Turkey falls to Greece; Atsür leads team

Turkey fell to Greece, 79-82, yesterday in the semi-finals of the Mediterranean Games in Pescara, Italy. According to the game stats, Engin Atsür was again the leading scorer for Turkey, shooting 5 for 8 from the three and earning a total of 20 of his team’s points; it just wasn’t enough.

The preliminary rounds of Eurobasket 2009 start on 7 September in Warsaw, Poland. Turkey is in Group D and will first go up against Lithuania, a team that has stood in their way a few times before. Looks like Engin will be going back to Turkey to get ready for that.

Atsür leading scorer in triple-OT win over Italy

June 30, 2009 (Photo: FIBA Europe)Engin Atsür drained 26 points to lead Turkey to their first victory over Italy on Tuesday, June 20th, in Pescara, Italy, including hitting 4 for 9 from the three. The win brings Turkey to 3-0 in the Mediterranean Games, their first foray into Eurobasket 2009. Placing high in Eurobasket assures most teams entrance into the FIBA World Championship next year, although Turkey as host is guaranteed to wild-card in the tourney no matter what happens.

From FIBA:

Turkey, who are being coached by Alaeddin Yakan, trailed 70-57 at the end of the third quarter but clawed their way back and knotted the contest at 81-81 at the end of regulation.

I think Engin wants to make sure Turkey doesn’t just slide into the tourney just because. And, I guess his ankle and his hammy are doing just fine, thank you very much. Sounds like it was a great game with a lot of our favorite Turkish point guard driving inside to the basket to get it done. The final score: 121-119. Go Engin!

Update on Thu, July 2, 2009 at 12:08 by michelletack

The site for the Pescara games is here: Pescara 2009 Mediterranean Games

Turkey goes up against Greece in the semifinal today; on the start list for today’s game you can peep his tourney stats here.

Columbine writer struggled with PTSD

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in a discussion on Goodreads with Dave Cullen, the writer of Columbine. Dave wrote about the Columbine incident for Salon.com and his book was very, very powerful. My husband didn’t understand why I exposed myself to the story, but I felt I needed to understand why this thing happened. I found out that Eric Harris was a psychopath and that Dylan Klebold was a depressive who had gotten so far down into his depression that he struck out at those he blamed for it. I learned a lot about how depression can turn into violence, especially in men, although this can happen in women too. You can learn more about the link between depression and violence in adolescents in this excellent article by Dr. Allan Cooperstein.

I was saddened to hear that Dave struggled with PTSD after the Columbine incident and also during the writing of the book. In a revealing article he wrote for Borders, Dave talks about his experiences with PTSD:

School shootings hit me a lot harder since I got to know all those kids at Columbine. This time, it was a 60 Minutes segment called “Bumfights”: teenagers beating up street people for the fun of it. Kids smacked a helpless sleeping drunk with a stick. They returned with bigger sticks. They bashed a guy in the head with a two-by-four, with an exposed nail. They beat him to death.

The writing stopped. I drifted from overwhelming sadness to anxiety attacks. A Hemingway quote from A Farewell To Arms kept running through my head: The world crushes everyone… The world crushes everyone… The world crushes everyone…

I looked the quote up later. The word crush does not appear. Hemingway said “breaks.” Breaking everyone is bad enough, but I didn’t feel a snap coming, I felt a ferocious weight bearing down. I dreamed of each vertebrae ground to cinder, one by one.

Since reading the book, I’ve thought often about Harris and Klebold’s strange attraction for each other, and the terrible vortex they created between themselves that led to so much death. There was a lot of discussion after the killings about the music they listened to; Harris and Klebold listened to a lot of the music I listen to, so I took that personally at the time, as I don’t recall ever building pipe bombs in my parents’ basement and planning on blowing up my school. I still don’t believe music or video games makes anyone do anything, but they can contribute to atmosphere, and the more you indulge in an atmosphere, the more twisted your perspective can become. The music still won’t make you do murder. But you can get to the point where the darkness is all you can see.

Willingly drawing down that darkness is what must be avoided at all costs. That will must be applied toward reaching towards the light. I don’t believe the darkness is stronger. But the atmosphere … the atmosphere can be very, very tempting. It’s like a whirling dervish dance; it feels like ecstasy, but it’s the wrong drug entirely.

Avoidance

I’ve been avoiding my blog.

Avoidance is a common coping mechanism for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); you want to stay away from the things you know will upset you. But like just about everything else I can think of, avoidance has a dark side. Avoidance can be the crutch that keeps you away from people, just as it has kept me away from this blog.

After my post-surgical recovery ended and I went back to work, I struggled with depression. Our cat Ripley was ill and we didn’t know what was wrong; she rapidly lost weight and I avoided thinking about her impending death. She had lived almost sixteen years, a long, happy, life, but I couldn’t face that goodbye. Eventually we had to let her go. I was also struggling with a stack of letters from my father that I have avoided dealing with since he died that have been sitting in a brown paper bag in a closet. I had told myself I would deal with them during my time off, but I managed not to touch the bag the entire time I was home. Every weekend I would think about that bag, which represented the book I have to write about my father and myself. I can’t explain why I have to write it, I just do. Not for fame, money, or relief; I just have to do it. And I’ve avoided doing it for almost eight years.

Then bopping around on Facebook one day, I found the Aunt who had helped me get in touch with my father. Memories came back, but not in a flood. I didn’t fall down on the floor gasping for breath. I just knew it was time to stop … avoiding. So I contacted my Aunt. I don’t know what she is going to think about the book when it is done. I don’t think my book is going to help anyone. But it will be the truth, and the truth doesn’t have to make anyone happy.

So I’m writing it, but it takes me away from the blog. And it’s going slow, because avoidance is not something you just stop doing overnight. I think I should call this book The Procrastinator’s Tale, at the pace it’s going. But it’s going.

Yet, I’m going to try to come back here and write a bit more. I don’t know what I’m going to write about; I suppose I’ll keep writing about Complex PTSD and the struggle that goes on, and on, and on.

Atsür named to 2009 Turkish National team

According to FIBA, Engin Atsür will join Hedo Turkoglu on the preliminary roster of the 2009 Turkish Men’s Senior National Basketball Team for Eurobasket 2009, the run-up tourney for the 2010 FIBA championship which will be held in Turkey.

Atsür has been absent from his professional team, Efes Pilsen, since the spring recovering from a rumored surgery on his Achilles heel, a problem that apparently plagued him here at NC State.

FIBA’s Eurobasket 2009 feed

The Basketball Gorilla, or why I haven't been blogging about basketball

Gorillas in the mist 2, by Alan Nudman of Santiago, Chile, courtesy stock.XchngSid, you’re breaking my heart.

Because I couldn’t dis Sid. Because Sidney Lowe is the reason I’m an NC State fan in the first place. Yes, I’m one of those wagon-jumpers-on who jumped on during the ‘83 championship, but since I was 16 at the time, I think I can be forgiven. Everyone at my high school in Asheville was a Tarheel fan. And I mean, everyone. No one stayed up until 10 damoclock to watch the taped replay of the State games and no one cared that I knew of, but me. So no one knew about my little crush on Terry Gannon and how much I loved watching Sidney with the ball and how I cried, yes, cried when Jim Valvano looked around for someone to hug. So trying to type, Sidney, can you even coach a basketball team? on this blog would kill me.

Oops, I just did it.

So. I stopped blogging about basketball this past year and stuck to my other topic. Because the past two years just broke me. Going to games and just not — just not — understanding why anything was going on. Why are hot shooters on the bench for ten minutes? Why is a decent point guard not playing … for two weeks? And then suddenly playing in the frigging tournament? Did I miss something? Who exactly is our point guard? And does he know that? What the hell are we running? And on and on and on.

Poor Wolfpack fans. We cheer. And we holler. And we bleed. And we take anti-anxiety medication and pop Zantacs. And we come to the games. And we buy the shirts and the tchotchkes and we give money to Kay’s cancer fund and V’s tournament and we show up at the spring game and we go to the coaches caravan and we try to believe. And our hearts just get carved up in tiny pieces by the 4-3, 2-3, man to man, bum rush, half court press, what the hell offense are we playing now shit that just goes on and on.

It got so bad this year that during the second to the last game of the season, I turned to my husband and said, “Maybe we should skip season tickets next year.”

He said back to me, “Well, you’re a true Wolfpack fan now.”

As I rocked back on my heels I realized he was right, because I was accepting the negativity that comes with living with this disappointment day in and day out. It’s why so many people have told me they just can’t watch anymore. They are heartbroken.

This morning on 850 the discussion centered around our team, and Adam Gold said every expert he talked to said Sid can’t turn it around with his current coaching staff, and that it’s probably too late to make changes since he hasn’t done anything about it. And I wondered, is it Monte and Pete and Larry, or is it Sid? Who among this group can’t motivate players in college? Can’t get them to believe in something as much as we do? Can’t count how many minutes a player has sat on the bench and gotten cold as ice? Can’t recruit anybody, because no one wants to play for going on three decades worth of losers who can’t even win the tournament their own coach founded?

I know Sid wants to win as much as we do. I gotta believe that, because he shows up every day same as us. But maybe he can’t do it. And I hate to write that, but no one seems to want to say it out loud.

So say hey, Kong. Welcome to our room. How long you staying? We got sweet tea and all the barbecue you can eat.

Duke PTSD Study suggests disorder is related to cognitive dysfunction

The Cracked Egg by Bill Gracey of Lakeside, CA, USA courtesy Flickr.comThe results of a just-released Duke University study suggest that people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, suffer severe cognitive impairment. Specifically, patients with PTSD who underwent MRI brain scans during a test exhibited signs of impaired cognitive processing.

Combat veterans with PTSD as well as combat veterans without PTSD underwent MRI brain scans while they were shown a series of portraits. During the series, the patients were distracted with other pictures of combat, non-combat pictures, and some non-sensical pictures. When PTSD patients were distracted, they showed activity in their ventral cortex — regions of the brain associated with emotional processing. At the same time, brain areas in the prefrontal cortex, associated with working (short-term memory) and attention, “showed deactivation related to controls.” In otherwords, PTSD patients had a hard-time retaining what they were supposed to retain while they were being emotionally distracted by pictures that had nothing to do with the task at hand.

This discovery corresponds with the well-known symptom of PTSD known as hypervigilance. PTSD sufferers’ hypervigilance, a continual stress response state of “on,” leads us to regard many fairly innocent situations as threatening ones, and over-react, often with rage. The study suggests that PTSD involves a severe disruption in the regular information processing functions of the brain.

Dr. Rajendra Morey of Duke University, one of the study researchers, said a symptom like hypervigilance could be the result of an impaired brain misinterpreting information.  While such a study doesn’t help us undo such brain damage, it does suggest that we may eventually be able to “re-program” the brains of PTSD patients so that they process information correctly.

Until then, I guess, we’re still all a bit, um, cracked. Of course my family knew that already. Thank you, I’m here all week.

Update on Sun, April 5, 2009 at 09:21 by michelletack

A more enlightening article about the Duke study was posted at RedOrbit, which I found just this morning. In it, the writer noted that the sensitivity marker in the prefrontal cortex was distinct enough that it may eventually be a simple matter to diagnose PTSD biologally with a brain scan — making our diagnoses completely non-subjective.