Illness Thread
A few years ago, I had a serious brain-bleed, and the hematoma caused some uncal herniation and midline shift - all that mass-effect stuff.
Powerful headaches led up to the stroke for almost a full week, but it wasn't till the end that I began considering seeking help. There are logs of my Internet activity up to an hour before I lost consciousness, and I can remember clearly enough up to an half-hour prior to that point. I've heard that just before losing consciousness, I had been attempting to cross the room, exhibiting clear signs of left-sided paralysis. I experienced total incontinence with my loss of consciousness; the hematoma (ultimately as large as a balled fist) was pressing against my brain stem. I was down a good indoors-shirt that day, as well as a cherished pair of 5-7-year-old sweatpants. This happening Sunday night, I can only hope that the vomit and other waste threw off the EMTs and hospital personnel from my underlying unwashed and stale odor.
I spent the next 3.5 weeks intubated and in a coma, though I can't recall whether it was medically-induced for the surgery. (Just as I feared, I have come to grow fond of the craniotomy scars.)
Apparently, once I regained consciousness (though again, I'm not sure whether this was as soon as they tapered the anesthetics or of my own accord some time after) I suffered from hallucinations and agitation. There is a video of me fighting some orderlies from my bed, a scene which I am told went on for some hours before they could manage to sedate me.
I technically have memories from this period, but they all seem like dreams or dreams-within-dreams. I was still seriously hallucinatory, and that phase didn't finish coloring my perceptions until almost a week after I regained consciousness.
The hallucinatory memories and dreams have faded considerably since I began mulling over them while still in the ICU, not helped by the fact that the actual dreams were so strange that the concepts to explain them remained within the dreams themselves and are now lost to me. I suppose part of why I'm pushing ahead the posting of this thread is that I lost the more detailed log I made shortly after I was discharged from in-patient rehab.
Scattered anecdotes: I swore at my parents at various times, grabbed at the breasts of female nurses, howled at men crawling on the ceiling, and gave the bird to a visiting rabbi.
I remember the first solid food I was given, the thickened fluids (due to the dysphagia) and unappetizing purees. I had lost at least 30 lbs (out of a chubby 140) while intubated, so they goaded me with the promise of removing my feed-tube if I gorged myself on the solid foods in their sight.
I remember the neurosurgeon removing the staples from my filthy, crusty, spiky-haired, head. It wasn't a very painful ordeal, but I did murmur, "Ow" quite a bit. I picked a lot at those scabs, though I was told not to.
It was a relief to have the Foley catheter out of me, after I first noted it. I had a restless fear that feces would contaminate it and give me a UTI (I had to go in a diaper for a couple weeks; you know you're desensitized when you feel nothing at the sight of young female nurses wiping away "well-formed" fecal matter as you lie back.) At any rate, I had had a UTI and fevers and all sorts of infections while I was intubated (as we will see, the fevers colored my hallucination-memories), so I got off easy there. But why did the catheter have to be 3X the (former) size of my urethra? It seems like a violation of basic logic. I understand that craniotomy-patients urinate copiously, but it couldn't have been more than I was taking in through my feed-tube, and anyway there would only be so much that my kidneys could process and ureters admit. Think about it: if "cavemen" could survive trepanation, then surely they didn't need to take in all that much water, and if they didn't need to take in that much water then they surely couldn't have been emitting that much water anyway. The point is, I could have done with a much smaller catheter. Maybe the post-removal erections (for the next couple of months) wouldn't have been so thunderously painful if they had used a smaller one. I mean, come on - I have small, child-like genitalia, and when I first laid eyes on the catheter it seemed to be almost half the size of my flaccid penis! Up to its removal, I feared that a spontaneous erection would rip apart my penis from the inside.
I remember having a lot of difficulty ambulating for the first month. While in the ICU, once a day the rehab team would come over and stand me up. I could hardly sit up, let alone stand. I wondered if this was how the elderly inform must feel. One of the nights after I was transferred to the regular wards, a nurse walked me to my room's bathroom and left me there. I sensed that I might want to defecate and had regained enough self-awareness to not want to shit in my diapers again. At any rate, the undies they gave me outside the ICU were a strange sort of sere silken thong, and it wouldn't have held any solid waste very well. Well, after a few minutes alone in the bathroom I decided that I wasn't going to eject anything at that moment, so I got up into my walker and pulled the Assistance signal. I was left standing there for what seemed like (and perhaps was) half-an-hour before the nurse returned. For some reason, I did not want to sit back down on the toilet seat, and so remained standing for the duration. How my thin legs trembled! It was the single most difficult period of exertion I can recall from my life-experiences. Then again, I've had an easy, indolent life.
Speeding around in a wheelchair is lots of fun!
All told, I was in the hospital for two months, and had two more of out-patient physical therapy. Though at first I feared that it would take years to regain my (modest) musculature, by the end of the period I was moving about just as well as I'd ever been able to.
But now, back to the interesting part - the dreams and hallucinations, as far as I can recall and am able or care to articulate:
1. My first memory following those of the night of the stroke, is of a dream, or I guess so. I was in an airplane flying over the desert without my parents, but somehow was sucked out and landed without a parachute in an arid zone.
2. A similar ejection from an airplane occurs in this memory, but I now landed in a gloomy swamp of fish-people, and explored a flooded school. Something about counting, and a wall.
3. I was on a US warship in a ward full of moaning wounded soldiers, while helicopters pounded the coast - of Lebanon, I suppose. My uncle was there, and I tried to play a Wii-game as he looked on, though it proved too strenuous for me. I assume this is a hallucinatory memory, as I can also recall a dream in which my uncle and I were characters in a Wii game, while still on the ship. I detected influence from Castlevania, though I had only ever watched those games being played.
4. I travelled by plane to visit my cousin in Iceland; something was going on with his reindeer. Another memory, as I was later told that I was told (during this period) that my cousin had just had a baby. (He does not live in Iceland.)
5. In one dream, I was tormented by a trio of sisters who assumed various forms (as did I). Moving through various scenarios, I came to one in which I was eating rivers of chocolate and perhaps also caramel, but then I felt sick and I understood that I would never escape the dream unless I consumed a near-infinite stream of my own feces. Eventually though, the dream did transition, and I was lying in a coffin (surrounded by others) as a skeletal creature visited each and extracted what I understood to be "death-juice" from the occupants. It came to me as well; maybe it was one of those Heparin shots. Then, I suppose the dream transitioned to hallucination as I then recall my father being at my side in a hotel-lobby containing a fountain. Feeling relieved but also very thirsty from having consumed so much shit and candy, I asked if I could have any water. He replied that he would petition the doctors. He soon returned with a bottle of sparkling water in hand, but told me that I could not have any, on the orders of the doctor. And so I suffered on.
6. Various hallucinatory memories of being moved around the hospital, interacting with relatives.
7. Reoccurring dream-worlds too surreal and (at this point) dim for me to describe much. Building. Submarine. Worlds. Semen. Time travel. The universe. Energy. Ancient races. Gods. Train journey. Submarine. Movie. Skies. Stars. Animals. Apocalypse. Substances. High-rise. And so on.
8. In one hallucinatory episode, I imagined that I was being carted around a skyscraper construction project. Someone brought Chinese take-out, and I bit into a spring roll. Jackie Chan was there, bodyguard to the fish-person prime-minister of some Pacific island. I tried to sit up but broke my wrists and then crapped out a foot-long log that raised me off the bed into the air. IRL counterpart was me having my first bowel movement in a month; the nurses exclaimed (or so I was told later) that they had never seen a single person emit so much waste at once. I was at it for a while apparently, as I soiled two mattresses with continual shits.
9. My parents left me out on the streets to fend for myself in the midst of street gangs with only a sword and a hand-gun. Hobos living in a shipping container vigorously rubbed their genitals as I looked on.
10. Visiting imaginary relatives in imaginary homes. Making imaginary plans.
11. Being flown from the ship in the Mediterranean to New York, where my old orthodontist told me that my brain would be surgically inserted into the body of a narwhal. First the skeletal structure, then the organs, then the blubber and skin, left to marinate for a while in the cold winter waters of the New York harbors, and then I was a narwhal forever. My parents expressed concerns regarding my reproductive capacity. Special narwhal condoms. Dreams of generations of cetacean Mafia. Then all the water was gone from the world and there was rationing and desperation and we entered another apocalypse.
12. Relatives and huge parties and who knows what else.
13. Ramp down at JFK airport, while in the clutches of a fever. Everything was hot, then cold. This was the beginning of a semi-lucid phase that lasted a day or two. I began to recall (see?) the hospital as it really was, though for some time after I retained the impression that I had just been moved from another hospital. I recall the diaper-changes and the full-body scrubdowns, though the latter made me uneasy due to it always being "too cold". I came under the impression that next time I soiled myself the nurse on shift wanted me to yell out, "Void!". And so I did, for several minutes until someone finally came to check on me. I did not realize yet that I was not alone in my area (i.e. ward). I did not realize why, then, when I was moved to a different part of the building, to some hallway.
14. Soon after that, perhaps the same night/morning, my father arrive and I asked him to tell me a bedtime story. He told me some fairy tale, and then a bit of current events. He watched as a nurse shaved me and gave me my first fluid to actively drink (as in, not through the feed-tube), a box of some sort of tasty vanilla milk that I could never again get hold of.
And from there I have all lucid memories (but none of dreams) and I'll not go into those any further. I'll just add that I began crying only while in rehab, mostly because I have a great resistance to change of any sort - this being a fairly drastic change to my life-patterns. I cried almost nightly for the next 4 months, but since then I have only cried once, for totally unrelated reasons.
That's enough for one post, if not for good. The greatest shame is that such a woe should afflict me in fact to my benefit.
Bits and pieces add up, you know. The only way to protect myself is to drown out everything with thousands of posts.
You ought to forget about this in time.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Husar
Bookmarks