Revisiting Thirteen Years Ago - another introduction to the coma dreams

 It is such a strange thing to reflect on. Thirteen years ago, I was dying in the ICU. The surgery that was supposed to fix my diverticulitis had gone sideways. The anastomosis had failed, allowing fecal waste to enter the abdominal cavity. This led to sepsis and peritonitis along with about a dozen other catastrophic issues. I was dying. They had done an emergency surgery, performed a lavage, and given me a colostomy. They sent me back up to the ICU knowing full well that I was still dying. 

How do you reflect on reading the notes from surgeons who you trust/ed with your life, when their very notes clearly indicate that survival was not guaranteed. By the time I read the surgical notes five days post first surgery, the notes from the surgeons and ICU intensivists read like a very confused teenager being asked to write a book report that they forgot to read. Thirteen years later, it does not inspire confidence.

So I was dying. 

I guess we all are, whether or not we choose to recognize our mortality as being far off or imminent. It is the other side of the monotony of living. The abruptness of dying. 

I hadn't done anything wrong. I wasn't in the ICU because of a car crash. I hadn't overdosed on drugs. I hadn't fallen from a ladder. Nevertheless, I was dying. That's what the notes all said. Five days post-operative emergency. Yesterday I sat here when I should have been off to bed. I put on music I hadn't listened to in thirteen years. I let myself get carried back into the eddies in the current of time. I pushed against the double doors that opened onto the ICU, where the lights were all set low. And there I saw my dying.

I have looked at my death from myriad perspectives each time it has come to greet me. Always curious, slightly confused, always hyper-aware. Those memories have stuck like tar on a hot day. When I was in first grade, I was riding my bike to school. I was crossing one of the busier streets in Hialeah, in the crosswalk, with the light red and cars stopped. A white Camaro ran the red light. There was no sound of brakes until after I felt my bike torn from under me and I was on the hood of the car, pressed against the windshield. My mom had followed me to school that day, driving just behind me. I don't know if I imagined it, or if I really saw her over my shoulder... but I remember her face in a rictus of screaming fear as I entered the crosswalk. I was dying in that instant. By the time I came to rest on the asphalt, my bike nowhere near me, I was alive. I've been told (or maybe I remember) that I wanted to get up and go to school so I wouldn't be late. My legs refused to obey. My shoulder hurt. I couldn't find enough air to breathe. I don't know if I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I remember being in the hospital, on a gurney... waiting for x-rays. Might have been my first x-rays. I was sure that I had brain damage. Brain damage was what my child mind was certain had made my brother David unable to communicate. We didnt know anything about his autism at that point. We didn't know that he was a chromosomal anomaly and that his failure to speak wasn't caused by any damage done to his brain after his birth. But I didn't know it that day. I was sure that my injury was going to make me like David. 

I didn't die. I injured my collarbone. Nothing broken. Just the spell of childhood innocence. 

Reading the surgeon's notes from my failed surgery is similar in many ways. 

In my mind, there is the last memory before the coma. It is a strange disconnected memory. The heated air was being pumped through the gown I had put on in pre-op. I was so upset that the air was hot. The nurse was trying to explain that I was going to be cold otherwise... but I hate being hot. I remember being wheeled into the operating room and being so unhappy about the hot air blowing through the stupid gown. 

After that, there was blackness for a moment. Much like the time I spent in the air after connecting with the white Camaro in the crosswalk. It was a time when I was released from all the tethers that tie you to here and now. For everyone else in the world, the day continued on. I stopped. Due to the insane concoction of drugs (fentanyl, Propofol, and morphine) that they used to keep me in my sedated comatose state, I was gone. I stepped off of the merry-go-round and fell into a different stream. I was dying. 

If I am honest, I knew I was dying. I just couldn't figure out why it was taking so long. Let me back up. For the next thirty years or so, I experienced time pass just as I had for every day of my thirty-seven years up until that moment. I know now, that they didn't happen the way everyone else talks about time. But I also know that my body and mind experienced thirty years of strange, horrible, boring, wonderful, lonely things... and I also know that I was dying. In many of the coma dreams (as I euphemistically call them) I tried to die. There were all sorts of weird stories about me trying to find a way to either die or to be released so that I could die. Each time I would fulfill the task, some new revelation would make it such that dying wasn't possible. 

But I knew I was dying. I just didn't really understand how to do it properly. Through the perspective of thirteen years, I think the hubris is slightly more amusing. In the coma dreams, I tried to do just as I do out here. I tried to fit in... to blend. I tried to follow the rules as I understood them. No one explained shit to me. No different than out here. 

To this day, I think the most interesting aspect of the coma dreams was the idea of waking up somewhere, fully formed, at a seemingly random age, sometimes not even male, in a place I had never been, as though it was just another Tuesday. Sometimes I woke up in a barn, asleep against the side of sheep. Other dreams had me waking up in old abandoned houses whose basements connected to underground caverns where people raced illegal cars. Each time I woke up, I was there. But most importantly, I had never been anywhere else. I didnt carry with me any of the memories that we all carry. I wasn't Alex from Miami. I didn't have my parents or siblings. I hadn't been married. No history at all. Whenever TV or movies depict a person suffering from amnesia, there is always that mythology about how memory vanishes. Far stranger for me was to lose that entire sense of self that connected to past self. I was fully there, just as real as today... but I had no day before and somehow, that was just fine. Would you remember yesterday if you weren't trying to remember it? Life without rear view mirrors and windows. Just straight ahead. None of the experiences in the coma dreams carried from one dream to another. I was always someone different, somewhere different, a different age, and usually lonely. 

And because my body outside (in the ICU) refused to let me forget, I was also dying. Periodically the coma dreams would toss me into a blended Frappuccino of hospital and Salvador Dali. If it was an easy coma dream, it might almost make sense. Other times the coma dreams would take a real-world physical setting in the hospital and just play havoc with it. I'll get to some of those stories soon. I needed time to write this preface (again). Probably just for my own sake of understanding. 

I was dying thirteen years ago, and I did it badly. I failed miserably. Instead I ended up living thirty years or more, in ways, places, times, and people I could never have been. Those experiences have changed my understanding of what it means to be alive. So many of the negative associations I had previously held about death, don't apply anymore. There was never a "white light at the end of the tunnel" moment. It was so much more mundane and prosaic. I was dying inside a Burger King where I couldn't find a bathroom to pee. 

Like I said earlier, I really struggled to die any differently than I have lived. 

Between now and October 10th when I first woke from the coma, and which we celebrate as my second birthday... I try to reflect on the bizarre experiences I went through. When I can free up my hands to type and convince my mind to untangle some of the threads of the coma dreams, I will write more of those stories. 

Struggling with Introductions

One of the things I struggle with when it comes to these coma dreams is how much of a preface to give folks. Do I try to lay out the backstory? Do I just jump into the story midstream the same way I fell into it when I was in the coma? Do I try to make it make sense? Or do I just lay it all out there and let folks find their way through the tangle?

Let me pose another question: who are you if you had no day before today? I am not talking amnesia. I am talking about waking up, and it is DAY 1. No past, no memory of places other than there, right then. Without a past, without knowing where we come from, without having all of that backstory, what defines who we are? This may sound like an esoteric mind-exercise... but for me it was the reality of the coma.

Each time I woke up in a different place it was Day 1. No part of me knew "Alex, who was born in Miami, who is sick in the hospital..." and so on. In a few instances, I woke up without a strong understanding of language, as though speech wasn't enabled. Without hearing my own voice, sometimes for weeks... time stretched in strange ways. What was more difficult were the places I found myself in the coma where I was both unable to speak and where there was either no sound, or precious little. That isolation robbed me of the passing of time... and that clock is a big part of what helps us define ourselves. Is it daytime? Is it time for sleep? Some would argue that you sleep when you're tired and wake when you're not. It isn't that simple. Just ask someone who has spent more than a night or two in the hospital. Time becomes a very strange concept very quickly. Add the coma with all of the drugs and the time dilation... and I found myself wandering through a maze of time that looped back on itself or stalled against a wall, bunching up like a conveyor belt jammed with boxes falling to the floor.

Let this tiny blurb act as a preface... or as a signpost. Something to indicate a change in direction. Fifty two miles to the next exit. No rest stops.

Scenes to Forget

From the top of the stairs to the curb was only five large cement steps. The paint on the iron handrail was chipped and rusted through in places. I was just going to the corner for a snack. Out of the corner of my eye, just peeking over the sidewalk was a candy wrapper. Tootsie-Roll Blow Pop to be specific. Red and blue, crumpled plastic just on the edge of the sidewalk.

When I looked up again I saw the sky above me. The candy wrapper had flown away. People had gathered around me. I couldn't make sense out of what they were saying. Voices seemed over-loud like marbles in a blender. The dirt in my eyes burned. I couldn't find my hands. They were still attached to my arms but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't lift them. I couldn't roll over to figure out why I was laying on the sidewalk.

The person who rolled me over had no idea. I am sure he meant well. I am sure he thought I would be able to get up and move around after getting my bearings. I am sure he had no idea. If he knew, how could he have done this to me?

The first movement tore the sky away from the ground. Everything lurched, hard, to the right. The abrupt direction made no sense. I was on the sidewalk... on my back... now where had the concrete gone?

The next movement spun me like a washing machine on spin cycle, complete with "unbalanced load" alarms beeping. I am sure he had no idea. No idea that once the vomiting started I would have no way to stop. The nausea wasn't inside me anymore. The retching emptying of my stomach carried years of my life into the gutter. I am sure he had no idea that some of my favorite days were lost like that damned lollipop wrapper.

Someone thought that holding my head might stop the hurricane thrashing me around. That might have been me. I could see my hands but they were so dark. Everything felt dark, muddied and hot. When the tsunami in my mind slowed to a dull wave, I looked up to see the concrete stairs were still there. Sounds were still fugitive. I could make out the dull bell across the street as cars pulled into the gas station. Being comforted by a flat tinkling bell was strange reassurance.

Inches of red raw pain allowed me to pull myself half up the stairs. The railing failed me just like my college girlfriend. You had one fucking job. Couldnt even do that. Holding the broken railing in my burned-black hand made no sense. I couldn't lift the railing any further. The stairs had no use for failure. They too, were disappointed in the handrail.

Many bells later I was happy to hold my eyes closed with my less dirty hand. Why the railing had chosen to come to rest on my legs, I couldn't make sense of. It weighed so much more now that it was free from the concrete. With my eyes filled with grime and sourness, I didnt have much reason to trust the story they were playing.

Waiting for more bells...then they were silent. Doors closed and dinner smells opened. Humid air that reeked of lost socks rolled down the sidewalk. As the stench passed I looked up, expecting to see something different. Something less like a gas station, perhaps more like a bus station but stationary all the same. Instead the movie before my eyes was quick and sudden. Playing forwards first, then slowly backwards to make sure I saw every detail.

It is never the first mouthful of vomit that burns. The last bits of puke that you find behind your ears makes you wonder. Then the burning. Then the story plays again. Forwards then backwards.

A young woman and her boyfriend, both of them no more than high school kids. Holding hands and walking quickly through the doorway across the silent street. The door closed with a stiff puff of air that smelled of rubber and oil. Across the street, I could hear their quick steps as they raced upstairs. Unseen stopping on the landing meant so much more the first time I heard it. Forward it made me smile. Of course.

Stolen time in the empty stockroom was filled with sighs and moans. Forward motion and I could almost hear their flaccid conversation. Simple things: tomorrow who would do what. Gentle smile you could hear in the soft spaces between words. The words had smaller feet and took longer steps.

No one told me to hold my breath. The pigeons lied about how awesome the stoop was. And nothing barks as loud as a gun at that range. Flashing twice, like daylight and then gone. The smacking echo against the concrete behind my head told me lies about where I would sleep that night. The young couple poked their heads above the window ledge, looking down onto the street below. Both carried on a silent conversation without their mouths moving. The glass had one job and it too was a failure. Even with the sashes painted shut and years of flies sealing the window shut, there was no way to hold back the screaming.

As the wail fell onto the street below, lights from televisions doubled as porchlights came on. My own movie played out first slowly, forward. Then reversed. Their terror was inhaled in the same breath that sucked their mouths closed. Their eyes however grew bigger. They had seen and couldn't shut out that light. The report and then again. They had seen the fear, the face of confusion, the asking begging visage trying to understand Beowulf... and then deciding that Wheel of Fortune was more than enough to grasp with one grimy hand.

The warmth was a graceful wet towel that wrapped around my neck. With no reason to look, the hot flood around my neck told me the plants wouldn't need to be watered. Thumbs dug into my eyes to stop the constant turning of the street... and still the glass failed to hold the screaming. They had seen. The dirty dust-caked window had one fucking job. More failure.

As I died they watched.

When the street blossomed with loud cars and sirens, the screaming poured into an old Gatorade bottle half filled with urine. Cigarettes shoved into my ears carried the soft reassurance that I would miss the best part of the story. Silence settled with a cold white blanket, almost reaching my feet.

The tape played back slowly, unreeling the taken up slack... first the quiet vanished. Replaced with bright sharp sounds and chased by cars undriving themselves down the street. The scream inhaled the smeared glass torrent. The loud report and repeat. The moans and cries returned with quiet reassuring thumping. Their backward jump through the doorway and onto the sidewalk would have seemed out of place if I hadn't watched it once already. This time the candy wrapper made its way onto the sidewalk before the handrail abandoned hope. Five steps down, up. Wound up again, the story replayed. Each time they watched from the window. Each time their screams etched grooves in the shellac to be played back over and over. And each time, I died as they watched.

Six Years Later, Ten Years Later

To say that life has drawn me away from writing more of these coma dreams would be an understatement.

I recently had dinner with a fantastic writer who encouraged me to get back on the horse and to get these stories written down. That made me dig up my old notes that I had written down on paper, in a notebook I used to carry everywhere in the years immediately following the coma. I had very little ability to remember things... lot of short term memory problems. This notebook went with me to physical therapy 3x a week, enabling me to jot down exercises I should be doing at home to rebuild my body. It also gave me a place to throw out ideas that came floating into my head. This became the place where I tried to list all of the various coma dreams that I lived through.

Last week, nearly ten years after the coma began, I scanned those original notes. These notes are barely legible... but my hope is to tease out the intense stories that I tried to remember through these one-sentence blurbs.

Since trying to read my handwriting is nearly impossible, I aim to write down the bare bones of each idea here, in hopes that it will allow me to circle back and flesh out each story... To give each experience its due. So much of this memory is so intensely personal that I hesitate to write any of it down. There are so many aspects that I still struggle with, even ten years on. But, I told my friend I would try to write it all down.

Having said all of that, I have one more request of anyone reading this: imagine you had a spectacular dream this morning. Can you remember it? Can you still taste it, smell it, hear all the tiny things that were happening? Most dreams tend to vanish quickly on waking. It has been nearly ten years since I woke up from the coma... and these dreams, for lack of a better word, are just as real and tangible as the day I woke up.

My notes follow:

• Jesus in the graveyard, being left behind
• Fishing : restaurant: broken down rig: scuba diving and fear of water: circular driveway
• Kayaking across big lake
• Moving kiln w/woodfire
• Recycling via sidewalk streams, Ithaca
• Dragon making via Nancy; hammering coins
• Display behind my head covered in Led Zep based foods
• Swimming across polluted channel w/ dirty city (recycling focus)
• Sitting in pools eating lunch with David Bowie in France (gallery with pedestal platforms at eye level with David Byrne)
• Falling out of taxi in Queens, carried to stairwell, left in room with glass table, Bridgid brought bread. Diabetes.
• Wyoming dream. Hunting antelope, laying silver $ on train track 
• Living in a barn with animals
• Working in diner, cleaning, setting included trees, road, snow
• JFK house w/Nancy - new AC - new clothes/bed
• Old houses @Xmas, singers, smells, horse carriage bells
• Old woman, knitter/weaver w/feathers, looking out her window at sunset
• Room with German platter/disk - played backwards by wife
• Trains rolling by - through army camp ca., WWII
• Housesitting for couple in 1950-1960, very mod - include carpet, chrome, leather
• Canadian woodlot as punishment for speaking out against bad sheetrock and the tearing out of sheetrock @hospital on other side of the mountain
• Hospital setting looking for Mecenas, 3D displays
• Cruise ship with BTS, wife having affair on tape; Jose on call; Grandmother called at port of call
• Restaurant w/Nancy fish restaurant, next to fishing tour boats
• Restaurant w/Nancy van broke down, breakfast only - started story as Another Story
• Mexican scenario w/ morning villa, weird lunch restaurant w/margaritas, salsa verde tacos, fragrant flowers on rock wall, motorcycle dudes in restaurant
• Going through box of records (Mary Ellen, Nancy and I) and dressing up like albums
• Ducts & power company - hiding in abandoned  house
• Finding rogue car racing group / underground in ducts 
• Cooking / baking during depression @ holidays - trying to perfect not-chocolate for donuts
• Photographing in x-ray film, converting a camera to use x-ray (not IR)
• Martin's Japanese GF racing motorbikes and jetskis - cant remember this one now, 10 yrs later
• Working w/ Nancy's grandfather
• Eating sushi w/couple & mother making food, finally walking across wet field
• Dancing after wedding to Nancy in Spain, paella, rosemary
• Invention device using croc foam to print anything
• Room in house where ^^^ happens, multiple servers
• Ride home from work @ diner in snow
• Hike ~ Spain to see Japanese potter, firing wood
• Waking up in bus depot, stuck there till custodian takes outside
• "" w/ latino and Jesus & tree
• Inside cruise ship BTS - elevator and cameras in CCTV room
• Outside dirty city, BK everywhere, tables, recycling lines, getting trapped in Brazil-esque setting - started writing in Hell is a Lonesome Place  needs more.  Also started as Thoughts on Dying - still incomplete
• Visiting w/brother, racing off road motorcycles & jet skis -cant remember this one, 10 yrs later
• Mother sitting in corner, knitting / fan blowing
• Indian angry that I could talk to birds, animals - maybe related to weaving woman dream
• Kids poaching deer & woman being so upset, sawmill (ref. Melanie?)
• Seeing Mag's artwork, photography & then seeing subjects in person, together
• Meeting couple with and without kids on kayaking expedition
• Photography out in desert
• Working w/ contemporary photographer w/ pkging 
• My medical bed in hospital breaking and fixing it by pushing it to the ceiling - me telling them that I was ready to go home
• Being held post-surgery in an old movie theater's projectionist space w/file cabinets and soda
• Playing w/Xray film, buying special cameras to play with. 
• Being arrested for video & being held by FL troopers - ref cruise ship
• Stuck on a long mountain road, needing chains for the truck and the only person I could call was Grandma Barbara
• Landing planes in Okinawa post WWII - written as Landing the Planes
• My mother telling me she was a punk rock groupie
• Stuck in the old room w/diabetes and running out of meds. Needles on the floor. 
• Leah and Tim watching kid get killed - Syracuse or Binghamton perhaps - lollipop wrapper near the curb - Now written as: Scenes to Forget
• Passing judgement on souls - in garage with dust and oil
• Recycling life in Ithaca, very hot, needing AC, curbs carrying water, retarded kids and adults working at recycling center
• Watching kids w/candy wrappers and lollipops in Binghamton, (while judging souls)
• Woodfired electric kiln, made by L&L/dusty / taken to  CA roadtrip.
• Helicopter ride with Obama's kids, landing on the WH lawn
• Asian food restaurant/kitchen/sliding doors, fish etc.
• Hockey w/girls TGHA in CO, WY, sleeping in crappy hotels w/wet carpet (related to being in teardrop trailer?)  - part of this dream written into Burning from the Inside
• Packaging ideas while working for photographer 
• Looking for Mecenas in Hospital in Miami - Gangs & 3D screens and virtual presence
• Recycling center in huge scale in city, unable to get out - giant machines like bucket loaders
• ^^ related somehow to Burger King and London
• Hockey arena while on gurney to watch 12U play, but audience unhappy because no beer (<18 yr olds) played Camilus and won
• Hockey travel team going from motel to dive, wet carpet, high fever
• Being stuck in Denver, 2nd story apartment, with ostomy, smell and wet damp everywhere, renting with lots of people, and being stuck in recliner
• Russian hospital w/ labels in Cyrillic - started in Coma Dreams #1  incomplete
• Russian family taking care of me on their table in return for American insurance $$$
• World as Lowes @Thanksgiving/Xmas, including inflated stuff, giant fans and wiring everywhere, fixing house we were renting - tied into JFK house  - written as Dust that Burns
• Nancy was there, no AC, installed AC and painted via Lowes- written as Dust that Burns plus part two We Now Return to Our Story
• Laying half out of taxi in NYC/Bronx/Queens, near river, can see bar w/Irving's room above
• Transition to all family inside waiting for Bridgid who brought bread, wall of open shelves, knickknacks.