Sorry it's taken so long to get to part 2 here- there has been a lot of things going on here, mainly in the area of adjusting to a dialysis schedule.
In Part 1, I covered the higher points of what I saw during my death. There were some finer points I left out- my wife called my son in Boston to let him talk to me one last time, and the fact that I did recognize some of the people on the hill as I was descending- family members that had passed on (my paternal grandmother, and my uncle Carl) and a couple of friends - but I was in such a hurry to get to the town, I figured I would catch up with them later.
At any rate, as I said I was in the ICU and I was intubated. And, I had absolutely no idea of what had happened. Oh, I remembered the "hovering" in the recovery room and seeing my wife and daughter crying, but the context of it was all scrambled. I was sure it was still Wednesday, but I couldn't understand why I was intubated? My left side hurt terribly and the right side of my neck felt like it was in a vise.
Turns out that they had inserted a chest tube into my left lung to drain the 2 liters of blood that had gotten into it, and I had a sub-clavial IV (central line IV) inserted on the right side of my neck, directly to my heart. They had sedated me, but they had also paralyzed me and restrained me so I would stop trying to tear out the tube. Oh, and it wasn't Wednesday morning- it was Thursday around noon.
The intubation and neck IV were removed about an hour after I awoke and I could prove to the docs that I could breathe on my own, and a variety of other (painful) catheters were also removed, but the chest tube remained.
So, I was alive. My wife was there and looked terribly tired and terribly relieved. She went thru what had happened to me, to which most of replies were a very hoarse, "Really?". It took me quite awhile to accept what had happened.
And then a very strange thing happened.
One would think that if they literally dodged death, that their immediate reaction would be on of joy and thankfulness. After all, I obviously had a family and friends that loved me very much, I had first-class health care and had been assured that I would walk out of the hospital under my own steam, and it was super-obvious that I must have some purpose left to fulfill by continuing living. LOTS to be thankful for, right?
And yet, I felt none of that. At first, I really felt nothing at all, neither good nor bad. But as the hours wore on in the ICU, I started feeling more and more empty inside. I also had this overwhelming feeling of "You don't belong here" and even though I wasn't wishing for death or being suicidal, I didn't really want to be alive, either. It's so difficult to explain, and even now, a full month later, I can't hardly do it justice. I described it to my wife like this:
"It feels like a big chunk of me is missing."
One of my closest friends, Paul, came to see me in the ICU. Paul and I mess with each other all the time. He walked into the ICU and said, "Dammit, motherfu**er, don't you ever do that to me again" with a big smile on his face, and my response was to burst out crying. It wasn't from sadness and it wasn't from happiness at seeing my friend- it was because I actually felt NOTHING at that statement. Not a blessed thing.
During times like this, my usual response is to cry out to God to help me. So, I did that, and I got absolute, total silence as a response. Nothing. This deepened the feeling of being alone, immeasurably.
They moved me very early Friday morning to another room, and then to another room later that day, where I would be for the next 9 days, trying to recover. For the first 4 days. my strength was completely non-existent- my wife literally had to bathe and shave me; I could walk no more than about 2 meters (and had to use a walker to do it) and then would have to sit for about 30 minutes trying to get my wind back; I was completely unable to feed myself and couldn't do the simplest things like rolling over in bed or adjusting my position in bed. This just added to my despair, and I spent those first 4 days doing nothing but crying- especially when I was left alone. It got so bad that my wife decided to stay at the hospital with me so I wouldn't be alone with my thoughts. My nurses were very worried about me, too- they could tell this wasn't "me".
What I had never considered throughout this was this wasn't a lack of thankfulness or emotion, rather, it was the absence of thankfulness and emotion. Yeah, I was alive, but I was emotionally wrung out like a dry sponge. And the harder I tried to "come to grips" with it, the worse it got.
One day, the hospital chaplain popped into my room. Turns out, my wife and the nurses had collaborated on getting this together, but didn't tell me. After establishing that she and I would actually be able to talk (she was Episcopalian, so that was cool) we started talking about this "absence" I was feeling. What she said was (and I had never considered this at all) that my reaction to this was coming from 2 places: I had just experienced MAJOR trauma and that I hadn't assembled all the pieces in my mind as to what had happened. She also assured me that this was the most common response to these things, and likened it to a soldier who had just experienced combat. So, basically, I have PTSD, and that is perfectly normal.
This was a HUGE relief. I thought I was going to completely lose it, but this is what it is, and it will take time to get thru it. We're talking therapists here, and I'm 100% ok with that.
I was released on December 23, and on the drive home with my wife, I cried uncontrollably the whole way. When I reached my couch in the living, I literally collapsed on it and cried like I have NEVER cried in my life for about 2 hours. I was wailing and moaning thru most of it, and my wife could do nothing to give me solace except hold me. Again- not sadness or happiness- and it wasn't all that cathartic, either. It was just so completely overwhelming.
I managed to get to church for Christmas Eve service, and I wanted to do that because my church has been an UNBELIEVALBE support mechanism for me during this time. It was also so good to be around people- that did help my mood a lot. Christmas Day was very, very down (I never left the couch) and that Wednesday was my first dialysis treatment at the clinic. My family had a small gathering for Christmas on New Year's Eve.
On New Year's Day, however, I started having trouble breathing and started experiencing chest pain. Rather than mess with it, we returned to the hospital where an X-Ray and CT revealed that my lung had decided to start leaking again. This required 2 more blood transfusions, another chest tube and another 4 day stay in the hospital. I was finally released on 1/4 and have been home since. I still cannot walk very well and my right leg (where they inserted the embolization catheter to embolize my lung) really doesn't work well. My energy level is still darn low, but getting better. My doctors are optimistic that things will turn around (I'm still not so sure) but we'll see.
The road ahead is steep and painful, but we're gonna tackle it.
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