I’m back at it again to explore more about what I want from my writing. Specifically, if I want to do NaNoWriMo and if so, what I’ll do for it. In the past, writing 50,000 words in a month was not a problem. I made a personal goal to write 2,000 words a day, which I did mostly with ease.
Yesterday I wrote about reality versus what I thought was reality when I was on very heavy drugs. I was 100% convinced that what I experienced was real. My brother asked me months later about one thing I had rambled about whilst heavily drugged. He asked if it had actually happened, and I immediately said no. I had Googled it after I got out of the hospital and found no mention of it. I would have if what I thought happened had really happened.
Once the drugs had cleared my system, I realized that most of what I thought had happened could not have/did not happen. I read up on it and realized that hopsital psychosis (and delusions) was a thing. I didn’t have any truly traumatic delusions, thankfully, but it was such a wild ride. I thought everyone taking care of me weer PoC, which was really nice. In reality, there wasn’t anyone of color on my team (according to my brother and the pictures I saw of the staff a year later).
I want to talk about it because it’s had a deep and lasting impact on me. To put it plainly, I have a week missing from my memory and a week of memories that are a complete lie. Delusions, almost all of them. Well, roughly 90% of them. Let me say not remembering a week is a trip in and of itself. Actually, it’s more like a week-and-a-half. The memory wipe was retroactive and took away a half week leading up to my hospitalization. My heart doc said this was normal and he told me about one of his patients who was on vacation when he had a suddent cardiac arrest. He could not remember any of the vacation leading up to the cardiac arrest.
I remmeber on Tuesday emailing my Taiji teacher to let her know I was not attending the Zoom class that evening. I remember messaging Ian Thursday morning to talk about Nioh 2 (which we were both playing). That’s it for that week. I had my medical crisis at 3 in the morning Friday night/Saturday morning and have no memory of it. At all. When my brother told me what happened, I was astonished because I had not a whisper of a memory of it happening.
I stayed in a coma until Thursday. My brother set up a CaringBridge journal while I was in the hospital and he noted at a quarter to seven in the evening that just as he was walking to the car to drive to the hospital to see me, the doctor called him to tell him that I had woken up.