Note: This was written 6 hours after I posted Chapter 3 of my ICU experience. I’m posting it now, several weeks after that post, and then I’m going to add to it.
It’s now been 6 hours since I posted Chapter 3 of my ICU experience.
I started it last week, and finished it today. Emotionally it was one of the hardest things I have ever written. When I was done my chest physically hurt, my heart was beating so fast I could feel it beating, and I was completely exhausted. I even found it hard to talk full sentences without running out of breath.
Experiencing it, and the things you have and will read in other chapters, was also very hard.
When I write anything (fiction, this blog, ect.), that portrays emotion, I try to make the reader feel the emotion. To do that, I have to feel and remember the emotion. In this case it’s really not that hard to do, because I think about it everyday. The flashbacks are getting better, but in the beginning I went right back to being under sedation and felt, and experienced what I did then.
I think one reason this particular part of my sedation story is so hard to express, is because in this part I was exactly what I was not. My sense of self was turned upside down. I like to think of myself as a good and compassionate person. Instead I was so horrible that an indefinite coma was suggested to protect other people.
It’s the reversal of self, and the idea that I am so horrible that the world needs protection from me. That’s what the nightmare was.
That is why it hurt so much, because I was thinking I was somebody I never want to be.
My fear (it lasted more than a year), that the sedation revealed to me what I really am, a racist and evil person, isn’t true. I’m not racist. I’m not evil. I’m not wrong in who I am.
Sedation is really different. It’s unlike anything else I’ve experienced. It causes all sense of time to disappear. I saw my brother when he was little, but his nephew also existed. My brother didn’t have a child when he was 10, although he does now.
It also caused my sense of self to be questioned.
Under sedation a racist man, might think he is a black female, or is married to a black female. To him that would be a nightmare.
When I look at it that way, it’s nice to know I’m not racist. If I was, that wouldn’t have been my nightmare.
And maybe that’s the lesson here – for me anyway. I’m not the horrible person, sedation made me fear I was.
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Note: From here to the end, was written today.
I sit here, gathering courage to write the next part of the story.
Because I am alone in the house (something that happens very seldom), I will have the time to dive back into my sedation memories uninterrupted.
I have felt an urgency to write all of this from the very beginning. I am afraid that as I heal from my experiences I will also forget, and if I forget I will not be able to write it. Each time I write I feel the pain of before, and although it’s not comfortable I need to do it, because I need to explain all this before I forget.
I live in this limbo of wanting to heal, and wanting not to heal. If I’m still broken, I can write about being broken.
With that in mind, I will begin to write Chapter 4.
Christmas in the ICU 