"I Love You, You’re Going to Die": A Masterclass in Medical PTSD
- Jennifer Keller
- May 18
- 8 min read
Updated: May 21
A Note from Jen: I have picked up my pen and stared at a blank screen a hundred times trying to find the words for this post. Naming this part of my story has been the most difficult thing I have ever had to write. It’s heavy, it’s raw, and it forces me back into a room I have spent months trying to outrun. But I’m writing it anyway—for my own healing, and for anyone else carrying the invisible, loud weight of a day that went completely off-script.
We went into this nightmare holding onto a script we thought we knew by heart. In 2018, Greg had survived a heart attack. It was small, he beat it, and he came home.
I still look at the photo from that day in 2018—packed up in his wheelchair, clutching his red bag, wearing his favorite Marshall Lions t-shirt, and playfully stroking his chin because he was entirely focused on needing a good shave. He was being silly. He was being Greg. He had three large stents placed; he beat the odds, and we drove him right out of those hospital doors. That image was the blueprint my brain memorized.
The trauma, however, loops all the way back to the morning before the twelve-day hospital countdown even began, right in our own kitchen.
Fast forward from 2018 to 2025. It was a normal weekend morning. Greg was at the stove, doing what he always did—whipping up a breakfast that has become an agonizing memory, yet remains a running joke among our kids, our family, and our very close friend group because of how greasy he liked it.
He had three eggs, a quarter (maybe more!) of a cup of bacon bits, shredded cheddar cheese, and plenty of butter sizzling in the skillet. Before I walked out the door to meet Avery at Meijer for a routine grocery run, I looked at him and lovingly, playfully joked,
"I love you, you're going to die!"
It was a joke made because a real goodbye wasn't even a thought in our universe. But just a short time later, while I was in the middle of the grocery store, my phone rang. It was Greg, and he sounded panicked. He was short of breath and vomiting—I could tell instantly that he was in severe distress.
All he said was,
"GET HOME NOW!"
I left the cart right there in the dairy section, and Avery and I flew out of the store. We drove like we were in the Indy 500, trying to get back to Marshall. On the way, my mind was racing as fast as the car; I scrambled to arrange for an ambulance, reached out to neighbors, and called our dear friend to rush over to the house so someone would be with Greg until Avery and I could get there. He was having a massive heart attack right there at the house, and our world was instantly upended.
When life shatters like that, your brain weaponizes your last normal words. PTSD tries to turn a moment of lighthearted love into an ironic echo, connecting that playful kitchen joke to the sudden panic in the grocery store and, eventually, to the stark reality of the hospital.
So when this new nightmare began on September 21, 2025, at Union Hospital in Terre Haute—where a heart cath revealed he was 100% blocked everywhere—we braced ourselves, but we relied on the old script. They cleared the arteries, added several new stents, did their best, and two days later, upon my firm request, they transferred him to St. Vincent’s in Indianapolis.
For ten more very long days and nights, I lived in that hospital. Greg was completely in a comatose state, hooked up to pretty much every machine the hospital possessed. They were literally doing everything they could for him. But looking at all those advanced machines, I wasn't giving up. I truly believed St. Vincent’s would be the miracle he needed. I journaled about his progress (or sometimes lack thereof) daily, and provided updates on Facebook & CaringBridge for our family and friends.
We were fighting so hard for his future that Wyatt and I even attended an LVAD class at the hospital. Sitting through that was an unbelievable experience—learning about heart pumps, batteries, and a completely new way of life. But we leaned in, and we learned it, because we thought that mechanical heart might be our next route. We were actively preparing to bring him home and take care of him, no matter what it took. We fully expected him to fight through the coma, beat the odds, and walk out. We expected a happy ending.
The waiting room became its own strange, parallel universe. The ebb and flow of that space was a whole thing in itself—a heavy, shifting climate of high stakes and exhausting stillness. During those long days and nights, I bonded deeply with three other families who were living the exact same nightmare. We became a tribe forged in the worst circumstances. We spent hours talking about our people, sharing fierce, hopeful moments, and holding space for the very sad ones. We watched each other pace, we shared updates, and when one of the families lost their person, we all grieved together. We felt the collective shatter in the room. It was a beautiful, heartbreaking communion of strangers, all of us anchored by the same fragile thread of hope.
Since we believed that Greg's upcoming procedure to open the right side of his heart was the final, necessary step to stabilize him enough to move forward with the LVAD, I didn't feel the need to call an emergency family meeting or gather the kids to say goodbye. On Greg's twelfth day in the hospital, one of my best friends, Leslie, drove up specifically because she didn’t want me to be alone during what we thought was a 'routine medical step.' We were just trying to pass the time together.
And then, the world fractured.
For nearly an hour, a team tried to resuscitate him after attempting to clear arteries on the right side of his heart. An hour of desperate measures was happening just out of sight while Leslie and I waited. When the doctors finally walked into that tiny room, they didn't just bring the news that his heart had stopped and his organs were all failing. They brought a choice.
They asked me if I wanted to place him on an ECMO machine.
But I didn't just hear their words; I looked at their faces. The look in their eyes told me everything. It told me this was a desperate, last-ditch effort. And in that split second, through the blinding fog of terror, I knew my husband. I knew Greg would never want to be left as a shell, artificially kept alive by a machine for whatever fraction of a life he had left.
That is the deepest, darkest root of my PTSD. It’s the fact that I had to sign that fucking form. Your brain traps you in that moment. It loops the weight of the pen in your hand, the legal lines on the paper, and the horrific, false feeling that you are the one deciding to let the world end.
This is the image my mind gets trapped in when the trauma loops take over.
His heavy, fluid-filled hand was caught in the midst of a brutal medical struggle. This hand represents the final hours at St. Vincent's, embodying the version of him that my mind wants to believe was the story's conclusion.
But what makes this weight almost too heavy to carry is that my nervous system had already been broken by this almost exact nightmare. Exactly one year before that day, I had sat bedside at Carbondale Memorial Hospital with my dad. I watched him fill up with fluid in a desperate attempt to save him, which ultimately damaged his kidneys. He, too, died from complications of heart disease. To walk into a hospital 12 months later and watch the identical monster steal my husband was a level of cruelty my heart wasn't prepared for.
When life shatters like that twice, your brain struggles to find anywhere that feels safe. It loops the hospital rooms together, connecting the monitors, the waiting rooms, and the grief into one continuous storm.
It causes you to question God.
For a long time, I have carried the agonizing ache of the kids, his family, and our tribe family not being there when that pen hit the paper. They rushed up as fast as they could, arriving just a few hours later, but the guilt of that empty room has haunted me.
But lately, I’ve been looking at it through a different lens.
Maybe that was exactly how Greg wanted it.
Greg was a protector. Maybe he didn't want his children to have to stand in that tiny room and look into the eyes of those doctors. Maybe he wanted to shield his family from the horrific weight of that paperwork, leaving Leslie there to hold me up so I wouldn't collapse into the pieces I eventually became. He let me bear that weight because he knew I loved him enough to protect him from becoming a shell, and he knew my brother, Greg's sister & brother-in-law, and the tribe stepping into that hospital hours later would help carry me and the kids through the aftermath.
And maybe he wanted our last conscious morning at home to be exactly what it was: normal, full of butter and bacon, and wrapped in a completely safe, ordinary "I love you."
To anyone else who carries trauma from a final day, who carries compound grief from losing multiple pieces of your heart, or who lived in the heavy, shifting tide of a hospital waiting room:
You are not wrong for replaying it.
You did not give up on them.
You loved them enough to take the pain into your own body so they could be free.
Your system survived a catastrophic shift in reality.
We brought them as far as we could. But we have to actively fight back against the clinical, sterile images the trauma tries to leave behind.
We have to choose how we remember the hands that built our lives.
Because the fluid-filled hand in that ICU bed was just a temporary shell.
These are the hands that stay.
The young, strong father reaching out to touch his newborn child, starting the adventure of a lifetime with me. And decades later, those same weathered, capable hands securely holding up our grandbaby with those bright blue eyes, just weeks before the storm hit. Those are the hands of the protector.
That protector was also full of a vibrant, ordinary, beautiful life. He was the guy who loved his greasy breakfasts, wore cut-out white t-shirts, and smirked with that playful, loving look in his eyes while holding a Mountain Dew and a bag of airport snacks. He brought warmth and fun into every room he entered.
That warmth is exactly what built us.
This is the ultimate truth of our family—the four of us standing shoulder-to-shoulder, glowing with pride under the balloons at Avery's graduation party. We were a unit, a team. The hospital was just a twelve-day storm,
But this—
The laughter,
The pride,
The deep love that anchors us,
This is the permanent sun.
We brought him as far as we could on this earth,
And the love he left in our hands is what carries us forward.
Reflection Prompts for Your Journal
The Script We Had Written: What was the "happy ending" or regular routine your brain expected to happen on that final day, and how do you give yourself permission to grieve the sudden shift in reality?
The Moments of Light: What is a normal, everyday memory or lighthearted joke from your person’s final days that your mind sometimes struggles with, and how can you reframe it as a testament to the safety and love you shared?
The Unspoken Protection: If you look at the difficult logistics, empty rooms, or hard medical choices of that final day through the lens of your person trying to protect the people they loved, what changes for you?