I'm back.
The metaphorical rock has rolled back from my cave entrance, and I have arisen, albeit shakily, to stagger out into the bright sunlight and the land of the living.
It has been a while. Four years since my last series of consistent posts, two from the last article about Shinzo Abe’s assassination, an act which roused me from my covid isolation-induced stupor.
What happened, you ask? Where did you go?
Would you believe me when I say, “I’m not sure?”
From one perspective – that of the physical – I did not actually go anywhere. From another – that of the medical -- I did go to the very edge of existence itself.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I almost died.
Yes, the D-word. The action that even those who believe in a God don’t want to experience despite knowing it would (probably) take them to Heaven.
One minute you’re going through the mundane daily exercises of existence, dreaming dreams, making plans big and small, thinking of what to have for dinner, which item of booze to imbibe, whether to pay this bill in favour of that one as money is tight (yet again), worrying about the deadline for the project etc., etc., etc ..
And the next the virus you picked up from (probably) eating shellfish (ok they were gamey to the taste, but since when has that stopped us from the sin of gluttony?) from a reputable hotel’s seafood buffet is busy coursing through your veins. To compound matters whatever physical foreshadowing or warning signs was probably masked by a severe gastric eruption which caused me enough discomfort and pain to keep me up all night (that gluttony Achilles heel again).
It wasn’t until the day after that I became aware that something was more than off. Imagine feeling like a damp rag that’s been squeezed with maximum force in an effort to eke out every last water droplet – that’s how I felt. Pain exploded with such assertive force throughout me that it almost wiped out coherent thought. I moved like Joe Biden does. My face swelled up red as an overripe tomato, with a thermometer reading hitting 40.8 degrees Celsius. It didn’t feel like Covid symptoms and besides, a self-administered test was negative. Why was I sweating like Richard Nixon during Watergate?
Then came the chills. Waves and waves of uncontrollable shuddering, teeth chattering with such relentless intensity that it felt like little bombs were exploding inside my brain.
When oblivion finally came for me it was swift and complete. It wasn’t a gentle ‘Fade to Black’ like in the movies. Try ‘Light Switch on; Light Switch off’ abruptness instead.
One minute you’re going through the mundane daily exercises of existence, dreaming dreams, making plans big and small, thinking of what to have for dinner, which item of booze to imbibe, whether or not to pay this bill in favour of that one as money is tight (yet again), worrying about the deadline for the project etc. and the next minute everything that ‘you’ are – the sum of your x years’ existence on this rock ball orbiting an otherwise ordinary star in an otherwise obscure arm of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy – is severed as abruptly as an unpaid phone connection.
Imagine being adrift in sea of black. There was no fear, no panic, just a vague awareness of the dark embrace all around me. It would not be until much later, and after considerable reflection that I realized I was probably not quite dead, but neither was I fully alive. I was most likely bestride both states, as my brain activated its “In case of emergency, break glass and pull switch” protective mechanisms.
To hear my wife tell it, my spirit was gone and what lay on the living room floor was my husk, deadweight to her as she desperately tried to revive my consciousness even as the EMTs were charging through our front door.
Folks would later ask me if I saw anything, felt anything. Did I see God? Was there a bright light? Nothing like that happened – not that I could recall anyways, and I was by no means a coherent observer. But – and this is very hard to describe in words – I felt like I was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. For a moment... I was tall. Really tall. Like, mountain-tall. Or I was the mountain. But I was moving. I felt dizzy. And I thought -- I thought all the thoughts. As if, for a moment, I was around everyone on this planet. And my thought was all of theirs ? No, no, my thought was all of our thoughts…
If I wasn’t quite dead, I wasn’t quite alive either. So by process of elimination was I in that great transit lounge of purgatory? If so then I prefer airport terminals: they are less confusing, albeit less entertaining.
Everything that happened next as I slowly drifted upwards with the current of increasing consciousness was seen through the prism of what seemed like a hazy dream. And its wild what the brain and the subconscious can whip up: more pyrotechnics than a Michael Bay movie. I would drift in and out of consciousness. The combination of powerful drugs, incredibly strong painkillers, antibiotics and the fact that I was almost always confused and disorientated, meant that I literally had no idea where I was or what was going on. My dreams felt oddly lucid but were crazy and often involved things that I can only assume that I heard around the bedside.
Then, all of a sudden, whatever scales were on my eyes dropped, the darkness was gone to be replaced by what appeared first to be fog, than powerful hospital lights. Which was when my cognitive functions began to cohere…
“What’s your name?”; “Can you repeat your name for me?”
“What’s your IC#?”; “What day is this?”
How did I get here? Wherever ‘here’ was – clearly a medical facility of some sort. Well, the masked figures in green around me looked human enough so alien abduction could probably be stuck off the list. The logical side of my brain attempted to right the ship of my mind from its list, for a few minutes spinning some fantastic yarn about me somehow collapsing on the sidewalk while heading for a clinic appointment – notwithstanding that my last true coherent memory were the chills gripping me.
I heard a woman’s calm voice. “You were very sick.” It was a nurse, part of the team who had just saved my life. Machines were rhythmically beeping in the background. I nodded and slipped back into nightmares of red lights in the ceiling chasing me and people melting as though they were in a Salvador Dalí surrealist painting.
The diagnosis, which didn’t come until well into my almost ten-day stay (after all the medical teams’ priority was to do whatever they could to keep me alive), was sepsis caused by an infected gallstone (or gallstones) which l odged somewhere off the beaten path and then exploded with the force of a bacterial nuclear bomb. In a matter of 12 hours, I ended up looking like Stephen Hawking on a bad day, my body hooked up to an oxygen machine and so many IVs that I could not turn onto my side, even if I’d been conscious enough to want to. I’d gone into septic shock and my liver, kidneys, pancreas, gallbladder and heart all came under enormous strain. To stop them from shutting down and to stop the rapacious infection’s progress, the doctors blasted me with repeated waves of the strongest antibiotics. I was comatose for 24 hours.
When I finally completely emerged from my poisoned reverie, I could neither remember how to walk nor perform a bodily function without aid for three days. Feeding myself became an erratic exercise as food tended to end up everywhere else but my mouth. My muscles atrophied and I had lost hearing in my left ear. I started the rehabilitation process, learning to complete even the most basic efforts all over again. It was a very slow, and more than frustrating to someone like me who’d been used to charging through life. I experienced chronic pain, fatigue and loss of cognitive function. To this day, I still struggle with short term memory loss and the inability to focus or concentrate for long periods of time, preventing me from working in an office environment any longer and affecting my ability to write. The simplest efforts, like walking in a straight line, became a challenge.
This is not uncommon for severe sepsis cases. In fact, many sepsis survivors experience cognitive problems like memory loss, inability to concentrate, and difficulty performing mental tasks that were easy before sepsis. And unfortunately, data shows that the older the patient is when they contract sepsis, the higher the risk of memory problems afterwards.
Anyone who has faced near-death from sepsis can benefit from paying extra attention to their mental health. I still have nightmares, and a PTSD monster to tame. I also get very nervous before doctor’s appointments, dreading getting medical bad news, including a recurrence of sepsis — once you’ve had sepsis, you’re more susceptible to having it again.
I have no messianic pronouncements, no demands from mortals to Bow, Yield, Kneel before my greatness. I have no earth-shattering philosophy, live-changing bromides, or miracle cures to impart. Not even pithy insights.
What I do have is a whole bunch of questions which will likely never be completely answered. These are distressingly mundane, garden variety queries verging on the banal:
Why was I spared?
Who am I?
Is this all that I am?
Is there nothing more?
Some people emerge from near-death experiences more certain in their beliefs. Others achieve certainty that the Universe, the Deity of their choice or faith, have spared them a one way ticket to what Shakespeare called the ‘Undiscovered Country’ because they have a Destiny, a Purpose.
For me though, as you can probably gather from my rather paltry list my overriding question could be best summarized as:
Wtf?
For many nights during my hospital stay, hitched to machines and IVs with their soundless drip, drip, drip, I would stare up at the ceiling fan, whirling and rotating through the heavy humid air like an electric dervish. I would try and engage in dialogue with God. Fortunately for my sanity it was a one-way conversation. I cried, I raged, I pleaded – most of all I wanted an answer to the wtf question. What was it all for? What did it mean? And why was this third life-threatening experience even necessary?
But answer came there none, as Lewis Carroll wrote in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’
Why was I spared, given a second chance, or saved would be questions running on a constant feedback loop in my mind. All the while I came to understand that something had changed inside of me: I now saw everything…life, living, emotion, situations, work, people, with greater clarity and distance than ever before, giving me an opportunity to perceive existence from a more objective standpoint. It became much easier to see how things connected.
I began to live Robert F. Kennedy’s favourite Aeschylus quote:” Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
When did we lose sight of our dreams? When did life become a constant repetitive series of boring episodes, each day a near exact copy of the last?
The truth is, the flow of time is not constant, and our perception of it is warped and twisted, and is a downright cruel joke sometimes. We live in islands of time, where one important event is preceded by many - or few, I guess - repetitive tasks before it, and then superseded by the same tasks before the following event.
Take booking a doctor's appointment a few months in advance, for example. Months suddenly shrink into days, days shrink into mere seconds while we repeat the same process over and over again, waiting for that appointment to happen.
Most of the time we spend living is in moments when we're not doing anything, those moments when we sit back and look at ourselves and wonder how we got here. Wonder who we are. Wonder where we're going. The truth is, life is not short, nor is it long. It's simply a measure of time allocated to each person for us to grow as an individual and as a species, as a civilization together.
Enjoy every moment before you no longer have the ability to, but also allocate time to plan the future and catch sight of your dreams once again. Those childhood dreams swallowed up by the waves, and the dreams you had with other people that got blown away by the storm. Time is a cruel mistress, and fate is but a mere daydream.
We're not meant to live our life like this, spending every day just to meet the next head on. We're trapped in a cycle of just getting through today, so we might realist our dreams tomorrow. But in truth, waiting for tomorrow will seem like an eternity if you try to persevere through the endless flow of time that way.
If you truly want to make the most of the boring days when you're just waiting, take the time to plan out your future. Dream big, because even if you don't reach the stars, you'll have a hell of a lot of fun just building the ladder. The universe is our playground, and we're the children. The laws of physics are the rules, and we must abide by them, even if they may seem silly or unjust. Even with such harsh bindings and laws, life has still blossomed on this pale, fragile blue marble. If with such impossible odds something beautiful like us could exist, we should make the most of it. Who knows, maybe intelligent life might reappear sometime arbitrarily far in the future, but it certainly won't be us.
The fact that you are reading this means that you still have a chance to make your life better. So get a brush made from stardust and use the universe as your canvas, as this might be the only chance we have to shape the universe with true beauty. Even if you might feel hopeless, have courage. All is not lost if you're still alive, no matter how crippled or wounded you may be. So have the courage to pick yourself up with your own two hands, to stand on your own two feet. Roar in defiance at the world, because it'll have to try harder if it wants to stop you. You - and only you - have the strength to get out of your situation, the strength to put one foot in front of the other, the strength to never lose hope.
I've been through some of the worst incidents myself, and I'm still standing. I'm still standing, because I never lost hope. I'm still standing, because I always had the courage to keep pushing forward, because I always had the strength to stand on my feet, because I never lost sight of the future where I could be happy. If I could do it, so can you. You have the same strength I do, you just haven't realized it yet. So take my hand, and I'll lead you into a better future. Walk by my side, because I'll be there to catch you if you fall. You can do it, trust me. Just never, ever give up.
Comments