I cannot believe it’s nearly the end of another year. 2022 is nearly in the bag and it’s really whizzed by. Especially the last few months. Ian came to visit a year after my medical crisis. Kathleen came at the beginning of November. Both of those events were in a blink of the eye and the last quarter of the year seemed like one day. Now, we’re sitting on the day after Christmas and we’re less than a week from the new year.
2023.
How is that even possible? It’s been over a year since my medical crisis and I still don’t quite know what to do with it. When I talke about it, I pretty much say that it was a medical emergency or crisis from which I was not expected to recover. I leave it at that because I don’t want to bring down the conversation or make people feel sorry for me. I also don’t want it to sound like a humblebrag, which I know it does. “Oh, it was no big thing. I just had two cardiac arrests and a stroke, but I didn’t have to do any PT or rehab for them.” Unspoken is the “It ain’t no big thang.”
I know I was lucky. I am grateful that I escaped the negative ramifications of my medical crisis that most people usually go through. I scoured the internet to find a therapy group for people who survived cardiac arrests. I did not finy one. Why? Because most people who have cardiac arrests die. 90%. This is something that got impressed upon me while I was in the hospital. I shouldhave died. Or rather, I should have stayed dead. I died twice! My heart doctor said that to me.
I should be dead. This isn’t something I think about all the time, but it’s definitely in the back of my mind. I should not be alive. How does one really process that? In the RKG Discord, I was talking about almost dying and someone said he had almost died and it hadn’t changed the way he lived. In other words, he was still deperssed and anxious. I should have said that I actuallydied–not just that what happened to me was life-threatening. And I’m not trying to tell anyone else how they should feel about their near-death experiences.
All I can do is talk about my own. I literally died twice. I was without oxygen for a period of time. We don’t know how long, but it was enough that the police bagged me (with oxygen) when they came to my house.
So. Ok. I died twice in September of 2021. I spent the rest of that year recovering. No PT or rehab because I was fine in that sense. My motor skills were OK and once the blurriness of my eyesight disappeared, I could get back on the internet with no problem. I could type as fast as I used to (which is roughhly 100 wpm). The thing, though, was that I had no stamina. That was what affected me the most. It took me two months to get my stamina back. Saying that, I realize that I was incredibly lucky in that sense, too. Two months to be back to 100%? That is insanely lucky.