What I’ve Learned about Trauma: Reflections on Between Two Kingdoms
Reflections by IS team member Lisa LaBrie on the intersection of nursing and trauma, and finding a way to hold it all
Dear Friends,
We’re excited to launch our new Kindred Readers series on Substack. Deep gratitude to our team member Lisa LaBrie for sharing her powerful reflection on ’s Between Two Kingdoms:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” -Joan Didion
Suleika Jaouad references this quote in her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms; her story about being diagnosed with cancer, undergoing a bone marrow transplant, and its wake. This memoir is a story she is telling about health and medicine and relationships and coming of age, but its also a story about trauma. As a nurse who has worked in bone marrow transplant most of her career, I knew quite a bit about leukemia and bone marrow transplant going into this book. But what I was hesitant to read in this memoir was the trauma she would endure. It is not uncommon for our patients to develop PTSD from the trauma of being diagnosed with a life-threatening blood cancer, enduring difficult treatments over the years, and experiencing the fear and isolation that comes with it. Jaouad explains this with care and attention to detail. I am not a stranger to trauma in my own life, and as vicarious or secondary trauma in my career as a nurse. When I read that Joan Didion quote, I thought about the stories that healthcare professionals and caregivers carry, which remain untold. I also thought about my own personal stories.
Summary of Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
In her memoir, Suleika is a twenty-something person, finishing college and moving to Paris to begin her adult life and fall in love. All of that is cut short by a life-threatening diagnosis of leukemia and subsequent treatment that lasts years and includes a bone marrow transplant. This memoir reflects on that experience, the trauma of it, and what it’s like to exist between the Kingdom of the Sick and the Kingdom of the Well.
What I’ve Learned About Trauma-A Reflection
Reading Suleika Jaouad’s memoir was an experience of shared suffering for me. This may not be the experience others have when reading this memoir, but so much of her experience to me in those hospital units was not new information and new scientific terms. Instead, it was reliving memories and adding new perspectives to experiences I had. I couldn’t help but think about the kids I had cared for with Graft Versus Host disease, a complication of transplant. I couldn’t help but remember the teenagers with infections and long isolated hospitalizations. The night shifts with kids who were tired and frustrated and sick of being sick. The parents whose faces were etched with worries that they tried to hide. The ones who never made it to transplant, who died waiting for a match. It all comes back. I imagine Ms. Jaouad writing this memoir after writing her newspaper series about having cancer, having to revisit the suffering and trauma of that experience. And I don’t imagine that was always easy.
But beyond the cancer and medical trauma, I thought about the trauma I prefer not to talk about. The childhood trauma I experienced growing up in poverty with a mentally unstable and abusive parent. This is quite different from the experience Ms. Jaouad discusses. But her use of Susan Sontag’s quote on being between the Kingdom of the Sick and the Kingdom of the Well was easily identifiable to me as a fellow sufferer of capital T Trauma. I spent many years attempting to move ‘past’ the trauma and be done with it. I often felt like I had one foot back in that experience and the other foot here in my good life. I wondered if I would ever get past being stuck between the two Kingdoms, so to speak. What I’ve learned about Trauma is that you don’t move on. Instead, you learn to carry it with you.
One of my nursing mentors used to say, “No one gets out of this life unscathed.” I am constantly reminded of this truth. Reading a story like this is a reminder of this truth. It also reminds me that there is a connection to be made in our common hurts. We are not alone, although we may feel that way. Not everyone is going to write a book about their hurts, but when we get to read and hear others’ stories, it allows us to access our own hurts and our common human experience. I revisit that Joan Didion quote and see it not just as we tell ourselves stories in order [for me] to live, but that we tell ourselves stories for us all to live and to live together. We tell stories to access our shared humanity. We are all between kingdoms here, looking for meaning and connection. Storytelling is a way to remind ourselves of that.
-Lisa LaBrie, RN
Reflection Questions (From the publisher, Random House):
The book’s title comes from a Susan Sontag passage: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Have you used your “kingdom of the sick” passport yet? What was it like there, and what did you learn about yourself? What are the benefits of experiencing this “other” place?
Eventually, Suleika realizes that she can’t wait until she’s “well enough” to start living again. What sparks this realization for her? When have you wanted to wait until you were “enough” of something—rich enough, thin enough, well enough? How can we learn to embrace where we are at present? What do we lose by constantly striving, without satisfaction?
Write a haiku about a difficult time in your life ( a haiku has 3 lines with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the last)
Think about a difficult time in your life and close your eyes. Imagine 3 colors that go with that time or those feelings that come up. Draw or paint using those three colors.
