I’ve learned several things from my medical trauma, much of it positive. I learned to enjoy every moment I have because you really don’t know when it might be your last. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned, honestly. You can die at any second. I mean, of course I knew that intellectually, but most people don’t go around thinking they’re going to die. I didn’t. My mom asked me what I saw while I was unconscious. Nothing. I saw nothing. No lights. No angels. No demons, for that matter. One minute I wasn’t and then the next minute, I was. I came to, scared, angry, and ready to fight whomever needed fighting. I was unconscious for a week and remember none of it. In fact, I don’t remember most of the week leading up to it.
My heart doc said this is common in his patients–retroactive amnesia. He had one patient who went on vacation, had a heart attack, then couldn’t remember the vacation afterwards. It’s comforting to know that it’s a common thing and not just my brain being weird. I don’t remember emailing my Taiji teacher on Tuesday, telling her that I’m was exceptionally tired, but my sent emails tell me I did that. I remember my brother coming over the Monday before (I was admitted to the hospital Thursday night/Friday morning) and messaging with Ian about Nioh 2 on Thursday. Other than that , I don’t remember the rest of the week.
The first lesson I learned was to be grateful for being alive. Life can be snuffed out in a second, and I am very lucky that I was brought back to life twice. I have mentioned that people have asked me if I questioned why all this happened to me. Nope. I’m not in great shape so there’s no reason it shouldn’t happen to me. The fact that I’ve studied Taiji for fifteen years is a plus, but it’s not a get-out-of-jail free card. Plus, while I eat plenty of veggies and fruit, I also eat a lot of junk that’s not good for me. And I have bronchial issues that I deal with all the time. Except, funnily enough, during the pandemic. Well, not that funny, really. I barely left the house for the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic, so my chances of getting bronchitis were lessened. That’s one reason it’s so weird that I got non-COVID-related pneumonia–I wasn’t going anywhere. I did ease up a bit after getting doubly-vaxxed, but that meant going to Cubs twice in a month and picking up lunch from the Thai restaurant with my brother once. I wasn’t going crazy, partying every night, and doing shots off the bodies of unvaxxed people. I honestly don’t know how I got it. Maybe at the pharmacy or Cubs. But it’s not something I can prevent by being careful because I’m very careful in general.
When my parents were here ,they were obsessed with the idea that they could prevent me from getting pneumonia. Or rather, obsessed with making me do something to avoid it. My father got it into his head that cold caused my pneumonia. I can’t even type that without rolling my eyeballs. This has been a lifelong argument between us–my lack of feeling cold. For the most part, I just grit my teeth and ignore. But this time around, he had another angle to his nonsense. He couldn’t just tell me, obviously, because that would be too easy.
He got the look on his face that he always gets when he says something incredibly ignorant. It’s a cross between taking a massive shit and a sneer. He said, “I’m not a scientist, but–” and I thought, “Oh, here we go.” I was interested to see how ridiculous he could get, even though I was not having any of it. He went into this long and boring rambling about how it’s just his opinion, but the cold opens up pores and makes them bigger. Then, it makes it easier for germs to enter the pores because they are bigger.
I mean, what do you say in the face of such sheer idiocy? This is provable untrue and I do have science to back me up on it. It’s well-known that cold shrinks your pores and heat opens them. That’s why you steam yourself when you have a stuffed nose! This isn’t rocket science. This is pretty basic. There is just so much wrong with that opinion, anyway. That’s not how germs work. That’s not how any of this works! When I pointed out that he got it exactly backwards, he got a mulish look on his face and said it was just his opinion in a really snide voice. But his opinion is wrong! This isn’t a question of maybe he might have a point–he was just flat-out wrong.
But, and here’s what I’m trying to learn, there’s no point in arguing with him. This is the hardest thing to absorb, but it’s true. He believes what he believes and nothing will change his mind, not even facts. If he feels something to be true, then it’s true. Oh, and the whole reason he brought up the bigger pores thing is because he wanted to prove his point that the cold is what caused my pneumonia. Later on, my mother got into this thing where every day after our walk, she would say, “I bet you’re cold now!” Which really irritated me because she knows I don’t get cold. I had a hunch she was bringing it up because my father was bugging her about it, honestly. One day I finally told her off and said she needed to stop saying that and she said somewhat martyrishly that she didn’t know how to talk to me. Well, telling me repeatedly that I’m cold is not the way to go, especially because she knows I don’t get cold. That’s the thing. She know she irritates me with the things she says, but she says them, anyway.
She said we didn’t know what caused the pneumonia so that’s why she was pressing on the cold thing. But we know it wasn’t that! I didn’t go for walks before they came here. I hate walking and it’s not my exercise of choice. So before I collapsed, I rarely went out of the house thanks to the pandemic. I did not get pneumonia from going on daily walks, I’ll tell you that much. I didn’t go on daily walks until they came here. So that was patently false–the implication that me walking in the cold gave me pneumonia.
More to the point, there’s only so much I can do to protect myself. I AM going to die one day. That’s a fact. And I don’t want to live my life being afraid to die–I’ve lived that way for too long. Another thing I learned from being in the hospital is to put things into perspective. We’re going to have to live with COVID and it’s going to be like the flu. I let it make me afraid for a year and a half, but that fear dissipated in the hospital. Why? Because one, I was already fully vaxxed. I want to get my booster, but that’s a whole nother issue that I don’t want to talk about right now. So even if I get COVID, it probably won’t be too bad. In addition, I died. Twice. I literally died twice. And came back twice. That does make me look at other things differently.
For example, my mother trying to manipulate my emotions for my father by pointing out that he’s close to death. Here’s a general rule I can give to you–do not talk about death with someone who actually died. I have very little sympathy for my father being on the cusp of death (which he is not, in general, I mean. He has nothing wrong with his body that isn’t just old age). Both of them moaning about him being near death to the person WHO LITERALLY DIED made it really difficult for me to keep my mouth shut.
I heard through my mother that my father said repeatedly that he might as well die because no one cared if he lived or died. He’s not wrong about that, but again, shut the fuck up. I know everyone has a different relationship with their mortality, but I am not the audience for that kind of talk. If he wants to die (which he doesn’t), that’s on him.
The other big thing I learned was that I’m going to enjoy every day that I have left because they’re all bonus days. I should be dead and I never forget it; I’m grateful to be alive.