Tag: medical issues | A Banana Peeled

I woke up today with a stuffed nose. Normally, I would shrug my shoulders and get on with my day. I’d chalk it down to a cold or the beginning of bronchitis and move on with my day. Yesterday, I coughed a few times because I had something in my throat and my mother immediately commented both times. When I said I had something in my throat for a second time, she said, “You get things in your throat a lot.” Which, I mean, twice in several hours is not a lot, but even if it were, so what? It’s really annoying to have someone scrutinizing your every move and analyzing the hell out of it.

My voice has been a bit raspy since the hospital. Understandable as I was unconscious for a week and had a breathing tube in my nose for a week-and-a-half (different tube once I woke up, but still a tube). It has gotten better over time, but it comes back in times of stress. I had it yesterday; I’m not sure why. I wasn’t particularly stressed.

Anyway, as I said, I woke up today with a stuffy nose and a bit of a sore throat. It would normally not be a big deal except the thing that started off my whole medical ordeal was pneumonia. Non-COVID-related. I sent an email to my Taiji teacher the Tuesday before I went into the hospital that I was feeling unusually exhausted. I’m tried all the time, but not like that. I could barely keep my eyes open and I wanted to sleep all the time. I thought it was my imagination, but it was non-COVID-related pneumonia.

Here’s the thing. My mom is obsessed with the fact that we don’t know what triggered it so how can we prevent it? While I was impatient with her when it came to dismissing my home nurse, she’s not wrong. We don’t know what caused it so it’s hard to know how to prevent whatever happened from happening again.

I have written at length about the miracle that happened to me and how I’ve started to resent the word, ‘miracle’. Today, I want to talk about the mundane as it pertains to said miracle. The first week I was awake, I wasn’t thinking about much of anything other than how the hell did I survive? My brother laid it out to me what happened and emphasized that I should not be alive. He wasn’t trying to be cruel–just matter-of-fact. It was a lot to try to understand, especially since I was still high as balls. Honestly, the only thing I really cared about was the ice water because it was ‘amazing’ in my words. I couldn’t stop gushing about it to anyone who came into my room. I insisted that every nurse bring me a new glass of ice water (usually meant they’d bring me a glass of water and a glass of ice), which meant I had several by the end of the day on my side table. The nurse (whichever was in my room at that moment) would ask if I wanted to get rid of any of the cups and I would be reluctant to let go of any of them–even if the ice had melted. That was my norm for my first few days in the hospital–asking for ice water. Actually, that was my norm for the whole week I was awake. I was obsessed with ice water and declared it amazing to anyone who would listen–and anyone who wouldn’t.

I talked to more people the week I was awake in the hospital than I have in the past several years combined. One of the people I talked to was the chaplain. I was chary at first because Christianity has been brutal to me, but he was very laid-back and chill. He didn’t try to shove the Christian God (with a capital G) down my throat and was just there to listen to me babble about my experience. This was the third or fourth day I was awake, so I wasn’t completely out of my mind. I think he was one of the people who asked if I questioned why this happened to me. If so, my standard response is, “No. There’s no reason it shouldn’t have happened to me. I’m not special or exempt, and I didn’t take particularly good care of myself.”

The part that got to me and still does is why I was lucky enough to return with so little damage. That’s the part I don’t get and has the power to drive me crazy if I let it. My nurse’s aide who does my hair (did it today for the last time) told me about a friend of hers who had a similar experience to mine when he was 49. Except he had to be revived 3 times and was in a coma for 29 days (I think it was around that much time). and he had necopathy in his lower legs that he still has to live with. He’s on permanent disability–and he used to be a hockey player when he was younger. He was fit and healthy when this happened to him; he’s not any longer.

Tag Archives: medical issues

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