Trauma

Poor Tim. He went in to the hospital on Monday to get his casts off and the doctor said, "why did I schedule your appointment so early?" It had only been four weeks with the hard casts on. Tim reminded him that it was because the doc was going on holiday. Alas, the wrists were not ready to be unveiled and Tim came home with his sparkly sleeves intact. The actual unveiling is scheduled for January 3rd.

Poor Istra. She is having such a hard time lately. Last Thursday our apartment building did it's bi-monthly fire alarm testing and we were all caught unawares. When the alarm went off Tim, Emeth and I were in the bedroom and poor Istra was in the living room reading a book all by herself. The alarm is horrifically loud; I can't even adequately describe it. It is probably close to sounding like an air-raid siren. Incoming, indeed.

So the alarm went off, and so did Istra. She screamed like someone was killing her. Tim ran to go get her and bring her to me, as I was comforting Emeth who was also screaming like someone was killing him. Luckily for Emeth, he is a baby and promptly forgot the dreaded fire alarm moments after it was switched off. Istra, on the other hand, talked about the fire alarm all day and then refused to sleep in her own bed that night, obviously terrified that the thing was going to go off again and she was going to be by herself when it happened. Perhaps worse than an acutal reoccurance, Istra woke up in the middle of the night screaming like someone was killing her, obviously dreaming about the thing. She refused to go back to sleep and stayed up with Tim for a bit.

The next day I tried to help her out by showing her the speaker box that is mounted in our hallway. In trying to convince her that it wasnt so scary, I created another thing for her to be scared of. She refused to walk down the hall for the majority of the day, making me carry her from one end of the apartment to the other. The one time I couldn't carry her with me, she stayed in the living room and cried, eventually sobbing and screaming, "I'm so scared! I'm so scared!" It was heartbreaking.

She does seem to be getting slowly less afraid now, almost a week after the alarm went off. We decorated the box with frog stickers and drew a happy face on it. Istra announced that she was happy and wouldn't be afraid of the fire alarm anymore. But she still has moments of obvious nervousness about the thing. Her bedtime routine is still not back to normal and she eyes the box with suspicion sometimes, despite the frogs.

I write all this here because I find this an interesting (though not at all fun) psychological development. I don't think she was ever really scared of anything before, so much that it disrupted her routine and everyone's lives. Also, because it makes her nervous when I talk about the fire alarm, I thought I'd write about it rather than talk about it repeatedly on the phone to everyone in front of her. In telling a few people I have also realized that it's maybe time I stopped talking about certain things pertaining to Istra when she is around. Lately I have gotten the feeling from her that she doesn't like me telling other people that she accidentally peed her pants or hit Emie or had a tantrum or any other thing that could be embarrassing for her. I think she knows that there are certain things that she shouldn't do (or she perceives that other people don't like her to do those things) and it makes her feel doubly bad when I tell other people about them in front of her, like reliving the incident perhaps. Another interesting psychological development.