By Dani Blum, Illustration: Debora Cheyenne Cruchon, The New York Times, April 4, 2022
Nancy Méndez-Booth was diagnosed with PTSD after she delivered a stillborn baby in the winter of 2008. Within an hour after she rushed to the hospital, in labor and exhilarated, a doctor told her that the baby she had spent years planning for had no heartbeat.
When she returned home from the hospital, Ms. Méndez-Booth said she felt as though she had “arrived from Mars”; she got lost in her own apartment building. She oscillated between numbness, vivid paranoia — she worried the police would arrest her for her son’s death — and bursts of anger. Her kitchen cabinets became loose because she would bang the doors together, over and over, looking for a way to let out some of her rage.
“I would just think to myself, Who in their right mind experiences four different, incredibly intense mental states in the span of 15 minutes?” said Ms. Méndez-Booth, a writer and educator in New Jersey. She couldn’t differentiate between the past and the present; she kept flashing back to the delivery table. She thought she was experiencing a psychotic break, but later, she found out she was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
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