Medic!

I don't know if it's a permanent change, but it's been with me for a while now. Actually, it's been over 18 months. The change is that I don't see the world in any way similar to how I saw it in the past. The world seems foggy, out of focus.

When I went to the Emergency Room at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles in late January 2006, for the second time in 3 days, I was about to die. The ER doctor put me on oxygen almost immediately and prepared to admit me with a horrible lung infection. As I lay in a room near the ER, I went into respiratory arrest. The staff knocked me out and intubated me as I lay in the dark, so to speak. The next thing I remember is going in and out of consciousness, finally awakening some days later with my wrists tied to the hospital bed and a respirator doing my breathing for me. I was told that after admission to the Pulmonary Critical Care Unit, I had experienced critical care room psychosis and had tried to pull all the tubes out of my body.

I stayed in the unit on a respirator for about 15 days. Obviously, I survived, but everything has been different since. It's almost as if a thin, gauze screen has been erected between me and the world. The emotional pile up has had me often feeling disconnected and anxious, then later, depressed, then briefly whole, but not for long, only minutes. For now, I'm going to chalk it up to coming face to face with my own mortality for the first time in my 6+ decades of life. I never felt anything like this before, and though I'll chalk it up, as I said, I'm not absolutely sure just what it is. All I'm certain of is that I wish it would go away.