PTSD Meeting & Tom Petty Swingin

Here in gratitude is an update on that scary meeting my boss had me attend with the dean today about my ADA workplace accommodation at my college to stop teaching overload schedules and teach a normal load of classes.

I was short of breath when the meeting started because I felt panicky, but I brought books on the war I survived abroad as a missionary kid.  Showing those helped me stall and slow down so I could breathe and forestall a full blown panic attack.  One of those books was my own, published years ago, on the war I survived.

Then I brought out the book that has the chapter on Patient Centered Medicine I co-wrote with a PTSD friend and two other collaborators.  That showed the progress I've made to where I not only write about the war, but about recovery from a patient-centered point of view from Daily Strength's PTSD group here.

Starting the meeting like that made it go on my terms.  It is awful, just brutally horrible that the Las Vegas shootings happened this week.  However, it put the shooting spree on a downtown crowd I got caught in the middle of overseas as a missionary kid when I was 11 into a less foreign context now.  My boss asked what had been wrong with the class load she'd given me this semester, a question she asked so the dean would see her make amends for overloading me.   

I was nice.  I said just I wasn't asking for a special accommodation to teach less than a normal load, I was just asking for a normal load from here on out as per my tenure contract.  Then I said if I teach night classes from 6-pm, which I do every semester, please not to have me teach 3 double period classes the next morning, like I still am now and it wears me out.  Spread it out instead, and I'll be able to handle it.

She agreed, the dean agreed, my union rep there agreed.  Then a staff member rushed into the room and interrupted to tell me:  Tom Petty died last night.

Folks at work know I'm a huge Petty fan because I just saw him in concert this past June 2017.  When I was in college, I had a cover band and I sang his song at a festival with about 750 kids present because his line "don't have to live like a refugee" was my anthem.  As a kid I had run to the States from Uruguay 4 months from high school graduation to get out of that war zone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFnOfpIJL0M

He has another song that has a line about how a character "went down swingin'."  I know even though he died too soon, he went out with class just like that, Swingin, he never gave up.  He had an abusive dad like I did, and he didn't let that one thing alone define him.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4vJM4L2D2U

I had a good cry on the way home out of relief for how my meeting went, and grieving for the passing of a hero, Tom Petty.

I just came back my psychiatrist appointment where I put this all on the record.  Now I thank you for your advice, your thoughts, your prayers, and that daily support of yours.  It worked again, and I am so thankful.