It’s been six months since I had my medical trauma. It feels like no time has passed and all the time in the world has passed simultaneously. The first month after I came home from the hospital, it was all I could think about–when I was awake. Not why it happened to me because I’m nobody special in that way. I don’t eat fantastically and I don’t take the best care of myself. Yes, I do Taiji which helps, but I’m not hardcore about my health. I smoked two cigarettes a day, broken up into quarters; I started with a half cig in the morning. I like chocolate and while I’m GF/DF for sensitivity reasons, that doesn’t mean the substitutes are healthy by any means. I do eat five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables a day, but that’s about as much as I pay attention to nutrition.
When people asked if I wondered why it happened to me, I always say no. Why wouldn’t it happen to me? I’m not exempt and it makes total sense that it did happen to me. Once again, to recap, I had walking non-COVID-related pneumonia that led to two cardiac arrests and a stroke. Pneumonia leading to cardiac arrests isn’t uncommon, though two of them and a stroke probably isn’t as common. It’s hard to get exact stats on this kind of thing, but I admit I haven’t researched it that extensively.
What I do wonder is why and how I got so lucky as to survive essentially intact. Without much effort on my part, I might add. Remember, my brother was told that I would probably need to do months if not years of rehab. All the therapists I saw emphasized the long road ahead. The occupational therapist said it could take up to two years for something to get back to normal–if it happened at all. That was the underlying theme, that I could not count on anything returning to normal at all.
I had gone without oxygen for an undetermined amount of time. The doctors were clear with my brother that my chance of survival was not good. At all. And if I did survive, I’d almost certainly have brain damage. They questioned whether I would be able to walk and talk again–and if I could, to what degree. I cannot stress enough that the idea of me returning to any version of normal was not on anyone’s radar. Me waking up at all was the best possible outcome; the doctors took great pains to make sure my family knew the odds of me coming back to life.