Winter might be the time for holiday caroling, but quite different sounds emerge from my body at this time of year. As the ice and snow bombard western Canada, an ordinary car ride with my spouse becomes an exercise in terror. The moment I find myself freezing in the passenger seat any unprocessed or semi-processed trauma comes zooming out of my nervous system like an army of flying monkeys. While I cannot purge trauma from my life experience, I can name it, recognize it, ove

I would like to tear certain traumatic memories out of my brain, like old garments on fire, and stamp on them until the burning and the sensation and the repetition of burning is extinguished. But trauma doesn’t work that way. The offences I can’t forgive or forget are nestled like baby reptiles in my blood, my nerves, my bones, my flesh. Recent research suggests why defeating traumatic memories is so difficult.

Grappling with PTSD from emotional and medical trauma, I search for support groups in my community but find none. Instead I bond with characters from outer space. I have followed the character of La’an Noonien Singh on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with interest, respect, and recognition. And La’an is not alone in being a survivor of trauma on the Enterprise. If only respect and understanding for trauma survivors arrived on Planet Earth, now, and not in a fantasy future.

Recovering from trauma, I use hatred not as a vehicle for hurting others, but as a vehicle for changing myself, for changing the world. Eventually, hatred will be displaced by joy and curiosity.

I keep living into the same answer. It is the same answer because it is the same question. I give people millions of chances. I don’t start from cynicism. I make allowances for mistakes, fatigue, and frailty. And still I am disappointed. I am hurt, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. Time after time, I reach the same conclusion of midnight desperation: No More.

Invincibility. It doesn’t exist among humans, but I love invincibility as masquerade, as defensive strategy in cancer and trauma...

There are many ways to kill people without physical violence. All it takes is obedience. A willingness not to think or care. A vulnerable person might cringe as the faces harden, and the backs turn into impenetrable walls. The sanctuary turns into a collapsing house of cards, where someone is always going to end up crushed at the bottom. I offer this writing as an incendiary and hope that the flames give warmth and light to those looking for relief from the cold and the dark

Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the massage. It had been almost two years since a professional had touched me in a compassionate, and not a clinical, way. My chemotherapy for breast cancer had finished, and I was trying to reconnect with my body and find some physical relief. My cancer recovery had begun. But massage releases both the angels and the demons within.

We are still mired in disease-centred care. As to being seen as a whole human in the healthcare system, you are out of luck.

Rule #1 and #1000: Never try to cheer up a cancer patient. Is it really so hard? Letting others be themselves?

Having long been gaslighted by authority figures, I tend to gaslight myself, but I am done. Believing myself is healing, is health.

I didn’t have a PTSD episode while awaiting my colonoscopy to annoy my gastroenterologist, but annoyed he was. He is a busy, important...

A survivor of cancer and childhood abuse explains how empathy and defense have become her superpowers, sprung from scarcity.

What does trauma look like? Appearances can be deceiving, as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are common and can happen to anyone.

A survivor of multiple cancers reflects on her relationship with panic, how PTSD has shaped her life and her character.

Medicine as transaction. I suppose I am not suited for it. But I ask myself, what are these startling realities calling me to do?

Recent revelations about author Alice Munro cause this writer to reflect on her own childhood

A Canadian cancer patient shares observations from the front lines of an overtaxed and underfunded system

Looking back, it seems obvious that what happened to me that summer was traumatic. I was a fifteen-year-old receiving chemo for Hodgkin’s...

Before, during, and after my bone marrow transplant as a teenager, the experts at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center did not disguise...