Tortured by Her Touch. Dianne Drake
she hadn’t felt like she’d made a difference at the end of the day since she’d come back.
Sure, she could have re-upped, but she’d have been assigned stateside this time, doing exactly what she’d been doing when she’d parted ways with the army. So on those evenings when she’d been alone and she’d thought about the direction her life was taking, she’d let her depression out, fretted a little, cried a lot. Until her hands had started to shake and her mind had started to get muddled. Then there’d been missed work and missed days, and weeks that had gone by in a blur because she’d been unable to force herself to get out of bed in the morning.
Oh, she’d known it had been depression. But she’d never attributed it to PTSD. That was for other soldiers, the ones on the battlefield who came home battered either physically or emotionally. No, Anne Sebastian just felt tired and irritable, and she hadn’t wanted to face her days head-on. With family swooping in, trying to get her to do one thing or another. “Get help,” they’d kept telling her. “It’s not an embarrassment to admit you need help.”
Then one day a dear friend from her army days had come to visit, thanks to Anne’s parents. Her friend, Belinda McCall, also an army doc, had admitted she’d had trouble. Hers had been temper, and outbreaks, and crying jags. Her diagnosis—severe depression.
“I’m just going through a bad divorce,” Anne had replied. “And I can control my moods whenever I want to.”
“Can you?” Belinda had asked. “Are you sure?”
Had she been sure? Of course she’d been sure. She wasn’t a weak person. Only a person going through a bad patch.
“Must be a pretty damned bad patch for you to miss work,” Belinda had taunted her as she’d handed her a brochure for a program in Oregon for returning soldiers suffering from stress-related disorders and depression.
Long story short, she’d seen herself in the description—sleeping on the job, listless. Then one day she’d curled up on an exam table and just dozed off in the middle of the day. After the fire rescue squad had knocked her door in, she’d made the phone call. Two years later, with counseling for depression behind her, she’d had her PhD in hand and had reemerged into the world ready to treat soldiers with PTSD like she’d seen in the clinic. So many of them so often misdiagnosed or forgotten. And as luck would have it, she’d landed the job at a little veterans’ rehab clinic in Chicago. One run by her brother-in-law.
It had been a fresh start. What a perfect place to start over!
But was it a good place for Marc to start over? Her demons had been put to bed before she’d got here, but she had a hunch his biggest demons were still in front of him. He’d faced his disability and dealt with it as much as he could on his own. Or as much as he would allow. And he had great credentials as a doctor. So maybe he intended to spend his time behind his work, the way she’d tried doing.
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