Caregiving for a Loved One With a Traumatic Injury

“Trauma is a whole-body experience,” says Geralyn. “Regardless of which bones are broken. Nothing I had read prepared me for how it feels to wake up every morning frozen in pain or endure the suspicious glance of the pharmacist when I went to pick up my fentanyl prescription.” She would later come to learn that the experience of alienation from other people and from her own body are among the defining impacts of trauma. 

The impact of caregiving on a marriage

One of the biggest shifts in her life was within her marriage. Geralyn and Jonathan had each gone from independent people, with their own schedules and responsibilities, to a couple having what Geralyn describes as “the worst fights of our marriage.” 

The Ritter family

Bill Bernstein

“Jonathan’s love and solace were a vital aspect of my recovery,” says Geralyn. “I’d never have made it through without my husband and the rest of my family to pray with me, clean the dirt out of my hair and make me laugh. Yet despite their tenderness and care, deep in my bones I felt starkly alone.”

The transition from high-powered executive to someone who needed to rely on others for everything was difficult. “Some of the things Jonathan had to do for me wiped away my last shreds of dignity,” she remembers. “We’d been married for 18 years, but after the accident, our relationship was pushed to new territory.” Her frustration began to bubble up as little resentments, snappish comments and impatient criticism.

A few years earlier, Jonathan had left his law practice to become an entrepreneur, working out of the home on his business. Now that Geralyn was home recovering, tensions began to swirl around his work, which was in the start-up phase.

“Now I was out of work, which made me anxious about our finances and the future,” says Geralyn. “I needed him to take care of me, but I couldn’t face the reality that this was a 24/7 undertaking. I started to fixate on all the little things he wasn’t doing. Why didn’t he notice that we’d run out of milk? Why were dirty dishes always piled in the sink over the weekend? One day he took a nap on the porch in the middle of the afternoon, and I asked why he was so tired. He was stunned, certain it was obvious he was exhausted.”

Geralyn, too, was exhausted. She was diagnosed with PTSD and experienced severe insomnia, her nervous system stuck on high alert in the primal fight or flight instinct of the brain. 

Working through tough emotions

“Most of the time I was still caught in a distant, foggy, depressed feeling,” recalls Geralyn. “I cried easily and rose to anger quickly. I ignored my mother’s texts asking how I was doing. I snapped at Jonathan, ‘You aren’t the one who is actually hurt....’ We were on parallel but utterly separate paths through the darkness, and we both felt alone.”

Jonathan saw Geralyn as ungrateful. Their entire world and household had been reordered to revolve around her, but there were many days he felt entirely left out of the equation. “The normal give and take of a marriage was all about giving to my wife in those early days, as it should have been.” He felt exhausted and unseen.

“I was actually thinking to myself what a good guy I was, what a great husband, and all I’m hearing back is ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ ” recalls Jonathan. “One of the things I came to understand was that this kind of trauma exacerbates and magnifies the things within you that weren’t so great to begin with. When your loved one is injured or ill, you don’t suddenly become a saint. Stress, pain and exhaustion can bring out the worst in all of us.”

Geralyn recalls a time when she thought the patient/caregiving experience would break their marriage. “As time wore on and months turned into years, the medical uncertainty, the ups and downs, the career uncertainty, all of it added stress.”     

But time has given the couple perspective and understanding. They have come to realize theirs were the normal reactions and emotions of a couple who has survived a trauma and come out the other side. Geralyn’s book, Bone by Bone: A Memoir of Trauma and Healing, was a chance for her and Jonathan to share their stories in hopes that they might help others. 

Forever changed

Geralyn understands now that her previous life is not her future. “There is a before and an after,” she says. “The only way forward is acceptance. In hindsight, the months of depression and sadness that followed my discharge form the hospital seem like a necessary grieving period.”  Professional counseling aided in her mental health recovery too.

The couple, now in a much better place, recently celebrated 25 years of marriage and went out to dinner at their favorite restaurant. Jonathan bought Geralyn a butterfly necklace — a  symbol she chose to represent how she has been “beautifully” transformed by the physical and emotional aspects of the accident; she gifted him a new guitar.

After a phased return to work, Geralyn is back full time and traveling the globe for her job, but that “new normal” is hard won. She lives with chronic pain, working hard to manage it without prescriptions and with ongoing physical therapy and “lots of Advil.” She has found relief in alternative forms of healing, from yoga and meditation to breath work, but trauma has forever changed her and the entire family.