Mind Of Time
The Pathway
On September 14th 2008 my wife found me unconscious, with my body gasping for air. I was in a coma.
I stopped breathing for about 4 minutes and had a cardiac arrest. The cardiac arrest happened while I was receiving medical attention. Then in the ICU I would be induced into another different coma, it was to put my body in an almost frozen state to stop the multiple organ failure that was going on. This coma was necessary if I were to survive, but I would also need to come out of it.
There was a big, bright light, slowly and gradually, the light of the room was spreading into my surroundings. Eventually I was able to notice some objects in the room and hear the voices of people. The process of seeing and hearing is on and off, but more off than on Then there came a time where I could make out the room, where things and people became a little more clear, but I was not able to participate. It was as if my consciousness was only halfway back. Looking back, this could've been an undefined line between life and death, which side would I lean towards and then fall into. The short periods of seeing and hearing allowed me to pick seriousness of what was going on, you know, being in the hospital having all your family from overseas there, but I could not express my thoughts on anything. Maybe I didn’t have thoughts further than acknowledging what people and things were or maybe I did form thoughts but could not remember them after they were completed. My point is that I was able to see but I could not react to what I saw. At times it was as if I was looking at pictures at a fast pace. My brain could not absorb or really figure out what actually was going on. After some time I would eventually be able to put some pieces together and come to the conclusion that I was in serious trouble, and I that needed serious help. But during this time it seemed to me that I did not worry, feel sad, or have the proper or even much emotion about what was going on.
I would lay in the coma for longer than the doctors predicted. Then unknowing to me, I would I start to move by slowly swaying my head to the Jack Johnson song “Never Know”. After this would start a new phase, a new space of uncertainty, how much would I recover? All my organs would be damaged, including my brain. For a small period of time my memory would be a concern, but eventually it would all come back except for about 2 weeks before this time.
One of the first things on my schedule, now that I was back at home and out of the hospital, was going to go get dialysis. Later that night I sat up in bed with one of the worst headaches you could imagine. My stomach was not feeling too good either so my wife told me to go sit on the toilet. That’s the last thing I would remember before waking up in the hospital again. I had rolled off to the side of the toilet and had seven seizures in a row.
After waking up in the in the ICU for the second time they sent me up to the second floor. Here I developed pulmonary edema and they had to send me back down to the ICU. Also waking up this time, I would wake up blind. While in my dark world I would hear the doctors explaining to my mom and wife about how I was not going to be able to make it and I was getting scared. I eventually was explained that I was paranoid, and that being paranoid is not that uncommon for someone in my state.
In time I would see lighter and darker blobs, later small spots started to fill in the figures, which helped in defining them. Then eventually, some colors started showing. Then one day I woke up and there was birthday cake and pink frosting all over my bed, the walls and the whole room and no one said anything. This would be a hallucination I was having. One way the doctors would test my vision is by taking a pen type object and they would move it in a ”ticking” like motion across the spectrum of my vision, watching how my eyes followed the pen. Next thing I know, my mom and wife are making everything they do “tick”. I thought they wanted to participate in testing my vision also, so the doctors taught them how to “tick”. So they got really into the “ticking” They were “ticking” with every movement. It was like they were both doing the robot all the time. I finally asked them about it. Come to find out somehow the “ticking” the doctor was doing, transferred to how I saw my mom’s and wife’s normal fluid movements. Later on a nurse, as normal, came to give me my medication. She walked away then stood at the door and put her hand up to waive, but she did not put her hand down, in fact she did not even move. This was a sticking effect in my vision. The part of the brain that processes vision was affected and swollen. The doctors don’t know if and when it will get better. Then sometimes my vision would do the craziest things and I wasn’t sure if I should mention it because it was so unbelievable. Once my wife was in the room and her boss and his wife came to visit me. Her boss had a great big full beard. I was paying attention to the conversation and having a little participation, when I looked over at my wife and her boss' beard ended up on her face. His exact beard was on my wife and it fit her face perfect. I did not want to say anything about the beard because saying and hearing it might strengthen or enhance the uncomfortable change in my vision. But furthermore, because everything else was normal, I was awake, I was talking and seeing fine, then my wife had a beard, it might be too weird for people. It did actually seem unreal. It seemed impossible. It was hard for me to understand, so I thought no one else would.
I know it’s probably supposed to be nice to have a T.V. in your room to watch, but for me it was so annoying and irritating. My brain was in the middle of trying to repair itself from being damaged. Around the time I was getting out of the hospital the voices of the actors where not matching up. It took me awhile to figure out what was different. It was like their lips were speaking another language and English was laid over it. With all the craziness with my vision, including the fact that no one had informed my family that I had lost my vision in the first place, my family requested a vision test. My vision was close to perfect, it was 20/25, but still on the way home from the hospital I saw a car stopped right at the top of the hill at a stoplight and we drove straight through it. We faded into the car until our car took its spot. It took a second but then my wife let me know there wasn’t a car there. These crazy visual disturbances, from my damaged visual processing that I experienced, still have me second guessing some things I see.
So I’m new to having seizures and don’t really know my triggers and one day I decide I don’t want to be on Xanax so I stop taking the 6 mgs a day that I am prescribed. The next day I had wanted to go for a run, and right before I got to the street I thought for a second that I saw a spot that was a little too bright and soon after one or two more brighter than normal spots. Believe it or not, I continued on the run. Then everything in my vision became very bright and blurry, with a lot of red, yellow, orange and purple. It eventually got so bad I had to close my eyes and lie down. I took some deep breathes, then decided I should head back the way I came from because it was obvious shorter then continuing around my normal loop. With my eyes closed, I remembered touching this telephone pole that I was familiar with. I had to relax my eyelids and crack them just enough to make sure I am staying on the pavement. I also was extremely lucky to have our dog with me because he knows he the way back. We made it back. By this time I am barely able comprehend my vision. I have no clue what’s going on. I just know every second everything is becoming more blurry and soon I can’t see anything so I need to get somewhere safe. I open the door and get right into bed, then feel around my night stand for my phone. I found my phone but it is an iphone with a touch screen, the screen is so colorful and blurry I can’t see where to touch. There was a heavy pressure pushing my eye lids down, covering over my now completely blurred vision. My eye balls were feeling a slight force sucking them towards the back of my head. Like I said I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know how serious this was, so I just went with it, I closed my eyes and slept, is what I thought. Only to wake up feeling exhausted. This became to be what I know to be my first seizure besides the seven in a row. This only became known after I experienced two or three more, because of the similar before and after effects of the seen seizures. Now 10 months after my last seizure, I woke up to a phone call from my wife. She said she had tried to call a few times before but I did not answer. I happen to tell her that I don’t feel so good. I actually I had a little image, a flash of me turning my head to the side and vomiting. I tell her this. While still on the phone, I check along where I was sleeping, no vomit, then in the toilet, no vomit. Well maybe I just made that up somehow, we thought, then let it go. Soon after we got off the phone I spotted some vomit on the bathroom floor next to the tub. A more clear flash back now, I’m lying on the bathroom floor, I turn my head to the side and vomit. One more flash back, I’m getting back in bed completely soaked in my own sweat and not knowing why but not caring because I’m so exhausted. Well knowing my recent history and still feeling completely exhausted and out of it, I believe I had a seizure. Not even a month later, my wife wakes up to go to the bathroom, around 12:00 midnight, and finds me in a grand mal seizure. I am sliding halfway off the bed. My wife had been through this many times before, so she does what one's supposed to do when someone is having a seizure, and just makes sure my head does not hit anything.
Every time I have a seizure, it can disorient me and wear me out for days, weeks, even close to a month. From this position, I was now completely set on the outside of society because my mind and body damages would consume me. I would spend years rehabilitating, learning and researching how to improve and/or maintain one's mind, body and soul, including seizure management. It is not common that mentally and physically one gets or has to rebuild themselves from the condition I was in. I am now in a time and place required to repair my brain and body, but more interesting, I would re-enter the world with the influence of my previous entrance. This becomes a monumental point at which I can establish new views that would help enhance my mental health. This makes me more free than ever.
The Pathway
On September 14th 2008 my wife found me unconscious, with my body gasping for air. I was in a coma.
I stopped breathing for about 4 minutes and had a cardiac arrest. The cardiac arrest happened while I was receiving medical attention. Then in the ICU I would be induced into another different coma, it was to put my body in an almost frozen state to stop the multiple organ failure that was going on. This coma was necessary if I were to survive, but I would also need to come out of it.
There was a big, bright light, slowly and gradually, the light of the room was spreading into my surroundings. Eventually I was able to notice some objects in the room and hear the voices of people. The process of seeing and hearing is on and off, but more off than on Then there came a time where I could make out the room, where things and people became a little more clear, but I was not able to participate. It was as if my consciousness was only halfway back. Looking back, this could've been an undefined line between life and death, which side would I lean towards and then fall into. The short periods of seeing and hearing allowed me to pick seriousness of what was going on, you know, being in the hospital having all your family from overseas there, but I could not express my thoughts on anything. Maybe I didn’t have thoughts further than acknowledging what people and things were or maybe I did form thoughts but could not remember them after they were completed. My point is that I was able to see but I could not react to what I saw. At times it was as if I was looking at pictures at a fast pace. My brain could not absorb or really figure out what actually was going on. After some time I would eventually be able to put some pieces together and come to the conclusion that I was in serious trouble, and I that needed serious help. But during this time it seemed to me that I did not worry, feel sad, or have the proper or even much emotion about what was going on.
I would lay in the coma for longer than the doctors predicted. Then unknowing to me, I would I start to move by slowly swaying my head to the Jack Johnson song “Never Know”. After this would start a new phase, a new space of uncertainty, how much would I recover? All my organs would be damaged, including my brain. For a small period of time my memory would be a concern, but eventually it would all come back except for about 2 weeks before this time.
One of the first things on my schedule, now that I was back at home and out of the hospital, was going to go get dialysis. Later that night I sat up in bed with one of the worst headaches you could imagine. My stomach was not feeling too good either so my wife told me to go sit on the toilet. That’s the last thing I would remember before waking up in the hospital again. I had rolled off to the side of the toilet and had seven seizures in a row.
After waking up in the in the ICU for the second time they sent me up to the second floor. Here I developed pulmonary edema and they had to send me back down to the ICU. Also waking up this time, I would wake up blind. While in my dark world I would hear the doctors explaining to my mom and wife about how I was not going to be able to make it and I was getting scared. I eventually was explained that I was paranoid, and that being paranoid is not that uncommon for someone in my state.
In time I would see lighter and darker blobs, later small spots started to fill in the figures, which helped in defining them. Then eventually, some colors started showing. Then one day I woke up and there was birthday cake and pink frosting all over my bed, the walls and the whole room and no one said anything. This would be a hallucination I was having. One way the doctors would test my vision is by taking a pen type object and they would move it in a ”ticking” like motion across the spectrum of my vision, watching how my eyes followed the pen. Next thing I know, my mom and wife are making everything they do “tick”. I thought they wanted to participate in testing my vision also, so the doctors taught them how to “tick”. So they got really into the “ticking” They were “ticking” with every movement. It was like they were both doing the robot all the time. I finally asked them about it. Come to find out somehow the “ticking” the doctor was doing, transferred to how I saw my mom’s and wife’s normal fluid movements. Later on a nurse, as normal, came to give me my medication. She walked away then stood at the door and put her hand up to waive, but she did not put her hand down, in fact she did not even move. This was a sticking effect in my vision. The part of the brain that processes vision was affected and swollen. The doctors don’t know if and when it will get better. Then sometimes my vision would do the craziest things and I wasn’t sure if I should mention it because it was so unbelievable. Once my wife was in the room and her boss and his wife came to visit me. Her boss had a great big full beard. I was paying attention to the conversation and having a little participation, when I looked over at my wife and her boss' beard ended up on her face. His exact beard was on my wife and it fit her face perfect. I did not want to say anything about the beard because saying and hearing it might strengthen or enhance the uncomfortable change in my vision. But furthermore, because everything else was normal, I was awake, I was talking and seeing fine, then my wife had a beard, it might be too weird for people. It did actually seem unreal. It seemed impossible. It was hard for me to understand, so I thought no one else would.
I know it’s probably supposed to be nice to have a T.V. in your room to watch, but for me it was so annoying and irritating. My brain was in the middle of trying to repair itself from being damaged. Around the time I was getting out of the hospital the voices of the actors where not matching up. It took me awhile to figure out what was different. It was like their lips were speaking another language and English was laid over it. With all the craziness with my vision, including the fact that no one had informed my family that I had lost my vision in the first place, my family requested a vision test. My vision was close to perfect, it was 20/25, but still on the way home from the hospital I saw a car stopped right at the top of the hill at a stoplight and we drove straight through it. We faded into the car until our car took its spot. It took a second but then my wife let me know there wasn’t a car there. These crazy visual disturbances, from my damaged visual processing that I experienced, still have me second guessing some things I see.
So I’m new to having seizures and don’t really know my triggers and one day I decide I don’t want to be on Xanax so I stop taking the 6 mgs a day that I am prescribed. The next day I had wanted to go for a run, and right before I got to the street I thought for a second that I saw a spot that was a little too bright and soon after one or two more brighter than normal spots. Believe it or not, I continued on the run. Then everything in my vision became very bright and blurry, with a lot of red, yellow, orange and purple. It eventually got so bad I had to close my eyes and lie down. I took some deep breathes, then decided I should head back the way I came from because it was obvious shorter then continuing around my normal loop. With my eyes closed, I remembered touching this telephone pole that I was familiar with. I had to relax my eyelids and crack them just enough to make sure I am staying on the pavement. I also was extremely lucky to have our dog with me because he knows he the way back. We made it back. By this time I am barely able comprehend my vision. I have no clue what’s going on. I just know every second everything is becoming more blurry and soon I can’t see anything so I need to get somewhere safe. I open the door and get right into bed, then feel around my night stand for my phone. I found my phone but it is an iphone with a touch screen, the screen is so colorful and blurry I can’t see where to touch. There was a heavy pressure pushing my eye lids down, covering over my now completely blurred vision. My eye balls were feeling a slight force sucking them towards the back of my head. Like I said I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know how serious this was, so I just went with it, I closed my eyes and slept, is what I thought. Only to wake up feeling exhausted. This became to be what I know to be my first seizure besides the seven in a row. This only became known after I experienced two or three more, because of the similar before and after effects of the seen seizures. Now 10 months after my last seizure, I woke up to a phone call from my wife. She said she had tried to call a few times before but I did not answer. I happen to tell her that I don’t feel so good. I actually I had a little image, a flash of me turning my head to the side and vomiting. I tell her this. While still on the phone, I check along where I was sleeping, no vomit, then in the toilet, no vomit. Well maybe I just made that up somehow, we thought, then let it go. Soon after we got off the phone I spotted some vomit on the bathroom floor next to the tub. A more clear flash back now, I’m lying on the bathroom floor, I turn my head to the side and vomit. One more flash back, I’m getting back in bed completely soaked in my own sweat and not knowing why but not caring because I’m so exhausted. Well knowing my recent history and still feeling completely exhausted and out of it, I believe I had a seizure. Not even a month later, my wife wakes up to go to the bathroom, around 12:00 midnight, and finds me in a grand mal seizure. I am sliding halfway off the bed. My wife had been through this many times before, so she does what one's supposed to do when someone is having a seizure, and just makes sure my head does not hit anything.
Every time I have a seizure, it can disorient me and wear me out for days, weeks, even close to a month. From this position, I was now completely set on the outside of society because my mind and body damages would consume me. I would spend years rehabilitating, learning and researching how to improve and/or maintain one's mind, body and soul, including seizure management. It is not common that mentally and physically one gets or has to rebuild themselves from the condition I was in. I am now in a time and place required to repair my brain and body, but more interesting, I would re-enter the world with the influence of my previous entrance. This becomes a monumental point at which I can establish new views that would help enhance my mental health. This makes me more free than ever.
