Mental health. Mental illness. This is extremely hard to write but I want to use my platform to reach others and will continue to be fully transparent. My life has been an open book, except I’ve been hiding our families “secret” for the past few years. I have been silent about something that impacts our daily life: my husband has severe and debilitating PTSD. Masking our smiles. Faking ok. A complete nightmare. I am so sick of living in fear. Ty is a combat vet and has been a police officer of 10+ years. We have been best friends since high school and I was so excited to marry him and start our lives together. We knew I was going to stay at home to raise our family and we added our beautiful girls one by one. He was working as a cop while we were dating and after we got married he landed his dream position at work, which was being on the SWAT team. He was SO determined to make it on the entry team and they swooped him up quickly because he is extremely knowledgeable with tactics. He has firsthand experience from Iraq and this man knows his stuff. He is brilliant and good at what he does.
After being on call 24/7 I began to notice a dramatic shift in him. He was becoming irritable and on edge. He was having night terrors. He was having panic attacks just thinking about getting a call out. He would throw up at our house before he left, dry heaving on his way out of the door. He would be physically shaking and was completely withdrawn from us. He would be sweating saying his chest was tight and that he couldn’t breathe. He would text me so I could reassure him that he wasn’t dying during these call outs.
The trauma he was being exposed to reignited the dormant symptoms of PTSD that were lingering from combat from more than a decade ago. We scrambled to think of how to get him removed from the team while still keeping his job secure. We had no options. Then a call out came, a police officer was murdered on duty and Ty was gone for days looking for his killers. It turned out that the officer had actually committed suicide and faked his own murder. It was devastating to our community. This brought out things in Ty I had never seen before. We put our heads together and decided we needed to make a choice to save our family: he had to come off of the team in order for him to stay alive and to protect both the public and his team members, because he wasn’t able to be fully present during his calls. We couldn’t tell anyone what was going on because of the stigma. Our livelihood depended on it.
Why we don’t treat mental illness as we would any other physical injury or disease is beyond me. He is our family’s only income. We have [five] of us depending on him. We knew he would lose his job if he disclosed to them why he really couldn’t be on the swat team that they had spent $20k training him for. We told his boss that MY postpartum depression was so bad that he needed to be home with his family. I honestly didn’t give a heck what they thought about me because I knew it would help save him. I truly thought this was the answer to our problems he was experiencing at work. Getting him back to being on the streets and removing him from the triggers that SWAT was exposing him to should fix this, right? Gosh was I wrong. Slowly but surely these symptoms transferred over to seeing any type of trauma on duty. He took sick days constantly — he was having such bad anxiety attacks just even thinking about going to work that he physically could not bring himself to the PD. When his doctors went to put him on medication he couldn’t take it in fear of dying from an allergic reaction due to seeing overdoses at work.
I felt completely helpless. My heart is literally crushed watching my best friend crumble over the last [three] years. My days and nights were filled with not only taking care of our babies but responding to hours of texts and phone calls trying to convince him that he was ok while on duty. That he wasn’t trapped or dying. That his heart wasn’t exploding. That he was going to be ok and I was doing everything in my power to try and find a way out for him.