18 Years After My Husband’s Bomb Blast Injury in Iraq, I Still Have Caregiving PTSD

Fast-forward to a few years ago. My husband needed a knee replacement after a lifetime of activity. Without consulting me, he picked a surgery date that conflicted with my schedule. Chuffed at the lack of communication and coordination — an Achilles’ heel in our marriage — I decided to prove a point. “If you say you don’t need me at the hospital, well, I’ll take you at your word,” I huffed during a phone call where pride got in the way on both sides. After everything we’d been through medically, how did he not understand that you needed an advocate? When the day came, I was secretly relieved to be far from the hospital waiting room.

Our children were grown by this time, and our eldest daughter was able to transport her dad home from the surgery and stay with him that first night. But my prideful decision would come back to haunt me. Before midnight, Bob began to experience a reaction to his medications and the anesthesia. My daughter called, terrified, home alone with him, and I dressed and scrambled into the car in minutes, my heart beating in my throat. When I pulled in the driveway at sunrise, Bob was sleeping soundly. I booked an appointment with his doctor that day, and the situation was under control. But the four-hour drive home, nerves jangling, walking her through what to do on the phone, left deep grooves on my psyche. 

‘Trauma compounds trauma’

Now, staring out the train window, experiencing a physical reaction to Bob’s news about his hamstring surgery, I was taken aback at my own weakness. What was wrong with me? I’d never run into a wall before when it came to caring for loved ones. I mostly viewed myself as “resilient” and “tough,” complimentary words other people had used to describe me, especially under pressure.

People got points in America for being able to “gut things out,” to deal with grief quietly, move through things and get over them. In the years since Bob had been injured in Iraq, I’d heard some version of this sentence thousands of times: “I don’t know how you did all of that!” Phrases like this always felt like a backhanded compliment, underscoring how strong you were while pointing out your extreme bad fortune. 

“Trauma compounds trauma,” a Bethesda Naval Hospital neurologist replied when I asked what to expect emotionally after Bob emerged from his coma. “The more horrible things people have experienced and witnessed, like many service members, the harder it can be to transition home.” I remembered worrying then. While Bob wasn’t in uniform, carrying a weapon, he had spent a great deal of time covering conflicts and seeing the horrors of war up close. Would he be forever changed by this experience? I’d wondered.

But the person I hadn’t considered in that equation was me. Maybe trauma had compounded trauma for me? Sitting on the train, listening to the rundown of surgical concerns for the hamstring operation in two days, I felt only panic. I kept pushing my internal gas pedal, but nothing was happening. 

Overwhelmed and depleted

In Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking, she describes her grief process after her husband died. Tragically, she would lose their only child, a daughter, 20 months later. “I also notice that I do not have the resilience I had a year ago,” she writes. “A certain number of crises occur, and the mechanism that floods the situation with adrenaline burns out. Mobilization becomes unreliable, slow or absent.” Was that what was happening to me? I wondered.

“I can’t be there with you,” I said in a small voice when I met my husband at home later that night. The kids can step up and help.” Something in my voice must have told him not to press it. He still carries a healthy degree of guilt around his bomb blast injury in Iraq, the sense that he “did this to the family.” But my 32-year-old, 29-year-old, and my 23-year-old twins were older now and fully capable of being on the front lines. 

Bob and Lee Woodruff walk their daughter down the aisle on her wedding day.

Courtesy Lee Woodruff

Two days later, instead of accompanying my husband to the hospital, I traveled north to the mountains, where the wedding would take place. Just a few weeks prior, my husband and I had spent time there planting flowers and putting up fencing to stop the woodchucks, feeling connected and excited as we talked about the wedding details. Now, absorbing what the next few months would be like, that couple was unrecognizable. And I was afraid. 

Our children rose to the occasion with empathy and energy, two qualities I suddenly seemed to lack. Was it the vigilance that had ground me down? Even when your attention was elsewhere, part of a caregiver’s brain is always peeled off, tuning in, anticipating and worrying. That kind of focus would surely lead to exhaustion over time. 

The surgery went well, and the nerve along my husband’s hamstring was successfully reattached. The weeks ticked by with Bob on crutches, all of us adjusting. The wedding weekend was gorgeous, the father-daughter dance was epic, featuring a light-up cane that pulsed to the beat of the music. But more than anything else, I began to see the small gift in my unexpected panic. There were limits to what I could do, to my capability. And I understood what they were, and that was OK. None of us was a superhero. 

“I think I had a post-traumatic stress response around your surgery,” I said, first to Bob and then to my kids. Just voicing that helped me deal with my own shame, my sense of being less than capable. If I could name it, point to it, then maybe it was real because I had processed it. 

But the other unanticipated gift was the chance to watch my own children step in and step up as adults. Whatever else life might throw at all of us down the road, I felt immense relief in knowing we would handle it together.