2 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} 2_gryphon) wrote,@ 2009-03-05 15:30:00 |
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Terror: The Director's Cut
I am now home from the hospital and recovering from the tests.
I want to say that I've been to a lot of hospitals in my time and University of Michigan Hospital is the absolute cream of the crop. I've never been treated so well as a patient. I've never had a staff so concerned and attentive. I'm very happy that I had the good fortune to be able to go through this experience in the hospital that I did.
A lot of folks have had a lot of questions about my experience on the operating table. Some of you have wanted more details on what happened and what I experienced, particularly during the dying part. For those folks who are curious about more, I've written a detailed account of what I went through. I have certainly learned that a lot of the cliches about death aren't true. And I'm more than happy to talk about what I experienced. So, if you're interested...
I'll start on Tuesday morning.
The procedure they were recommending, called an Eletrophysical Scan, had been explained to me the day before. I spent most of the day finding out more about what was involved, what the risks were and gathering the opinions of a few close friends and family members. Then, the staff gave me overnight to think about it. I would make my final decision when they came to see me that morning.
I didn't get much sleep that night. And when they came to see me in the morning, I did not want the procedure done. I explained this much to Dr. Eagle. However, I had decided that emotions shouldn't be a factor in a decision like this, and as much as I didn't want to do it, I was going to agree to the operation.
That was that. They scheduled me for the procedure at 11am, only two and a half hours from then.
At about 11:20, transport came for me. At this point, I had to force every bodily action I made that contributed to the procession of this madness. Every step toward the awaiting stretcher that would take me to the operating room was against my will. Staying in the stretcher as they wheeled me through buildings and into a waiting room seemed to go against instinct.
You have to realize that for over half of my life, I have had a mystery heart condition that had never been diagnosed or even witnessed. Everyone had always thought I was crazy. When my first palpitations appeared when I was 12, they frightened me terribly. In response to my pleading for a doctor because my heart was skipping beats, my parents sent me to a psychologist instead. I cannot count the number of occasions I've gone into the emergency room because of an abnormal heart rhythm or chest pain, just to have the doctor look at me and say, "Sir, you're in your 20's. You don't have a heart problem. Stop wasting our time." One doctor even suggested I ask a psychologist about anti-psychotic medication after coming to see him about my heart palpitations.
Now, not only had doctors witnessed and recorded one of my attacks, not only had they given it a name and explained to me how dangerous and deadly it had the potential to be, but I had to finally come to terms with the condition that had FINALLY been diagnosed, how dangerous it was and how my whole life was going to be affected by it. And this had all happened in one day.
And now, I was being wheeled to a room where these same doctors were going to purposely CAUSE this heart malfunction of which they, just the day before, had been stressing the severity! They went to great lengths to get me to realize, for the first time, that this heart condition I'd always seen as a semi-casual annoyance was actually potentially life-ending, just before telling me that they intended to intentionally induce it!
My instinct was to get the hell out of there. I had to concentrate on other things to keep myself from jumping out of that stretcher and running.
The transport people wheeled me into a waiting room -- white tile, curtains, smell of disinfectant, sterile. Every voice induced an uncomfortable echo. A friendly nurse began to stick electrodes to my chest and hook me up to an ECG machine and an IV stand.
Soon after, a young, Japanese man came in. He was the EP technician who would be controlling the computer which controlled the electrode catheter which controlled my heart. He explained a bit more about what he would be doing to me and afterward, handed me a clip board with a document to sign. The legal document stated that were I to die, have any allergic reactions to blood transfers or x-ray dyes, need emergency surgery because of the procedure or in any way came away from the operation with any debilitating, lifelong conditions as a result of what they were about to do -- I would not hold them legally responsible.
I forced my hand to write my name on the paper.
The Japanese man left the room and a young woman came in. She explained that she would be handling my sedation. "Ooh, drugs?" I thought. This, I was interested in. She told me that for the procedure, I had to remain conscious. The reason for this was because if they knocked me out, my breathing would have to be done by a respirator. Often, an irregular heart rhythm is corrected by our natural breathing responses to the sensation. Taking a deep breath or coughing can actually hit a kind of "reset" button on your heart rhythm and kick it back into the correct timing. Since a respirator could never mimic this, I had to stay awake and breathing on my own, with my own conscious reactions. The sedation, she said, would allow me to be conscious, but would relax me and cause temporary amnesia of the entire procedure.
This was good news to me! I said, "So, once you give me that, I'll just wake up and it'll be over?" She explained to me that there were no guarantees. That most people remember nothing. And some people remember a few details. But I likely wouldn't recall much, if any of the operation.
Now, if this had been the case, my story would now say, "And just after that, I suddenly became aware of being in the recovery room! It was all over!"
...You'll notice that doesn't happen here.
The young woman left the room and I was left alone with my thoughts for what felt like an eternity. It was a bad time to have nothing to do but think. Just the other day, I was at my computer desk, working on material that I hoped would be entertaining for furries. Now, suddenly, I was on a stretcher waiting for this nightmare to play out. It seemed like such a short time for such a big change to happen.
After around an hour and a half, an attendant came in and asked if I was ready. "No," I said. "And if you ask me again any time between now and when I'm 90, the answer will still be no." She furrowed her brow a little. "But, let's do it anyway," I said.
She smiled at me and popped an upbeat tone into her voice as she began to wheel me across the hall. "Well, we're ready! We're all ready for you, and you are the star."
My immediate thought... "Finally, a stage I don't want to in the middle of." And she wheeled me into the operating room.
The room was COLD. Uncomfortably cold. But I was too busy getting an erection over the technology to notice that for long. The place looked like the bridge of a federation ship, or perhaps one of those infamous anal probe implantation labs in an alien flying saucer. In the center of the room was a black, padded operating table, like a wide, stretched office chair laid completely prone. Directly over the table was a box with an orifice which would aim right down on my chest.
The staff wheeled the stretcher adjacent to the table and I carefully scooted myself onto it and laid down. Anchored from the ceiling, at the opposite end of the table from my head, was a jumbotron of flat screen monitors on an adjustable, steel elbow. The monitors were in a diamond kind of pattern. Behind the monitors was a glass window. Inside was a little room where the Japanese technician I had met earlier was sitting and starting up his systems. The rest of the room was filled with medical odds and ends. Tanks of gas. Steel tables with sharp things on them.
The young woman, along with another man and woman I hadn't met walked into the room, chatting casually about an interesting time they'd had at a certain restaurant in the recent past. I didn't know if I was comfortable with their nonchalance or not. When one of them suggested the white chocolate mocha whatever-the-fuck cappuccino, I pressed my fingers together and in the most doctorly way I could, said, "Yes. I concur." They just looked at me. Not even a hint of a smile.
The new woman began to stick more electrodes on me and the bank of screens in front of me began to flutter to life, one by one. The centerpiece of the monstrosity was the most detailed and visually beautiful ECG display I have ever seen. It spanned across a square of four individual, large screens and represented every electrical signal in my heart with a series of perhaps a dozen bright green lines, waving and bouncing rhythmically, crossing each other's paths and... practically dancing!
"Is that me?" I asked.
"It certainly is!" The new woman responded.
My new best friend, the drug lady said, "We're going to stick a couple more things on you, then I'll give you some happy juice."
Yeeesss! The happy juice! The stuff that will make this all be over. I was very much looking forward to seeing that needle go into my IV because I knew that's the last thing I'd see before I was being wheeled out of this beautiful and frightening room. And I was very anxious for that, especially seeing what it was they were about to stick on me. They were large, thin, rectangular pads with shiny metal on one side and a wire attached to the bottom that lead to places unseen. They placed on on the right side of my chest and one on my back, and I knew right away what they were for. Why pay a guy to stand over you with "the paddles" when they could stick them right to you? The pads were for zapping me back after they'd killed me.
I laid down and everyone in the room got into position. The technicians surrounded the table and started producing straps from the edges of the table. When they begin to strap down my arms, I protested! One of the women said to me, "Sir, people have certain instincts during a procedure like this. If your instinct is to jump off of this table, you're going to rip that catheter down every major artery in your body. And if that happens, no one on Earth will be able to save you."
What could I say? She was right. I laid still and allowed them to strap down my arms and legs. It wouldn't matter in a moment anyway. The drug lady said, "Okay, I'm going to get you started here." And stuck a needle into my IV and pushed in a good amount of magic fluid. I breathed a relieved sigh and looked up at one of the monitors. For a moment, it got fuzzy. I thought, "Here we go. I'll be out of here in no time."
But the monitor stayed there. I began considering the puzzling thoughts that this portion of the time line that is my life should no longer exist. I realized it shouldn't be the future yet, but when that future gets here, I should never have been continuing to stare at this monitor, as far as my brain was concerned. Yet, here I was. Still staring at the monitor and watching my heart rhythms.
I rolled my head toward the drug lady and said, "Uh... kinda feels like about three shots of whiskey." And at that moment, I began to curse my experience with alcohol. It'd been five days since I'd had any booze. All this drug lady had done was return me to my usual state before I entered the hospital. I suddenly felt more "normal" than I had since I was admitted. My brain was used to operating competently while doped up. I can deliver an hour or more of memorized monologue with a brain impaired enough to cause most people to fall down. And this little shot of giggle juice was going to make me forget THIS?
The new man came to my side and sat down. I felt the first injection on my leg. It didn't hurt terribly bad. He gave me another three or four, but after the first one, I only felt a bit of pressure. I'd become interested in the fluoroscope display on Ye Olde Wall Of Me. It was a live x-ray of my heart, bouncing around dutifully in my chest cavity, just minding its own business. When suddenly, from the top of my heart, I saw two thin lines extending down into the center. The catheter! I was still waiting for the guy down there to put the thing in and he'd been spending the last few minutes threading it through my arteries. I didn't even feel it!
Then I felt a little bit of panic. This thing was about to start. I could see the catheter inside my heart. And I was still here! I rolled over once again to the drug lady. "Hey, I don't seem to be in the recovery room yet. Could you set the time machine a little faster?" At this, I did get a slight giggle, which I'm proud of. The drug lady came and again, squirted more fluid into my IV. I waited for a few seconds.
...wonderful. Another two shots of whiskey. Hell, a couple more and I'd be ready to get up in the morning.
I was screwed and I knew it. But one thing the squirt of giggles did was give me a little extra courage. I realized I was going to remember more of this than I was probably supposed to, but suddenly, I was feeling defiant. Fuck it! Let's do this thing! Bring it, bitches! Kill me! Kill me hard!
I stared at the beautiful, dancing lines on the screen ahead of me and dared them to show me something new. A voice came over a speaker from the little room. "Okay. Let's start with JY-12." The ECG screen suddenly flew into a new dance. Orange lines appeared over my green ones, I can only assume they were the computer's projected input. They started bouncing over my green lines and red marks appeared where the two intersected, all flowing from one side of the board to another.
At the instant the orange lines appeared, my heart was racing as though I'd just run a mile. I could feel it thumping painfully, pounding blood around my system. It didn't speed up to this point, as I'd always experienced in my life, it was just suddenly there. After about ten seconds, the orange lines disappeared. The technicians watched the screen for what my green lines would do in response to the orange ones that disturbed them. There was a short moment of nothing and then a ker-thump from my heart and a blip on the screen and my heart went right back to its usual routine without so much as a shrug.
I thought, "Heh. Eat that, orange lines! Come back and I'll kick your ass again!" I probably shouldn't have thought that. The next few invasions from the Republic Of Orange were more speed tests. Different heart rates, higher and lower. I began to get used to them in a way. Once you knew what was going to happen, they weren't so bad.
"Okay, going to abnormal. RF-9," was what I heard over the speaker. The next orange lines to show up weren't so friendly.
The screen spiraled to life with what looked like an interference pattern of orange marks, jumping from the higher green lines to the lower ones. And instantly, I knew this one was different. It felt... bad. Wrong. Not painful, but... incorrect. Unusual. It felt almost like my heart was beating in reverse. It was slightly familiar from what I'd experienced with my own rhythm problems in the past. My heart felt like it was sloshing in my chest.
The orange lines went away. But this time, my green ones continued the pattern the orange ones had introduced. They didn't want to go back to their usual rhythm. I felt like I needed to gasp for breath constantly.
"Cough!" one of the technicians said. At first, I didn't realize she was talking to me. "Sir, we need you to give us a big cough." I pulled in a breath and gave them a good, hard cough. My heart was still sputtering uncomfortably. "Cough again!" And I did. And this time, I felt a satisfying ker-thump, as my heart was re-set and fell back into a normal rhythm. I panted a little, never realizing how good a normal heart rhythm could feel.
However, I didn't get to enjoy it for very long. The next orange pattern came up, sweeping around in a kind of circle in much the same way the last one did. This one wasn't painful at all. It felt like part of my heart was beating in my stomach and part of it in my neck. The orange lines disappeared and my green pattern had taken on a rather swirly look. I was instructed to take a deep breath, which I did. And then to cough, which I did again. But this time, my heart didn't ker-thump back into its original rhythm.
I had stopped paying attention to the screen. My chest began to feel hollow. The beats of my heart had turned into a very light, quick sputtering. Now and then a hard beat would hit, as though it was trying desperately to kick start itself again, but it never stopped the fluttering. Soon, even the kick start beats were getting weak. Everything in my chest was just an asynchronous flittering. I began to feel tingling in my hands and feet that swept into my arms and legs, thickening into a penetrating vibration all over. I felt my face get cold and my ears started to ring. Then, my vision began to break up into little spots and get fuzzy. The voices of the technicians sounded far away and though I could hear them clearly, I couldn't understand what they were saying. Speech turned into a series of sounds that eventually washed into the background.
I was hit with an emotion. It was more about myself than anything I'd ever felt. And I thought, "This is it. This is the proverbial "end". And it's MY end. Not someone else's. MINE. This is how it goes down." And it almost felt like the answer to the ultimate question. There was a kind of relief in just knowing how my death was happening. The vision and hearing I had left were suddenly something I couldn't pay attention to. I won't say they "faded". They were just stuffed into the background and unable to be grasped.
And then... well, this is where everyone says, "everything went black". But that's not how it happened. I can understand why people say it. It's the simplest way to describe an indescribable experience. However, things do not go "black". Black is an identifiable thing. What I faded into wasn't identifiable, because identity of anything had gone away. It's impossible to describe what I "faded" into, but I'm going to try my best.
It wasn't a place, a thing or an idea. Yet something was there. It was, let's say, a thought. But not a thought made up of words or images, but of bits and pieces of everything, tangible and intangible. Part of this thought felt the way yellow looks. Part of it had the impression of a large size. Some of it looked like tiny portions of different bits and pieces of things that I had seen and imagined in my life -- a section of air conditioner vent meshed with the texture of shag carpet. Part of it sounded like a section of time in which a car engine had been running. Part of it was the feeling of vibration. None of it meant anything. It was just there. Bits and pieces of random neurons firing off to make a thought that was composed of... anything. Anything at once, removed from the discrimination of what SORT of things they were. It was a thousand different random things -- the feeling of the distance of a foot in length, the recognition of a television commercial, the impression of a color, the knowledge of the location of my index finger when it's raised over my head -- all stripped of their names, purposes and meaning and woven together into...... an impression. An impression that slowly shifted, allowing new elements to fade in and other ones to fade away. I didn't understand it. I didn't want to understand it. There was no "me" anymore to wonder why I wasn't understanding it. It was there and it was everything.
This is the "black" that I faded into. It's a place where there are pieces of anything at once, none of which can be understood, grasped, sorted or differentiated. It's all there and all of it is one thing. Everything. That's the only thing that can be understood. It's everything. Not "nothing", as many people try to say you fall into. When I died, I faded into everything.
There was everything and then, there was acceptance of everything. I didn't need or want. I didn't care. There was everything and it was accepted for whatever it was.
That was my last memory.
If there had been time after my last memory in which there was nothing at all, I can never know that. I suddenly became aware of the things around me again. I didn't "fade back in". Everything I was seeing and hearing was already there, and always had been. I just began to comprehend them again. I understood time again. The things I was seeing and hearing were once again identifiable. And the first thing I identified was the feeling of having been hit with a brick wall seconds after the impact. There was a terrible, nagging thought racing through the back of my mind, insisting that something was wrong. Maybe that *I'd* done something wrong. There was no place to point an accusation, it was just the feeling of, "Bad! Badbad! Something wrong here! Very bad!"
This feeling faded quickly as I heard someone out of my left ear say, "And we're at sinus."
Without even looking up from his work near my leg, the new man said, ever-so-nonchalantly, "Welcome back, Mr. Davis."
I blinked a couple of times and my first words were, "Thanks. I wouldn't want to miss the next "Lost."
Not even a smile.
My feelings then went in very specific order. Relief that I was alive, elation that I had been dead, fear that I was still on an operating table and could go through it again, and then determination to get through this thing.
As if nothing had happened, the technician called out the number of the next pattern and my heart started flipping in loops again. The orange fuckers came several more times, swashing my orderly green lines with their chaos. Most of the time, my heart corrected itself fairly quickly, but I didn't have the nuts to insult them again, even mentally.
This went on for about an hour. Then the drug lady came over with a different injection.
"Sir, we're going to inject some adrenaline into you. Sometimes these rhythms can be triggered by that and we'd like to see the results."
The injection went in and, all at once, I had same feeling you get when you look out your windshield and see that the car in front of you has stopped and you're still speeding toward it... only without anything happening at all. More orange bastards came through to play with my green lines and adrenaline. After that, I received another injection designed to slow my heart rate. That was probably the creepiest moment of the procedure. No orange lines this time, but a terrible sense of anticipation as I waited for the next beat of my heart for what seemed like forever.
After the injections, it was time for another round with the Orange Army. And this time, they were pissed! The patterns on the screen got more and more intricate. And in my chest, became more and more painful. At one point, I asked the drug lady to give me another hit. I insisted that I was remembering more than I wanted to.
Her response was, "How do you know?"
I said, "Because I'm still here!"
She said, "But it's not the future yet. Of course you're here, because it's now! But how do you know you will have been here when it's the future?"
I was actually amused by this line of questioning. It was a refreshing little brain puzzle in the middle of this horror. However, I truly didn't want to remember any more of this. I said to her, "You remember my joke about missing the next episode of Lost?"
"Yes." she said.
"Why do I?" I asked.
She gave me another shot.
The final shot did make me a bit loopy, but not enough to forget the next barrage. Most of them, I survived. Two of them, I did not. I found myself sinking into the same "everything" as before, and then suddenly aware again.
The final pattern on the ECG was the most beautiful one yet. And the most painful. The screen lit up with a final, last ditch push by the orange, moving in a sine wave pattern up and down my green lines, jumping from one strand to the next. It looked like a Winamp visual plug in. And at the same time I was noting how beautiful it was, I was letting out an audible "ARRGGGGG!" from the pain it was causing. I didn't feel any particular beat in my heart during this one. Just a sweeping, stinging pain running circles around my chest. I did begin to feel a bit of pressure in my head, as though I was hanging upside down, but the pattern was stopped and my heart resumed its beat on its own. I may not have won every battle, but I whipped the final assault.
And just like that, the procedure was over. The technicians began to pull the equipment off and out of me. I was wheeled out into the hall where Jibba immediately greeted me with a smile. It was very good to see him. In fact, it was very good to see everything.
Death sucks, I will attest to that. I will not lie and say it was a comfortable, peaceful, warm experience. It was uncomfortable, painful and confusing. However, because it is the end -- the infamous, ultimate termination of everything that's important to us, we tend to imagine that it must also be the ultimate in fear, pain and despair. That's just not true. It's a painful and uncomfortable event in just the same way that painful and uncomfortable things happen in our lives from time to time. It's a very crappy 3 to 5 minutes of life. It just happens to be the ones at the very end. And it's certainly not worth spending 60 or 70 years in fear of. Death is going to happen to us all. It's a crappy thing. But it's probably not as crappy as most people imagine it. The worst thing about death is if the thought of it causes you not to live life. Worry about death when it comes. It's not that bad. Concentrate on life while you're alive. That way, when death does come, you can be happy with how you lived.
The most beautiful thing I learned from this was not a matter of spirituality, but humanity. I'm not a spiritual person, so it doesn't matter what I think about why I experienced what I did. Personally, I think it was just an indescribable effect of my brain dying and taking my perception with it. But that taught me something.
Life is differences. That's what it is to be alive. Life IS discernment. And that's all it is.
It's not existence or intelligence or spirit or any form of higher, intangible, invisible energy that lives in our bodies. Whether or not those things exist doesn't matter. Life itself is discernment of anything and everything. Life is the difference of difference -- The ability to take "everything" and slice it into portions, sections and "things" that we can play with, use and understand. That is what it is to be alive as opposed to "existing".
And when you have the very concept of difference taken away from you, you realize that people are in 99.9% in agreement on everything! And the small amount of things we do disagree on are simply more differences. More of our ability to live, sorting other people's opinions, rather than the concept of, say, a "sound" as different from a "sight".
Our brains and bodies are designed to be alive. To have the ability to set "everything" in pieces and then manipulate and use those pieces. We are filters, moving through the infinite and screening it into the finite. It is the only way it is possible to be alive. The only way to have life as we know it is NOT to have everything on our plate at once -- NOT to know everything -- NOT to comprehend God -- NOT to be enlightened -- NOT to be omniscient. What we consider our spiritual, philosophical and scientific shortcomings are the very things that are necessary for our existence as we know it. Without our narrow viewpoints and inability to understand it all, we would be another element of an incomprehensible "all", and unable to take part in life as we understand it.
We, as people, are exactly where we're supposed to be. We're doing our function. We're in the right place. To gain what we strive for would mean losing that which allowed us to strive in the first place. We are pieces of one, large thing, investigating itself and wondering what we are.
And if we ever find out... well, that will be the day it's no longer necessary for life to exist.
I am now home from the hospital and recovering from the tests.
I want to say that I've been to a lot of hospitals in my time and University of Michigan Hospital is the absolute cream of the crop. I've never been treated so well as a patient. I've never had a staff so concerned and attentive. I'm very happy that I had the good fortune to be able to go through this experience in the hospital that I did.
A lot of folks have had a lot of questions about my experience on the operating table. Some of you have wanted more details on what happened and what I experienced, particularly during the dying part. For those folks who are curious about more, I've written a detailed account of what I went through. I have certainly learned that a lot of the cliches about death aren't true. And I'm more than happy to talk about what I experienced. So, if you're interested...
I'll start on Tuesday morning.
The procedure they were recommending, called an Eletrophysical Scan, had been explained to me the day before. I spent most of the day finding out more about what was involved, what the risks were and gathering the opinions of a few close friends and family members. Then, the staff gave me overnight to think about it. I would make my final decision when they came to see me that morning.
I didn't get much sleep that night. And when they came to see me in the morning, I did not want the procedure done. I explained this much to Dr. Eagle. However, I had decided that emotions shouldn't be a factor in a decision like this, and as much as I didn't want to do it, I was going to agree to the operation.
That was that. They scheduled me for the procedure at 11am, only two and a half hours from then.
At about 11:20, transport came for me. At this point, I had to force every bodily action I made that contributed to the procession of this madness. Every step toward the awaiting stretcher that would take me to the operating room was against my will. Staying in the stretcher as they wheeled me through buildings and into a waiting room seemed to go against instinct.
You have to realize that for over half of my life, I have had a mystery heart condition that had never been diagnosed or even witnessed. Everyone had always thought I was crazy. When my first palpitations appeared when I was 12, they frightened me terribly. In response to my pleading for a doctor because my heart was skipping beats, my parents sent me to a psychologist instead. I cannot count the number of occasions I've gone into the emergency room because of an abnormal heart rhythm or chest pain, just to have the doctor look at me and say, "Sir, you're in your 20's. You don't have a heart problem. Stop wasting our time." One doctor even suggested I ask a psychologist about anti-psychotic medication after coming to see him about my heart palpitations.
Now, not only had doctors witnessed and recorded one of my attacks, not only had they given it a name and explained to me how dangerous and deadly it had the potential to be, but I had to finally come to terms with the condition that had FINALLY been diagnosed, how dangerous it was and how my whole life was going to be affected by it. And this had all happened in one day.
And now, I was being wheeled to a room where these same doctors were going to purposely CAUSE this heart malfunction of which they, just the day before, had been stressing the severity! They went to great lengths to get me to realize, for the first time, that this heart condition I'd always seen as a semi-casual annoyance was actually potentially life-ending, just before telling me that they intended to intentionally induce it!
My instinct was to get the hell out of there. I had to concentrate on other things to keep myself from jumping out of that stretcher and running.
The transport people wheeled me into a waiting room -- white tile, curtains, smell of disinfectant, sterile. Every voice induced an uncomfortable echo. A friendly nurse began to stick electrodes to my chest and hook me up to an ECG machine and an IV stand.
Soon after, a young, Japanese man came in. He was the EP technician who would be controlling the computer which controlled the electrode catheter which controlled my heart. He explained a bit more about what he would be doing to me and afterward, handed me a clip board with a document to sign. The legal document stated that were I to die, have any allergic reactions to blood transfers or x-ray dyes, need emergency surgery because of the procedure or in any way came away from the operation with any debilitating, lifelong conditions as a result of what they were about to do -- I would not hold them legally responsible.
I forced my hand to write my name on the paper.
The Japanese man left the room and a young woman came in. She explained that she would be handling my sedation. "Ooh, drugs?" I thought. This, I was interested in. She told me that for the procedure, I had to remain conscious. The reason for this was because if they knocked me out, my breathing would have to be done by a respirator. Often, an irregular heart rhythm is corrected by our natural breathing responses to the sensation. Taking a deep breath or coughing can actually hit a kind of "reset" button on your heart rhythm and kick it back into the correct timing. Since a respirator could never mimic this, I had to stay awake and breathing on my own, with my own conscious reactions. The sedation, she said, would allow me to be conscious, but would relax me and cause temporary amnesia of the entire procedure.
This was good news to me! I said, "So, once you give me that, I'll just wake up and it'll be over?" She explained to me that there were no guarantees. That most people remember nothing. And some people remember a few details. But I likely wouldn't recall much, if any of the operation.
Now, if this had been the case, my story would now say, "And just after that, I suddenly became aware of being in the recovery room! It was all over!"
...You'll notice that doesn't happen here.
The young woman left the room and I was left alone with my thoughts for what felt like an eternity. It was a bad time to have nothing to do but think. Just the other day, I was at my computer desk, working on material that I hoped would be entertaining for furries. Now, suddenly, I was on a stretcher waiting for this nightmare to play out. It seemed like such a short time for such a big change to happen.
After around an hour and a half, an attendant came in and asked if I was ready. "No," I said. "And if you ask me again any time between now and when I'm 90, the answer will still be no." She furrowed her brow a little. "But, let's do it anyway," I said.
She smiled at me and popped an upbeat tone into her voice as she began to wheel me across the hall. "Well, we're ready! We're all ready for you, and you are the star."
My immediate thought... "Finally, a stage I don't want to in the middle of." And she wheeled me into the operating room.
The room was COLD. Uncomfortably cold. But I was too busy getting an erection over the technology to notice that for long. The place looked like the bridge of a federation ship, or perhaps one of those infamous anal probe implantation labs in an alien flying saucer. In the center of the room was a black, padded operating table, like a wide, stretched office chair laid completely prone. Directly over the table was a box with an orifice which would aim right down on my chest.
The staff wheeled the stretcher adjacent to the table and I carefully scooted myself onto it and laid down. Anchored from the ceiling, at the opposite end of the table from my head, was a jumbotron of flat screen monitors on an adjustable, steel elbow. The monitors were in a diamond kind of pattern. Behind the monitors was a glass window. Inside was a little room where the Japanese technician I had met earlier was sitting and starting up his systems. The rest of the room was filled with medical odds and ends. Tanks of gas. Steel tables with sharp things on them.
The young woman, along with another man and woman I hadn't met walked into the room, chatting casually about an interesting time they'd had at a certain restaurant in the recent past. I didn't know if I was comfortable with their nonchalance or not. When one of them suggested the white chocolate mocha whatever-the-fuck cappuccino, I pressed my fingers together and in the most doctorly way I could, said, "Yes. I concur." They just looked at me. Not even a hint of a smile.
The new woman began to stick more electrodes on me and the bank of screens in front of me began to flutter to life, one by one. The centerpiece of the monstrosity was the most detailed and visually beautiful ECG display I have ever seen. It spanned across a square of four individual, large screens and represented every electrical signal in my heart with a series of perhaps a dozen bright green lines, waving and bouncing rhythmically, crossing each other's paths and... practically dancing!
"Is that me?" I asked.
"It certainly is!" The new woman responded.
My new best friend, the drug lady said, "We're going to stick a couple more things on you, then I'll give you some happy juice."
Yeeesss! The happy juice! The stuff that will make this all be over. I was very much looking forward to seeing that needle go into my IV because I knew that's the last thing I'd see before I was being wheeled out of this beautiful and frightening room. And I was very anxious for that, especially seeing what it was they were about to stick on me. They were large, thin, rectangular pads with shiny metal on one side and a wire attached to the bottom that lead to places unseen. They placed on on the right side of my chest and one on my back, and I knew right away what they were for. Why pay a guy to stand over you with "the paddles" when they could stick them right to you? The pads were for zapping me back after they'd killed me.
I laid down and everyone in the room got into position. The technicians surrounded the table and started producing straps from the edges of the table. When they begin to strap down my arms, I protested! One of the women said to me, "Sir, people have certain instincts during a procedure like this. If your instinct is to jump off of this table, you're going to rip that catheter down every major artery in your body. And if that happens, no one on Earth will be able to save you."
What could I say? She was right. I laid still and allowed them to strap down my arms and legs. It wouldn't matter in a moment anyway. The drug lady said, "Okay, I'm going to get you started here." And stuck a needle into my IV and pushed in a good amount of magic fluid. I breathed a relieved sigh and looked up at one of the monitors. For a moment, it got fuzzy. I thought, "Here we go. I'll be out of here in no time."
But the monitor stayed there. I began considering the puzzling thoughts that this portion of the time line that is my life should no longer exist. I realized it shouldn't be the future yet, but when that future gets here, I should never have been continuing to stare at this monitor, as far as my brain was concerned. Yet, here I was. Still staring at the monitor and watching my heart rhythms.
I rolled my head toward the drug lady and said, "Uh... kinda feels like about three shots of whiskey." And at that moment, I began to curse my experience with alcohol. It'd been five days since I'd had any booze. All this drug lady had done was return me to my usual state before I entered the hospital. I suddenly felt more "normal" than I had since I was admitted. My brain was used to operating competently while doped up. I can deliver an hour or more of memorized monologue with a brain impaired enough to cause most people to fall down. And this little shot of giggle juice was going to make me forget THIS?
The new man came to my side and sat down. I felt the first injection on my leg. It didn't hurt terribly bad. He gave me another three or four, but after the first one, I only felt a bit of pressure. I'd become interested in the fluoroscope display on Ye Olde Wall Of Me. It was a live x-ray of my heart, bouncing around dutifully in my chest cavity, just minding its own business. When suddenly, from the top of my heart, I saw two thin lines extending down into the center. The catheter! I was still waiting for the guy down there to put the thing in and he'd been spending the last few minutes threading it through my arteries. I didn't even feel it!
Then I felt a little bit of panic. This thing was about to start. I could see the catheter inside my heart. And I was still here! I rolled over once again to the drug lady. "Hey, I don't seem to be in the recovery room yet. Could you set the time machine a little faster?" At this, I did get a slight giggle, which I'm proud of. The drug lady came and again, squirted more fluid into my IV. I waited for a few seconds.
...wonderful. Another two shots of whiskey. Hell, a couple more and I'd be ready to get up in the morning.
I was screwed and I knew it. But one thing the squirt of giggles did was give me a little extra courage. I realized I was going to remember more of this than I was probably supposed to, but suddenly, I was feeling defiant. Fuck it! Let's do this thing! Bring it, bitches! Kill me! Kill me hard!
I stared at the beautiful, dancing lines on the screen ahead of me and dared them to show me something new. A voice came over a speaker from the little room. "Okay. Let's start with JY-12." The ECG screen suddenly flew into a new dance. Orange lines appeared over my green ones, I can only assume they were the computer's projected input. They started bouncing over my green lines and red marks appeared where the two intersected, all flowing from one side of the board to another.
At the instant the orange lines appeared, my heart was racing as though I'd just run a mile. I could feel it thumping painfully, pounding blood around my system. It didn't speed up to this point, as I'd always experienced in my life, it was just suddenly there. After about ten seconds, the orange lines disappeared. The technicians watched the screen for what my green lines would do in response to the orange ones that disturbed them. There was a short moment of nothing and then a ker-thump from my heart and a blip on the screen and my heart went right back to its usual routine without so much as a shrug.
I thought, "Heh. Eat that, orange lines! Come back and I'll kick your ass again!" I probably shouldn't have thought that. The next few invasions from the Republic Of Orange were more speed tests. Different heart rates, higher and lower. I began to get used to them in a way. Once you knew what was going to happen, they weren't so bad.
"Okay, going to abnormal. RF-9," was what I heard over the speaker. The next orange lines to show up weren't so friendly.
The screen spiraled to life with what looked like an interference pattern of orange marks, jumping from the higher green lines to the lower ones. And instantly, I knew this one was different. It felt... bad. Wrong. Not painful, but... incorrect. Unusual. It felt almost like my heart was beating in reverse. It was slightly familiar from what I'd experienced with my own rhythm problems in the past. My heart felt like it was sloshing in my chest.
The orange lines went away. But this time, my green ones continued the pattern the orange ones had introduced. They didn't want to go back to their usual rhythm. I felt like I needed to gasp for breath constantly.
"Cough!" one of the technicians said. At first, I didn't realize she was talking to me. "Sir, we need you to give us a big cough." I pulled in a breath and gave them a good, hard cough. My heart was still sputtering uncomfortably. "Cough again!" And I did. And this time, I felt a satisfying ker-thump, as my heart was re-set and fell back into a normal rhythm. I panted a little, never realizing how good a normal heart rhythm could feel.
However, I didn't get to enjoy it for very long. The next orange pattern came up, sweeping around in a kind of circle in much the same way the last one did. This one wasn't painful at all. It felt like part of my heart was beating in my stomach and part of it in my neck. The orange lines disappeared and my green pattern had taken on a rather swirly look. I was instructed to take a deep breath, which I did. And then to cough, which I did again. But this time, my heart didn't ker-thump back into its original rhythm.
I had stopped paying attention to the screen. My chest began to feel hollow. The beats of my heart had turned into a very light, quick sputtering. Now and then a hard beat would hit, as though it was trying desperately to kick start itself again, but it never stopped the fluttering. Soon, even the kick start beats were getting weak. Everything in my chest was just an asynchronous flittering. I began to feel tingling in my hands and feet that swept into my arms and legs, thickening into a penetrating vibration all over. I felt my face get cold and my ears started to ring. Then, my vision began to break up into little spots and get fuzzy. The voices of the technicians sounded far away and though I could hear them clearly, I couldn't understand what they were saying. Speech turned into a series of sounds that eventually washed into the background.
I was hit with an emotion. It was more about myself than anything I'd ever felt. And I thought, "This is it. This is the proverbial "end". And it's MY end. Not someone else's. MINE. This is how it goes down." And it almost felt like the answer to the ultimate question. There was a kind of relief in just knowing how my death was happening. The vision and hearing I had left were suddenly something I couldn't pay attention to. I won't say they "faded". They were just stuffed into the background and unable to be grasped.
And then... well, this is where everyone says, "everything went black". But that's not how it happened. I can understand why people say it. It's the simplest way to describe an indescribable experience. However, things do not go "black". Black is an identifiable thing. What I faded into wasn't identifiable, because identity of anything had gone away. It's impossible to describe what I "faded" into, but I'm going to try my best.
It wasn't a place, a thing or an idea. Yet something was there. It was, let's say, a thought. But not a thought made up of words or images, but of bits and pieces of everything, tangible and intangible. Part of this thought felt the way yellow looks. Part of it had the impression of a large size. Some of it looked like tiny portions of different bits and pieces of things that I had seen and imagined in my life -- a section of air conditioner vent meshed with the texture of shag carpet. Part of it sounded like a section of time in which a car engine had been running. Part of it was the feeling of vibration. None of it meant anything. It was just there. Bits and pieces of random neurons firing off to make a thought that was composed of... anything. Anything at once, removed from the discrimination of what SORT of things they were. It was a thousand different random things -- the feeling of the distance of a foot in length, the recognition of a television commercial, the impression of a color, the knowledge of the location of my index finger when it's raised over my head -- all stripped of their names, purposes and meaning and woven together into...... an impression. An impression that slowly shifted, allowing new elements to fade in and other ones to fade away. I didn't understand it. I didn't want to understand it. There was no "me" anymore to wonder why I wasn't understanding it. It was there and it was everything.
This is the "black" that I faded into. It's a place where there are pieces of anything at once, none of which can be understood, grasped, sorted or differentiated. It's all there and all of it is one thing. Everything. That's the only thing that can be understood. It's everything. Not "nothing", as many people try to say you fall into. When I died, I faded into everything.
There was everything and then, there was acceptance of everything. I didn't need or want. I didn't care. There was everything and it was accepted for whatever it was.
That was my last memory.
If there had been time after my last memory in which there was nothing at all, I can never know that. I suddenly became aware of the things around me again. I didn't "fade back in". Everything I was seeing and hearing was already there, and always had been. I just began to comprehend them again. I understood time again. The things I was seeing and hearing were once again identifiable. And the first thing I identified was the feeling of having been hit with a brick wall seconds after the impact. There was a terrible, nagging thought racing through the back of my mind, insisting that something was wrong. Maybe that *I'd* done something wrong. There was no place to point an accusation, it was just the feeling of, "Bad! Badbad! Something wrong here! Very bad!"
This feeling faded quickly as I heard someone out of my left ear say, "And we're at sinus."
Without even looking up from his work near my leg, the new man said, ever-so-nonchalantly, "Welcome back, Mr. Davis."
I blinked a couple of times and my first words were, "Thanks. I wouldn't want to miss the next "Lost."
Not even a smile.
My feelings then went in very specific order. Relief that I was alive, elation that I had been dead, fear that I was still on an operating table and could go through it again, and then determination to get through this thing.
As if nothing had happened, the technician called out the number of the next pattern and my heart started flipping in loops again. The orange fuckers came several more times, swashing my orderly green lines with their chaos. Most of the time, my heart corrected itself fairly quickly, but I didn't have the nuts to insult them again, even mentally.
This went on for about an hour. Then the drug lady came over with a different injection.
"Sir, we're going to inject some adrenaline into you. Sometimes these rhythms can be triggered by that and we'd like to see the results."
The injection went in and, all at once, I had same feeling you get when you look out your windshield and see that the car in front of you has stopped and you're still speeding toward it... only without anything happening at all. More orange bastards came through to play with my green lines and adrenaline. After that, I received another injection designed to slow my heart rate. That was probably the creepiest moment of the procedure. No orange lines this time, but a terrible sense of anticipation as I waited for the next beat of my heart for what seemed like forever.
After the injections, it was time for another round with the Orange Army. And this time, they were pissed! The patterns on the screen got more and more intricate. And in my chest, became more and more painful. At one point, I asked the drug lady to give me another hit. I insisted that I was remembering more than I wanted to.
Her response was, "How do you know?"
I said, "Because I'm still here!"
She said, "But it's not the future yet. Of course you're here, because it's now! But how do you know you will have been here when it's the future?"
I was actually amused by this line of questioning. It was a refreshing little brain puzzle in the middle of this horror. However, I truly didn't want to remember any more of this. I said to her, "You remember my joke about missing the next episode of Lost?"
"Yes." she said.
"Why do I?" I asked.
She gave me another shot.
The final shot did make me a bit loopy, but not enough to forget the next barrage. Most of them, I survived. Two of them, I did not. I found myself sinking into the same "everything" as before, and then suddenly aware again.
The final pattern on the ECG was the most beautiful one yet. And the most painful. The screen lit up with a final, last ditch push by the orange, moving in a sine wave pattern up and down my green lines, jumping from one strand to the next. It looked like a Winamp visual plug in. And at the same time I was noting how beautiful it was, I was letting out an audible "ARRGGGGG!" from the pain it was causing. I didn't feel any particular beat in my heart during this one. Just a sweeping, stinging pain running circles around my chest. I did begin to feel a bit of pressure in my head, as though I was hanging upside down, but the pattern was stopped and my heart resumed its beat on its own. I may not have won every battle, but I whipped the final assault.
And just like that, the procedure was over. The technicians began to pull the equipment off and out of me. I was wheeled out into the hall where Jibba immediately greeted me with a smile. It was very good to see him. In fact, it was very good to see everything.
Death sucks, I will attest to that. I will not lie and say it was a comfortable, peaceful, warm experience. It was uncomfortable, painful and confusing. However, because it is the end -- the infamous, ultimate termination of everything that's important to us, we tend to imagine that it must also be the ultimate in fear, pain and despair. That's just not true. It's a painful and uncomfortable event in just the same way that painful and uncomfortable things happen in our lives from time to time. It's a very crappy 3 to 5 minutes of life. It just happens to be the ones at the very end. And it's certainly not worth spending 60 or 70 years in fear of. Death is going to happen to us all. It's a crappy thing. But it's probably not as crappy as most people imagine it. The worst thing about death is if the thought of it causes you not to live life. Worry about death when it comes. It's not that bad. Concentrate on life while you're alive. That way, when death does come, you can be happy with how you lived.
The most beautiful thing I learned from this was not a matter of spirituality, but humanity. I'm not a spiritual person, so it doesn't matter what I think about why I experienced what I did. Personally, I think it was just an indescribable effect of my brain dying and taking my perception with it. But that taught me something.
Life is differences. That's what it is to be alive. Life IS discernment. And that's all it is.
It's not existence or intelligence or spirit or any form of higher, intangible, invisible energy that lives in our bodies. Whether or not those things exist doesn't matter. Life itself is discernment of anything and everything. Life is the difference of difference -- The ability to take "everything" and slice it into portions, sections and "things" that we can play with, use and understand. That is what it is to be alive as opposed to "existing".
And when you have the very concept of difference taken away from you, you realize that people are in 99.9% in agreement on everything! And the small amount of things we do disagree on are simply more differences. More of our ability to live, sorting other people's opinions, rather than the concept of, say, a "sound" as different from a "sight".
Our brains and bodies are designed to be alive. To have the ability to set "everything" in pieces and then manipulate and use those pieces. We are filters, moving through the infinite and screening it into the finite. It is the only way it is possible to be alive. The only way to have life as we know it is NOT to have everything on our plate at once -- NOT to know everything -- NOT to comprehend God -- NOT to be enlightened -- NOT to be omniscient. What we consider our spiritual, philosophical and scientific shortcomings are the very things that are necessary for our existence as we know it. Without our narrow viewpoints and inability to understand it all, we would be another element of an incomprehensible "all", and unable to take part in life as we understand it.
We, as people, are exactly where we're supposed to be. We're doing our function. We're in the right place. To gain what we strive for would mean losing that which allowed us to strive in the first place. We are pieces of one, large thing, investigating itself and wondering what we are.
And if we ever find out... well, that will be the day it's no longer necessary for life to exist.
