One thing that I have difficulty with is accepting that both everything has changed and nothing has changed at the same time. When I recite what happened to me, a sense of surrealness comes over me. How could that have happened and I’m still standing to talk about it? Once again, walking (non-COVID-related) pneumonia, leading me to passing out and collapsing. Two cardiac arrests and an ischemic stroke. Within twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes. Such a short amount of time to completely change my life. Twenty minutes in which I died twice and came back to life twice. Twenty minutes in which my life was hanging on the balance. Not just those twenty minutes, though. My life hung in the balance for a week after that. It’s all so strange because I was unconscious for all that. My brother never calls it a coma because the doctors didn’t call it that.
I looked it up. A coma is when someone is unconscious and not responsive to external stimuli. That was me so I guess we can call it a coma. My mother insists that I listened when she told me to move my extremities. But the doctors/nurses said that wasn’t conscious on my part, but involuntary. I usually just say I was unconscious, which works as well. But in looking it up on Mayo’s website, they say a coma only lasts a few weeks. After that it starts edging into a vegetative state. It surprises me because I tend to think of a coma as months so I thought my one week didn’t qualify because it was too short. I never thought there might be an upper limit to the length of a coma.
I was out for a week. Unconscious, I mean. My brother was thinking about whether to pull the plug or not when I woke up. You could not write it any better, honestly. My brother was on his way to the hospital to talk about it when he got a call from the doctor saying I had awakened.
Side note: I have commented several times about how much my brother did for me during the dark days. I could not have made it through without him and he did it without a single complaint. I can’t thank him enough for it and the one thing I’m most grateful for is that he didn’t have to make that decision–pulling the plug on me, I mean.