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others… Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities… A sense of a foreshortened future.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, American Psychiatric Association.

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(12) Betrayal of the Body   I felt as if my body had deeply betrayed me by having a heart attack. I lost all faith in my capacity to do anything requiring physical exertion. I did not want to get out of bed. When President Eisenhower had his first heart attack, in 1955, the standard treatment for such events was to commit the patient to bed rest for six months. (Eisenhower was playing golf when he suffered that heart attack, and he initially thought that he was just experiencing indigestion. His doctor then misdiagnosed him as having a gastrointestinal disorder, gave him some morphine, and waited ten hours before finally sending him to the hospital.) Now, hospitals keep you only four or five days after a heart attack before sending you home. The 1950s approach sounded better to me. I would have preferred to stay in the hospital for several months, since a hospital really, really felt like the safest place to be. Another heart attack seemed unavoidable and imminent. My body felt very detached and numb, and I did not want to feel anything at all. At home, I was most content when I was watching DVDs of the past seasons of television shows like “24,”  “Lost,” and “Desperate Housewives.” Each one of these complete seasons brought me about twenty hours of very welcome distraction. I was grateful to be able to pass that time in a trance, without thinking about what had happened to me or about what could happen to me at any moment. After about three weeks of spending most of my time in bed watching television, I started to feel as if I had some slight chance of living a little longer.     February 24, 2007