The Body in Crisis.

Now that I have some time to reflect on my months in college last year, certain events are kept alive , full of insight.

One of these was the body in case of crisis , organized as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences in November. One of the main organizers was Susanne Kean , who interviewed for the blog last year.

What brought me to the event was not only my interest in intensive care, but that would be an exploration of the experience from different perspectives, with contributions from health professionals , sociologists , academics and - especially - of patients and relatives who had survived the critical care experience .

By the time someone is admitted to intensive care , one or more of your organs and vital systems would be adversely affected or injured , his life will be in balance. If they survive the experience , their bodies can take years to recover - damage caused by loss of muscle mass , for example, can last up to five years.

But as one of the contributors , Danny Kelly, reminded us , " not only have bodies , we are bodies. ' A crisis for the body is a crisis for the mind and spirit as well , especially when the person can not understand what is happening, as is usually the case.

The stories of former patients were riveting , particularly the details given by a young woman who had been hospitalized for swine flu when she was 25, and quickly admitted to the ICU , where he remained for over a month , his life in the balance. She brought the patient perspective to vivid life - disorientation , anxiety , physical pain , strange dreams and terrors that beset her - she spoke of the dreams I had the feet of an elephant, then we showed a picture of her in the ICU unit using huge inflatable sleeves in their lower legs to help with circulation and pressure ulcers . The mind creates its own reasoning , when everything is meaningless.

The pictures she had of her time in intensive care, and explorations of his first attempts at writing scrawled hand , appear to have helped make sense of their experience, but she does not pretend that his recovery was anything but gradual and prolonged. She had the help of Service Community Rehabilitation for six weeks , but said he was just scared of germs, and contact with the public, and that the small amount of counseling they had received had helped more than anything else . Even now, she said , two years after his illness , things go back to it since.

It is estimated that about 25 % of ICU patients will suffer from PTSD. One thing that can help is to build recovery and absorption of "history " - the exact sequence of events of the disease, the treatment of a person and recovery , separation from what was imaginary and actually happened . It is standard practice in the modern army for wounded soldiers to be accompanied by the documents that describe the sequence of what happened to them - understanding that psychologically we need not only to understand our history, but to be allowed to enter details again and again, to embody that knowledge.

There are some interesting research going on right now around the use of diaries and records of patients in ICU settings and former patients of the Crisis Management , and most recently treated me did get that feeling of people going over the details again and again , like it is in pain , trying to make sense of a new reality.

The ability of modern ICU units to snatch life back from the clutches of death is awesome, and held , but for individual patients who have gone to the lead and back is always a life-changing event a victory that is wrapped in calamity.