I haven't posted for a support need for a while.  I've been saving up my support requests for this big one as I go back to school.  It's good I could make myself wait like that as it means I've been learning to self-soothe with my PTSD. Things have gone OK, but tomorrow school meetings start and I'm nervous.  Tomorrow's in anticipation of classes starting Monday at the college where I teach nurses death and dying courses from when I was a hospital chaplain. If you don't know my story about that, I became an ER hospital chaplain with trauma patients in Chicago from my own PTSD therapy as a patient.

So it's a challenge to teach with PTSD.  I don't teach light subjects, I teach subjects that use what I learn here from PTSD support every semester and I try to put it to use.  I'm "out of the closet" with my students and coworkers about myself and DS PTSD.  While I guard everybody else's anonymity, I speak once a month at churches about PTSD, too.  This week 2 area churches contacted me for 8 speaking engagements with them starting Aug 20th every month going all the way until March of 2018.  Again, I never violate your anonymity, but when I speak I'm open about the PTSD life lessons we share here, life lessons that I think apply in some ways to everybody out there with PTSD or not.

It all starts tomorrow.  I'm nervous.  I'm glad to have these opportunities to tell our story through my college classes and at those churches.  On the other hand, I tell them as no hero, but humbly, so I'm nervous.  I'm not "cured," I just am one of those CPTSD (Complex PTSD) cases who got it from years as a war child overseas.  PTSD went into my childhood development in my brain.

I'm nervous, then, since I still have flashbacks every day.  Sometimes I have flashbacks in front of classes or even in front of those church congregations right when I'm speaking to them.  Sometimes I have panic attacks when I can't breathe just like others report here on DS PTSD.  I just had one alone in my apartment last week that ended with me in my bathroom up-chucking.  

Besides those chronic symptoms, once a decade or so I've had a big PTSD crash like fellow members report here, too.  Usually they have landed me in the hospital from 1 to 4 days or so.  I haven't had a big PTSD crash now in 6 years.  If the past is any indication (and I hope it's not) I might come due for one in the next 4 so so. I lost a university job to one of those PTSD crashes in 1999.  That's why I had my college VP and my college HR head understand I'm officially under the Americans with Disabilities Act's protection now.  If it happens again, at least after I get through it next times I'll have this job to return to.

Therefore, I'm just as vulnerable to a setback as anybody else here.  With PTSD it's a day by day thing for us all, which is why I'm here every day year after year.  Thanks for how you got me through the last year at my college and speaking at those churches 1 times a month 10 times.  This week I've overcome some challenges already in technical problems with the online courses I teach.  The guy at the company that hosts our online courses resigned angrily and apparently locked us, all of his clients, out of our courses by changing the passwords for access without telling us.  

It took some major self soothing over the last 2 days to get that mess unraveled with emails and phone calls across the country to the company's tech and sales department personnel.  Stressful?  Oh, yeah.  But I didn't yell once, and it's fixed now, so I'm doing my PSTD stress reduction meditation and breathing exercises and posting you all.

I hope I can take the support you give me here and put it to use just as efficiently this coming year, too.  Since I live alone, I panic and forget how, though, sometimes.  Forgive me, then, if I you have to take me back to basics now and again and remind me of how we live with PTSD once more.  That's the kind of request for backup for back to school that I mean in this thread's title here.

I'm nervous, but I'm not going to click the box on our DS PTSD site for "I am having a crisis," at least not yet.  I will if I have to in the coming week.  In the meantime, your support to avert any crisis is so very, very welcome as this new school year begins tomorrow, y'all. VERY welcome, truly, 'cause I am truly nervous.