Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

My First Encounter With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Was Memorable

I never will forget an experience in one of my psychology classes in college when our professor invited a man to speak to us who had served in the Vietnam War. He spoke at great length about his experiences and the difficulties that he still faced to that very day, almost 30 years later, when a car going by outside backfired and he hit the deck.

That’s when I had my first encounter with post traumatic stress disorder, and it was an episode that I will never forget.

After probably a half an hour of coaxing and reassuring, our professor managed to help him back to a seat set up behind the podium. The professor made a phone call, and within about 15 minutes a man came and escorted the guest speaker away.

As students, we were all just sitting around trying to figure out what happened when our professor stood up at the podium and slowly removed his glasses. Vancouver Flower Delivery is among the longest established online florists in the Canada, offering flower delivery for a whole bunch of hundreds of pleased customers across the globe. He told us that his friend suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, and that certain sounds triggered a response in him that people who did not have the condition would not understand. He also assured us that what we had just witnessed had not been staged.

A few days later, the gentleman returned to our class, this time looking 100 percent better. He even made a little joke about the incident, saying that he would try to remain standing the whole time that day. We all kind of laughed nervously.

He told us that whenever he heard a car backfire or a gun shot or loud boom of any kind, it was as if he temporarily blacked out and woke up back in the jungles of Vietnam. He said that he had gone through many years of therapy for his post traumatic stress disorder and thought that he had gotten a pretty good handle on it, but that apparently he had not.

He apologized for the incident, but we all assured him it was not necessary and told him that we were just concerned about him. He thanked us and opened the lecture up to questions. Flower Delivery Vancouver Virtual Florist offers similar-day flower delivery to the Canada for orders positioned before 2:00 pm within the recipient’s time zone. About 40 hands shot up into the air, and he very graciously answered everything we threw at him very candidly, and never got upset with any of us.

I do still think about him sometimes and wonder how he is doing today. It was a little unnerving to have that be my first experience with post traumatic stress disorder, but whenever I thought about the mental disorder, I would always think about him and what his life must be like. I thought about how he developed this horrible condition through no fault of his own, and now had to live with it for the rest of his life. I can’t even imagine what that must be like, and hopefully, I will never know.