I wrote an article about my medical trauma, Elden Ring, and Taiji weapons–and it was published by PCGN, who are a big deal. A really big deal. I got the gig through networking (Ian works for them), which is the first time that’s happened for me. Ian approached me with the idea and in the past, I would have dithered until the time had passed when it would have been optimal for me to accept the offer.
I am often my own worst enemy. I delay doing something until the decision is out of my hand. I feel bad the whole time, but not bad enough to actually do it. This time, however, I jumped on it for two reasons. One, writing about Elden Ring! That’s all I’ve been doing for the past month–might as well make it official. Two, my life in the last six months! It’s become normal to me (for lack of better word); it’s nice to be reminded that it’s truly a remarkable story.
It was an interesting process. I always think about my pieces before I actually write. I basically write it all in my head. I don’t do outlines, by the way, at least not written ones. Then, I regurgitate everything onto paper (screen), writing madly to capture every thought.
Side note: My brother and I used to argue about how to use Google. He liked to use as general terms as possible to get more results than less. I, on the other hand, use very restricted terms because I want the best possible results. About a year ago, my brother admitted I was right (oh, how sweet!).
I bring this up because it’s the opposite of how I write. When I write, I just put every possible thought into the piece. I was given 2,000 words as a soft limit; my rough draft ended up at 4,000 words. That’s right–I doubled it up. That’s not uncommon with me. I used to write 2,500 words on the regular for a singular post.
Now, it’s more like 1,200 – 1,500, just because I have learned to hold myself back a bit. I can still get verbose, however, as that is my true nature. Still. 4,000 words? That was pushing it quite a bit. And I left a bunch out as well.
It took me three or four days to write it all down. Then, I got the metaphorical red pen out and started slashing. In my mind, I wanted to cut out a thousand words from when I was in the hospital and a thousand words from when I left the hospital and went home.
Basically, if I waffled at all about a paragraph, it was out. Normally, I have a hard time editing, in part because I was very precious about my words. Even though I am prodigious with my words and can vomit a million words a minute, I felt as if each one was a polished pearl. Which, obviously, is bullshit.
“You are a literal walking miracle.” That was what the nurse said when she came to do my weekly at-home checkup after I left the hospital. I understood what she was trying to say, and I came up against it again and again every time I met with a medical person–or just talked to them about it. I get it; I really do. They have to deal with unhappy cases all day long, especially in the ICU. There aren’t many people walking out of there on their own power, sadly. I had a nurse from the ICU who had sat with me while I was unconscious come down to the PCU (Progressive Care Unit) while I was awake so she could talk to me. She had tears in her eyes as she recounted sitting with me while I was unconscious. She said she had to come talk to me while I was awake, which I didn’t mind.
At a certain point, though, I started resenting being called a miracle. It doesn’t see the totality of me, which, again, I understand why my medical team would be focused on it. But it made me feel like that was the end of my story–not the beginning. If what happened to me was a movie, it would end with me waking up to a big swell of music. Then, credits would roll and everyone would go home.
In reality, that’s just the beginning. I’m still alive, living my life. I still have to navigate how to go on when something so monumental had happened to me. How do I bring it up when I meet someone new, for example? I don’t see it as first date information. “Hi, my name is Minna. I do Taiji weapons, video games, and, oh yeah, I died twice last year. You?”
K insists that it’s my life so I get to decide when to bring it up. That’s true, but at the same time, it’s not something that you come across on the regular. In fact, if someone said that to me out of the blue, I’m not sure how I’d react. If it hadn’t happened to me, I mean.
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.
The end (of the year) is nigh and I could not be happier. This was a shit year in so many ways and I cannot wait to see the back end of it. I am really hoping that 2022 kicks 2021’s ass up, down, and all around.
I know I’m going to sound like a broken record, but let me recap the biggest event of the year for me–possibly my whole life. That may be recency bias, but it’s also an experience that literally changed my life. And it didn’t change my life at the same time. I’m sitting on my couch, looking out the window at a barren land. We’re suppose to get 2-4 inches of snow today. I’m sipping pumpkin-flavored coffee as my cat, Shadow, is snuggled down on my legs. I’m eating Limon Lays, which are faaaaantastic. I also have strawberry-pineapple flavored Mio water, which is fantastic. I’m rewatching the gingerbread house episode of Without A Recipe by the Try Guys, easily my favorite video from them in a long time, and I’m just feeling grateful to be alive. This could have happened on any day in the last year or two, minus the feeling grateful to be alive part.
To recap. Late September 2nd/early September 3rd, I was having a hard time breathing. I called 9-1-1, walked to my front door to unlock it (probably at the behest of the operator) and promptly fainted. Down I went and I remember none of this. The cops came and oxygen bagged me until the EMTs came. I had a cardiac arrest. The EMTs shocked my heart back to life. I had another cardiac arrest. They shocked my heart again. They also jabbed me with an Epi pen one of these times. Oh and I had an ischemic stroke at some point as well. The stroke is always an afterthought for whatever reason. It shouldn’t be because it’s still serious, but it’s not as deadly as a cardiac arrest. Mortality rate for an ischemic stroke after a month is roughly 28%. That’s in comparison to a sudden cardiac arrest mortality rate of 90%. I don’t think it’s cumulative, though, because if that were the case, I’d be dead twice over. Then again, I did die twice. I just happened to be resurrected twice as well.
I remained unconscious throughout this, I think? At any rate, I arrived unconscious. I can’t stop thinking of all the things that had to line up exactly right for me to survive, even to this point. My brother told me had I waited even a minute, I probably would not have been able to make the call. I’m lucky in that the cops of my city don’t really have that much to do and were able to get to me so quickly. And that they knew to bag me. I’m lucky that the EMTs were so damn good at their jobs. And I’m lucky that my heart responded to the defibs and the Epi pen.
More luck: I was taken to Regions Hospital, which has one of the best heart centers in the state. Award winning, in fact. Hell, not just the state, but the country, maybe. My brother has a friend who had a heart attack/cardiac arrest a month or so before my own medical experience. He was taken to Regions, but they didn’t have a bed, so he was taken somewhere else. He died at the other hospital.