I Died in My Mind

I was hospitalized for the entire month of January 2015 with necrotizing pancreatitis which eventually progressed to multi-organ system failure. For 90% of that month, I was in the ICU. At my lowest point physically, I was given a 20% chance to live. So much fluid had built up inside my abdomen that at various times my kidneys, lungs, and heart each failed completely or had their function reduced to levels below what is necessary to sustain life. An emergency surgery called a decompressive laparotomy saved my life. Basically, they cut me open at the midline of my torso from sternum to waist, spread me apart and left me like that for three days to drain.

For most of my 32-day long convalescence I experienced a condition known in the medical community as ICU induced delirium. Many things can cause ICU induced delirium but long-term exposure to high levels of the extremely powerful narcotic medications administered for pain control and sedation is very often cited as a primary cause, and almost always exacerbates the condition. Everyone’s experience of ICU induced delirium is different, however, compared to the accounts of others I read online in researching this condition, mine was unique in terms of its intensity, vividness, duration and level of detail.

Describing those experiences/episodes is a bit like trying to recall a dream. Unlike a dream, however the things I do remember feel like actual memories from my real life. Sometimes I mix up the events I experienced then with real events from my own lifetime, my actual past. In my mind I lived parts of multiple lifetimes, and I died once too. The memories of those lives are disjointed and askew but the events they portray all seem so real. I lived them, experienced them, in every way that matters they felt like, still feel like almost ten years later, they really happened.

I battled a sinister man with terrifying powers who was known to me only by the cryptic name Mr. X. In a large majority of the events, I can recall Mr. X was the main antagonist, and he played at least some small role in virtually all of them.

In one of the most vivid of all the non-Mr. X focused delirium events/stories/experiences/lifetimes [I still don’t know the right word(s) to use] I lived through the end of the world. It was in this same timeline that I experienced my death. Somehow, I had become trapped in a terminal at the Philadelphia airport by a raging snowstorm. I was stuck there as an invalid, strapped in a gurney and unable to walk or even to stand or move. There was one woman who cared for me, fed me and gave me medication. I recognized her as a nurse though she worked for no hospital and wore no uniform. The little I recall of her are no more than impressions now. Ageless, ancient and young all at once, simply dressed in grey and black, usually plain but at times indescribably beautiful. She said almost nothing. “Relax, it will be ok, be calm, peace, don’t be afraid” are the few short things I remember. Never did she speak without touching me gently at first. Always her touch washed over me like a waterfall, cool and fresh, I would sleep then, for how long it’s impossible to say. The experience of falling asleep when one is already sleeping and has been sleeping for days or weeks, was so very strange. It is simply impossible for me to describe. What I can say is that it was pleasant, and only once did I fear falling asleep but that is a tale I don’t intend to tell, ever. Looking back now I recognize that this person must have been a real nurse or various nurses or doctors who had come into my hospital room to look in on my condition or administer medications, but in my mind they were ethereal beings sent by an unknown force to hinder or aid my ongoing battles against Mr. X.

There came I time when the world’s end was very near. I have no idea how I knew this, but I just did. The woman/nurse knew it too and she needed to get home to her family. She said nothing to me, but I knew she had to go. Before she departed, she took my hand, looked straight at me, and injected me with poison directly in the gut. I knew it was an act of mercy, and she only meant to spare me further suffering but I can still feel the pain from the needle as it pierced my abdomen. A numbness came over me, I could see the sadness in her eyes, her pity, then darkness grew as all the light was gradually extinguished. At the same time, I could hear the hospital monitoring equipment beeping and buzzing loudly at first and then beginning to slow in pace and grow quiet and I knew that when it stopped and there was no more sound, I would be dead. I felt great fear, the oldest and strongest fear known to man, that of the unknown. I was gasping for breath, thoughts racing, no way out, and the beeping was slowing down even more and becoming even quieter. Until one last barely audible beep, no more than a whisper and I took one final great gasp searching for air, there was none, and I died. After that I remember nothing for what seemed a very long time. I can’t puzzle out the order of events beyond that time but at some point, I came back either into another delirium state or the real world.

So many things happened to me in that month I spent in the ICU. Wonderful, terrible, happy, and sad, yet the entire time I was bedridden, organs failing, on dialysis, a ventilator, a respirator, dying but somehow surviving. Then one day I woke up, sat up, looked around and had no idea where I was, who I was, or how I had arrived there. Time was seriously out of joint (used with all due respect to Phillip K. Dick), and I was oblivious to the date. Even my name remained a mystery to me for the first day. Yet I immediately recognized my wife and I panicked some because she was the prime target of Mr. X. I had to warn her, explain what happened and that she was in terrible danger. I begged for a pen to write with but was too weak to grasp it between my fingers let alone use it. Instead, I let loose with as much intensity and speed as I could muster and spoke what I knew. Later she told me I spouted nonsense for two full days and occasionally gibberish for two more. Much later, I heard a recording of some of it and I sounded like a man possessed, barely able to breathe yet talking as fast as my weak body would allow. I had to get those things out of me. I needed to say them.

When I think about that time now, I feel a profound sense of wonder. Physically, though my abdomen now bears a vicious looking foot long scar, I am no longer plagued by occasional bouts of severe pain and weakness as I was in the years immediately following my hospitalization. At this point I am as recovered as I will ever be physically. Mentally, I still don’t know what to think. There can be no doubt it changed me in many ways. No one could live through the things I did and not be deeply affected. Mostly I am thankful. People assume I’m thankful to be alive. That’s not it at all, I’m thankful for the opportunity I was given to die. In that place. In my mind.

Authors postscript: I told a few people that I died in the hospital, and I do still occasionally say that today. For many months after I was discharged, I was absolutely convinced that I had died. I thought that what I was experiencing in the “real world” was itself a fake, a substitute for the actual situation. The situation being me dead and buried somewhere, remembered by very few close friends and family but forgotten by history. I “lived” that way for some time. In the end it didn’t really matter, if the world I lived in was fake I was still hungry in it, I still needed money to eat and to pay the bills, so I needed to work. I didn’t want to be alone in this fake world either, so I needed friends and family. I went about my business acting like nothing had changed. At some point pretending becomes just being, what is fake becomes what is real. I have mostly given up thinking I am dead but sometimes I feel something strange or hear something in a whisper and instantly I am back in that hospital, and I remember what happened to me and I wonder.