A Little Druggy Today, A Little Traumatic

So yesterday was a nice, bold return to work and progress until the evening struck.  Then I cried for three hours straight.
I’m battling a lot of emotions right now, because that ventilator was the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me, and the feelings of isolation and powerlessness are still hitting in weird ways. I woke up, completely helpless, with no one I knew around me to comfort me, and that’s a loneliness I didn’t know I could experience.  I’d always thought Gini would be there for me, and she was in that technical sense, but in reality I was in druggy blackness, manhandled by paramedics, and with no one to explain what was happening.
That’s backfiring in weird ways.  I’m terrified all the time now that Gini will leave if I’m not brave enough.  If I cry.  If I need her help for just one more thing.  And she won’t, I think,  but there’s that animal terror of coming to, paralyzed, confused, choking, and then I just want to cling to someone and never let them go.  And the lid slipped a bit on that last night and it was literally three hours of tears, including a low-grade sobbing throughout a family viewing of Hotel Impossible, which is really not a show that produces mourning.
Any reference to any character being alone now will cause sniffles, including shows like King of the Hill.  (The Bill Dauterive episodes are weepfests.)  I’m just sort of feeling terrified like this whole life I’m living now is a sham, and any moment they’ll pull the curtain away and I’ll be back in bed.  I double-dosed on Ativan last night and still was trembling until I fell asleep.
I’m told this is normal. Depression and disruption come in the wake of these things. Still, I hate crying so much that I wish it was anything else; I feel weak enough without my body betraying me again. My reaction to crying is sexist, and programmed, and completely stupid, but my own tears make me feel genderless and weak and pitiable.
I have an appointment with my therapist later this week.  Today, I’m staring at code, trying to make sense of it through a brain-haze of last night’s double-dosage, and the variables are just dropping out of my mind.  Things will improve.  But I don’t want that moment of blackness to become an axiom of my life, because I’ve got enough bad things embedded in my memory and I don’t need a trigger pull that huge this late in life.
But that waking up was the greatest terror I’ve ever felt.  Not knowing what was happening.  Not knowing where anyone was.  Not knowing how to get help, or how to get my body to respond.  And that trauma has saturated my psyche in ways that are subtle and hard to track down.  They’re fine threads woven through my mind that I only notice when something plucks at them.
I’ll be fine. I’m doing what I always do: documenting.  Maybe others have been through this and they won’t feel quite as alone or weird when they see it.  Maybe I’m the freak, and it’s just a personal quirk.  Either way, I lay it at your feet, and expose myself, and hopefully this cold wind whipping through will carry something away from me.