Running with my mind

You try to walk away unaffected. You try and walk away with your mind still intact, bent on moving on, your senses still about you. But things have changed, and you know it. Coming face to face with your own mortality is a big step, a staggering step. It was for me, and I haven't been the same since that day.

It feels like a fairytale- telling the story makes me bored now. I've told it too many times. Yes, Sleeping Beauty lay there, then some guy kissed her and she woke up. How many times do you want to hear it? Enough already.

Sometimes, when I'm trying to go to sleep, I still have images come back to me, remnants of the wild trip I took for fourteen days. Things seemingly disconnected from each other, yet so perfect in their symbiosis, as if trying to make a gradiose point to no one else but me, banging away at my senses. Images and phrases comes back to me, string themselves together just to take me back, give me a glimpse once again of what I saw. A trip back into wonderland - what a decieving name for a dark hole that exists for no other reason but to teach you something.

What did I see? I don't know, but at the same time, I think I know perfectly well. Its just that my concious state does not provide me the words or even the imagination to describe what I saw. Some of what I saw I would describe as beauty at its most alluring. At other times, the pictures that flashed my thoughts were pain, disgust, hurt and loss signified. A symbiosis of the beautiful and the scary, the lovely and the lost - this was my time in the ICU while I lay in an induced coma for over two weeks last year.

I couldn't speak. I just lay there, hating the ride at some points, fighting against it at others but always enthralled. What else could I hope for? This was a movie of my mind's own making, induced by the morphine cocktail I was being given. What I saw was not about me, my life or anyone I knew. Well, thats not true, I did see myself at times, but it wasn't about me- I was a mere spectator.

What I remember or atleast, can piece together is a series of stories or tales, call it what you will. At the time, they were all connected somehow, one led into the other. Now however, normality makes me re-evaluate the grand ride; in hindshight, it feels choppy, disconnected. I don't remember much but I remember enough to think of it as just a dream that scurried off when I woke up leaving me a depleting memory of it as each day wore on. I saw people I don't know, imagined instances which the laws of physics would scoff at. I saw life in a purer form, something modernity would be skeptical of. It was a journey into the recessses of my mind, egged on by phrases and names I heard in the ICU, and faces I saw when I was awake. It was all connected, yet not so.

I opened my eyes once to see a nurse brushing my teeth. I was perplexed when I did figure out what she was doing, I tried but was unable to speak. So I just sat there and watched her. Then she started to shave me. I dozed off at some point while watching her. Another time, I remember screaming in fright, frantically pointing to the patient next to me, pleading with the doctor to move him. His arm was swollen and it was scaring me witless. My mother later told me that it had been my own hand. I woke up once to complete silence in the ICU, except the beeping - that vital sound that dictated the silence, as long as it was not frantic beeping everything was at peace in this room that housed the nearly dead. I tried to feel my legs with my tied down hands but only felt pillow. When I woke up the next time, I was convinvced that my leg had been amputated.

As I dozed in and out of sedation, I came to believe that two of my fingers on my right hand had also been cut off. In reality, there were just numb, folded under my palm which had been still for about five days. My mind whizzed by me, it made up logical scenarios for all that I happened to see in the few minutes I regained conciousness everyday. Slowly a grand scenario took root and engrained itself as the truth, as the sequence of events as they happened, that is until I was taken off the sedation for good. Then I acted like a mental patient refuting what others told me, convinced that my version of the story was right. I had seen it hadn't I?

One day, I woke up and saw my younger sister by my bedside. She started spoon feeding me apple sauce, working around my tubes, all the while softly crying to herself. I wasn't able to say anything. I just pondered, possibly the clearest moment of my time in the ICU, my mind cleared up and I just thought of what was happening at that moment. That changes a man. It shakes him to the core if he is able to discern what is happening. It affects him like not much else can in this world. Of this I was sure, even then.

On about the twelfth day of my stay in the ICU, I was taken off the sedation- woken up to reality, so they say. They say that I could hear all the while I was asleep. I just couldn't speak or see. They say that my mind strung together disconnected that I heard, and it took me on a ride where everything became logical and everything was connected. The psychologist said that it meant nothing, just my imagination at work. But I think it had a purpose.

I laugh when people say that I am still the same Uzi they knew, they haven't been through those fourteen days. I changed monumentally; though I might act the same on the outside, my view on life has changed. I value different things, and I appreciate stuff I did not before. I walk through life slower. I enjoy the moment whereas before I spent every minute looking forard to the next. I have compromised lets say. I still let my mind run wild, but I ask it to run slower so that my senses can keep up. I like this compromise. I am not bored, far from it; neither do I find myself overwhelmed. Its a cliche, I know, but life is to be enjoyed, not zipped through. I am guessing a coffin is much less enjoyable than all this, might as well enjoy this while I have it.

June 2nd, 2005 was the day I suffered a massive respiratory arrest that caused my organs to go into shutdown. I was inches away from losing my life. If I had not been at the ER when I collapsed, I might not be alive today. This day last year, I was given another chance. This say last year, my whole life took a turn. It affected me in ways I cannot describe. It changed the people around me, it changed the way I live and look at my life.

Some would feel sad that I had to endure the pain that I had to, but not me. I am thankful for the experience. Those fourteen days in the ICU and the following month (53 days in all) in the hospital taught me things no school could ever teach me in a lifetime. It taught me who I was, who I want to be and what I am capable of. June 2nd/05 changed everything. And thankfully, I am here to write about it.