A year ago today, I should have died.
It was April 17, 2012. A Tuesday. I went to work with a headache, and the headache got worse. I was nauseous. Thirsty. B picked me up at 9:30, and by 4 we were on the way to the emergency room. A few hours later I was in septic shock, and by midnight I was being intubated.
It’s been one year. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five days have passed, but not a day has gone by that I don’t think about it. Sometimes it’s every hour. I close my eyes and can feel myself back in the ICU. I think I smell the plastic oxygen tubes I had in my nose the first six days. I remember the panic B and I felt when we noticed the burst blood vessel in my eye. B’s forehead pressed against the bars of my cot, trying to sleep sitting upright in my isolation room. Meeting my mom’s eyes as my lungs were failing, moments before I stopped being able to breathe on my own. The rash I saw moving down my collarbone on that first night. The taste of chunky peanut butter my dad tried to spoon into my mouth after five days without food. Being sponge-bathed at 3 AM. The insomnia… and the interminable, most vivid, and completely horrifying nightmares. Joking with my step-down nurse as she changed my a catheter, and the victory I felt when I found the right way to use a bedpan. Eight days without brushing my teeth, washing my face, or shampooing my hair. The friends who visited, and the parties that gathered around my bed each day.
And that first night, when things were… fading?… it was too chaotic to look for a light at the end of the tunnel, or try and catch my snapshots of my life flashing before my eyes. But when I woke up, I just felt this… calmness. Like everything was going to be okay. I was surrounded by people I loved and who loved me back, and that was the most important thing.
A year has gone by, and I can’t stop my mind from going back there. I don’t know how to talk about it; I don’t know how to stop talking about it. Half of my sentences start with, “When I was in the hospital….” It’s hard to know what to do with that string of words.
2012 was the hardest year of my life, but it was also one of the greatest. Sometimes when I’m feeling overwhelmed- with school, with relationships, with life- I try and remember the mood in our apartment the day I was discharged. Family and friends gathered in the living room to drink moonshine and bourbon- myself excluded, of course- and we ordered pizza. I could barely walk, but the mood was just so… festive. We were all so happy to be together. So thankful. It was all okay. It is all okay.
