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. 

Dust That Burns

When I moved into my new house, I knew that it needed some work. It was painfully apparent that it would need a new paintjob. From the street the house had good bones, but the paint more closely resembled an albino sunburn. The white paint was peeling in sheets and there was obvious water damage everywhere the paint had failed. My guess was that it would need some basic refinishing inside too. I never expected the house would renovate us.

Nancy and I moved in during the first weeks of fall when students return to college. The last few days of summer made a sudden appearance driving the thermometer higher than any of us expected. After spending the day in the moving truck, the last thing I expected was to walk into our new home and find it too hot to sleep. It was like a furnace inside. The windows had been painted shut, god only knows when... and with the storm windows still in place, the house was a stagnant crypt. The scent of mothballs and dust hung in the air, waiting for a breeze to stir. How they managed to keep a house free of mice with no cats living here was a complete mystery to me.

We had bought the house, sight unseen. We paid next to nothing for it, reasoning that as an older home, it would need some major renovation. Most well cared-for New England homes were usually at least 150 years old. This one was considerably older. Over two hundred years old and had the old-wood-smell to prove it. The doorways were much narrower and shorter than I was used to. The doors were solid plank wood, made with real mortise and tenons. There wasn't a single matching doorknob in the entire home.

Most of the house had been emptied before our arrival, though we had been told to expect to find some belongings left behind by the previous tenants. We were told by the realtor that someone would be by sometime in the next week to pickup the trunks and would arrange for shipping. It was hardly adequate preparation for what we found when we walked upstairs.

The bedrooms at the top of the stairs formed a nearly perfect-T, with one room on either side of the stairs, a bathroom directly ahead, and if you walked past either room the hall led to the only large upstairs window, complete with a window seat, framed on both sides by bookcases. The shelves were empty and the cushions were threadbare and nearly opaque grey with dust. There was an old pencil that had been left on the window seat. When I picked it up, the dust powdered off like fine confectioner's sugar. I set it back in place, afraid that someone might notice we had been here.

Mind you, we bought this house. We weren't invading someone's home.... but it didn't feel like our house.

The upstairs room's doors were all closed. Given the stifling heat, our goal was to get some air moving through the house, crack some windows and try to clear a place to lay down for the night. The big moving in could wait till the following morning. We started with the bathroom. Nancy reached for the small ivory porcelain door knob and turned. The knob spun freely, never engaging the pawl... instead the door swung inward with not a single creak.

The bathroom was unremarkable except for its complete lack of period furnishing. It was obviously a retrofit that had been added in the early 1950's. The tile floor was a dusky harsh green, somewhere between an acid green and chartreuse... but with enough wear to feel more than ready for replacement. The toilet, and tiles along the lower section of the wall matched the putrid green color scheme. As if to confuse matters, the tile on the upper-half of the wall was a pale pink. This covered everything except the mirrored medicine cabinet that hung over the sink. The sink basin was painfully pink. My only hope was that whoever had decorated this bathroom had died, painfully, before they ruined another home. This was awful.

What was odd (odder than the colors at least), was that everything was clean. Spotless really. As though the cleaning crew had been through a day or so earlier, and yet there was none of the chemical smells one would associate with a sparkling clean bathroom. There was even a roll of toilet paper sitting on the side of the tub. I am not sure what I expected, but I had to check inside the medicine cabinet. Maybe I was assuming there would be something more left behind by the previous tenants. Maybe I thought there would be old medicines and toiletries. Perhaps an old razor. It was empty. The glass shelves were dry, a touch dusty, and the enamel on the inside of the medicine cabinet was showing bits of rust in places. The chrome around the frame had definitely seen its share of unvented, lingering showers.

I figured that the other doors into the upstairs bedrooms would likely be like our introduction to the bathroom. I found instead, that the doors wouldn't budge. No amount of muscle would convince the worn cut glass knobs to turn. I walked back to the large window intent on opening the window as much as I could. The old sash windows had been painted closed, years ago most likely. We were prepared for some move-in cleanup, but this was frustrating.

I hustled down the stairs and rummaged through our travelling boxes in hopes of finding a box cutter or a pocket knife. I found our tape measure and a bunch of kitchen supplies; forks, spoons, ladles and such. Lacking an appropriate tool to cut through the paint, I made do with a butter knife. Once the window sash had been cut free of its overzealous paintjob, I raised the window. There were no screens in the window. As I knelt on the cushions of the window seat, I realized that there had to be a prop to hold this window open somewhere. Sure enough, on the lower shelf of the righthand bookcase, there was a wooden prop. I jammed that into the open window and immediately felt a rush of hot, dry, still air move up the stairs and out through the window. Certain that the prop would hold, I abruptly sat down on the cushioned bench, exhausted from the heat. The choking cloud of dust enveloped me for a few moments.

I heard Nancy giggle and realized that she was still near the bathroom and was watching this whole event unfold. Apparently seeing my form disappear into this opaque cloud of dust, and then reappear again, except this time I was dusty grey in form, seemingly struck a humorous chord in her. Crossing the hall towards me, Nancy let me know that it was obvious that the heat was getting to me. Afraid to touch me because of my sudden all-enveloping dust coating, she held me at arm's length and suggested I head into town to see about picking up an air conditioner for the bedroom window. At least then we would be able to sleep through the night.

As I shuffled down the stairs and out of the house, I looked back over my shoulder and felt a shadow move past me. The stairway darkened like a cloud passing in front of the sun, and then returned to its normal brightness. I closed the door behind me and ambled out to our bright yellow rental truck. We may have been new to town, but I was pretty sure we had passed a Lowe's hardware store on the way into town. A quick look in my side mirror, a glance upstairs across the open yard, and I pulled away from the curb.

To be continued....

Thoughts on Dying (repost from April 2010)

Let me begin with the obvious: I am alive. But I think of death often. Not with any morbid fascination, but more the casualness one would exhibit looking through a family photo album.

Perhaps we should call this the first glance through an album of memories.

But are they your memories if they didn't happen during your lifetime? What do you call things that happen while your body sleeps and your mind doesn't?

_______________________________

Let me say again: I am alive. I know this because the smells are different. The light is better too.

For a long time I lingered in a twilight haze of ashy shadow and grease. It was always 3am. For years at a time, it was always 3am.

Each day began with me sitting at a table. Outdoors, but without the weather that comes from being outside. The table was made of downward curving metal, perforated with large half-inch holes over the entire surface. The tabletop was covered in a thin rubber coating that once must have been mustard colored but now, like everything else around me, was dingy, grey and fading. Not quite black but never again anything remotely as lively as yellow.

The table was the end of the line for the production of the fast-food joint I was at. No one stood at a counter to take you order... well, not really. There was always someone standing there... but they just looked at you and then looked down as though that would tell you all you needed to know about ordering your meal. A meal. Even now I am not sure I can call it that. Imagine the ubiquity of water fountains and now imagine that in the same way, all food supply units were essentially a bastardized version of Burger King.

After looking down to order, something would be garbled back behind a wall, sounds of movement would begin, quiet, hushed then loud clunking and slow feet shuffling. Far across the open space of the dining plaza, a garbage can would start to beep. Incessantly, but quietly so as to not annoy you if you weren't really sure yet that you wanted the food coming your way.

Then with a whir it would present, through the open slot. Your food. On a tray, grey-brown with wet paper separating the food from the sticky plastic tray. Almost warm but by no means hot. Smells of old onions, scorched coffee and egg shells are the first smack to the face.

Leaving the tray and food intact, I am sure there has to be something better around to eat. I also desperately need to find a bathroom. It has been days since I could pee. I would trade a perfect chocolate milkshake for a chance to pee in a clean bathroom. But there is no bathroom. When I ask at the counter where the meal originated, I get the same bleary eyed response... that downward cast glance as though one could order a trip to the bathroom through this device.

I look down at my clothes. A cover-all that once must have been blue-grey with thin white stripes, but now, like everything else, it was greyed with time, grease and dust. I can't find the sun in the sky. The buildings around me rise ceaselessly into the sky, each one a copy of the one beside it. There is an occasional breeze which at first feels like it might have the warm touch of spring but by the time I can sort out the smell I am overwhelmed with the sickly sweet aroma of decay. The wind grows until I have to duck into an entryway of building so as to escape from the stench that threatens to coat my skin with an oily scum.

Looking through the scratched silver windows of the building lobby, I keep my eyes moving... hoping for someone to talk to. I really want to find a bathroom.

Walking farther down the street, I find a body curled around a bench made from the same perforated metal rounded into tables like I saw earlier. Finding at first his head amongst the papers and rags, I was unsure he was awake. With none of his hands visible I feared that if I asked of their absence, knowing would be worse than the reek wafting from him. Just when I was sure that he was deep aslumber, he opened one eye at me. Asking me with that same downward glaze and soundless hush, he asked why I was there.

I told him I wanted to die.

I also needed to pee.

Laughing into last month's urine soaked newspaper, he turned his head to me. Our eyes met only briefly before I turned away, afraid that his one good eye might see me for what I was. His other eye, caked with drying puss, kept oozing with each blink.If only he would look away... I could ask him again.

Before I can repeat myself he lifts his shriveled hands from beneath his shabby mound and points to an alleyway a few feet away. Slumped between a wall uncertain of its future and the ground well past worn, a woman looks at the needle in her arm, hoping for release. I am not even worth a glare from her direction.

With a plaintive look on my face, I ask again: how can I die?

Shouldering the wet mass of cloth and sopping cardboard, paper and shit, he pushes me headlong towards a guardrail over a highway. Looking down, bits of detritus falling away, he admonishes me to pick one. Slow or fast, both definite. Either way, I could die. Looking for some merciful solution, I look all around, hoping someone would see me in my plight. I asked again: How can I die?

Laughing that piteous laugh again, he slurs through wet teeth that all I need to do is keep eating the food that came out of that slot.

________________________________
END
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For folks who wonder: I have contemplated suicide only a few times in my life. Mostly during a rough time in college when my girlfriend had been replaced with a demon from hell.

I find it interesting that while in the coma, I needed to pee. I find this to have been almost an omnipresent sensation throughout all of the coma dreams.

But the wish for dying? I did want to know. How could I escape the 3am grey-gloom? I would have done anything to break free of those awful smells and sights. Even now, I feel the need to scrub my body with borax in the shower... anything to get that oily stench off of my skin.

I know you don't smell things in dreams. I never dreamed for years at a time before either.

Crying The Dust From My Eyes

A week from now, I will celebrate my second anniversary of the most emotional day of my life.... October 11th, 2009, I woke up from my coma.

I've had my hands full lately trying to wrestle with all the complications brought on by my failed surgeries two years ago. Not everyone understands how completely botched my surgical procedure ended up... or what the long term consequences have been. I'll save that recap for another night. For now, let's just say that recovery doesn't happen overnight and the stress never really goes away.

How does one go about celebrating a horrific event? Do you throw a party? Do you bake a cake? How many candles are you supposed to blow out? Do you exchange presents? I feel like our culture really lacks for ways to mourn and grieve. We have a million ways to party into oblivion, thousands of ways to excuse our indulgent behavior, but so few ways to share grief.

Given this obvious lack of cultural guidance for mourning, I will do what I do best.... I'll share a story.

The cool night breeze that spilled through the vents in the camper trailer was just enough to take the edge off the last remnants of the day's heat. The aluminum trailer walls were still warm to the touch. All day through the hundreds of miles, the trailer got hotter and hotter. Now, the sweet wind that trickled in was so welcome. 

The hardest part was trying to decide if rolling over was worth the slippery unsticking, and repositioning, or would it be too much effort to try to cool off the side that had laid against the sodden mattress? So much pain, so much fatigue. The delerium came in waves like nausea. Even turning my head was too much work. The many bags of overripe potatoes that held me down to the bed made moving almost impossible... until I realized nothing was resting on me except a thin sheet. 

By the time the first recoil of revulsion rolled through me, I was able to make out sounds outside. We had stopped for the night. Judging from the sounds of loose fine gravel underfoot, I guessed probably a parking lot. It wasn't overlong before I could begin to make sense of the strains of music outside. I knew I had to be in Hell since only in Hell would they play modern country music over a cheap PA system just loud enough for it to sound like cats fighting in a two liter soda bottle. It wasn't long before I heard another person walk by. The gravel made sense now. We had to be parked somewhere. The trailer had stopped all the shaking and rolling. We were definitely parked.

When I heard the many throated roars pull into the parking lot, I couldn't quite count the number of motorcycles, but my guess was a good half-dozen. As each biker shut down their ride, and the silence returned, more feet outside my world made me aware of just how thin these walls were. Their exhaust hung too long in the air and was now coming in on the night breeze. Great. The nausea returned and with it, whatever remains of my lunch I had, came right up.

Each passing person sounded so close but no one came to open the door of the camper. Wishful thinking had me praying for someone to stop, perhaps hearing my breathless pleading. My whispers amounted to nothing. I pressed on the walls but even my hardest pounding was but a feather touch on the aluminum sides. I had only enough strength to gag again as I tried to breathe my way through the pain. Blinking hard to push dry-salted tears out in hopes that they might rinse clean the bits of vomit that I couldn't reach before falling back asleep exhausted.
The music outside changed while I slept. By the time I roused, the only sounds were of argument and bravado. My guess was that some of the bikers had done or said something to someone and now were itching for something to get angry with. The violence was palpable. I waited for the sound of breaking glass, of screaming, of fists and leather. 

Instead I was surprised to hear the soft metal hinge of the trailer open. The blast of cold desert night air rushed in with just enough dust to steal away my breath. I coughed twice and tried to open my eyes. Finding them crusted over again and weeping burning hot salt tears, I just wept. When I heard her voice ask how I was doing, I fell. I fell and fell. Over black empty space. As she pressed the cold wet cloth into my eyes, clearing away the debris, I could see the concern and worry across her face. She passed a new, fresh, colder cloth over my brow, running it over my neck, ears, and back over my brow again. Her gaze met mine and we both realized I was awake. 

The trailer was gone. Replaced by small and boisterous Italian restaurant. The heady rush of  rosemary and oregano permeated the air. Olive oil and simmering tomatoes... definitely an Italian restaurant. On the wall in front of me was a small space reserved for waiters to process their orders, write up checks and other miscelania. Just to the left of that was a small alcove that had two small wall plaques made of plaster and painted; one of fruit and one of vegetables. A small way past the waiter's station and slightly to the right was a short set of stairs and a door to the outside.

Standing in the doorway was the most amazing sight I have ever beheld. My wife leaned against the counter, hands on her hips as though surprised I noticed she was there. Refocusing my eyes, I could see our dear friend Mary Ellen standing beside her. They moved closer to me and for the first time in years, I could clearly  make out what was being said. 

Nancy pulled closer and was so happy to see me that she was crying. Fighting everything holding me back, I pulled and pulled but couldn't budge. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Nancy looked into my eyes and tried to explain what had happened. It didn't make any sense. All I wanted was to hold her, to kiss her, to tell her I wasn't gone. 

In the end, all I could do was cry. The tube in my throat made it impossible for me to say what I so desperately wanted to say. So I cried. Nancy brought her head closer to me and tried to figure out what I was trying to communicate. Standing back up she asked if I was trying to tell her that I loved her. I didn't know tears could be so hot. She knew. It was her birthday. All I could do was cry. 

Hell is a Lonesome Place

Hell is a lonesome place.

Dark, wet, and sticky. Smells like the ass-end of a Burger King dumpster on a hot summer's day.

My friends aren't here. This is hell.

If I had friends here it wouldn't be so bad.

The tables in hell are made from perforated metal... large holes maybe an inch across, and then dipped in some grippy plastic. The tops of the tables curve downward slightly, like they were left out in the sun just a touch too long and started to droop.

None of the chairs in hell are comfortable. They either have no backs, or they rock side to side. Find the perfect chair only to realize that the back is broken as you lean back and nearly fall. Stand up and find yourself covered in itchy pet fur, bits of torn wool and reeking of stale urine.

In hell the televisions are always on. Nothing you want to see is on... but the TV strobes in and out of your vision no matter where you look. Compelling, numbing and terrifying at the same time. The audio track fails to sync so the newscaster's voice sounds too much like a detergent commercial.

Hell's designer should be fired on the basis of creating false promises. Everywhere that should be clean is anything but. Places that should be hidden from view, you are forced to walk through. Escalators that lurch and stagger. Handrails wait with splinters and smears of mucus left behind by toddlers too young to know better.

The custodial crew in hell expect everything to be recycled. Not just the good stuff. Everything. When you line up for your meal tray, and try to catch a glimpse of the kitchen, it looks like the food was just pulled out of garbage bags and broken milk crates. It is the smell that gets you though. The same salty, hot oil... the knowing scent of fried something or other. Your mouth waters before you notice the sickly sweet smell of rancid putrification.

In hell there are no bathrooms. Never mind a long line, there are no bathrooms. And worse still, you always need to pee. Every dark corner looks appealing as a place to stop and urinate until you realize that is exactly what everyone else has done. The pain comes in waves. Nausea mixed with sheer terror at having to keep waiting for a real bathroom. There has to be a bathroom somewhere. But there isn't. Hell's plumbing was designed by a general surgeon.

All of the voices in hell combine fingers on a chalkboard with toddler wailing. The resultant reverberation makes conversations sound like the clamor of an engine room on a cruise ship. In hell, you can see the horrific waves of halitosis as people cajole one another. Eventually, even your own inner voice starts to sound like your neighbor's cat in heat at two in the morning.

In hell, your fellow travelers are the bastards who screwed up everything they touched in your life. They are the assholes who broke your heart, teased you, molested you, chose you last for games on the schoolyard. Remembering the spilled milk, torn clothes, bitter iron in your mouth mixed with salty tears and the slurping back of the snot that just won't stop running down your nose... these are the people standing next to you everywhere you go in hell.

There is no view in hell. I tried for over a year to find a place from which to see out. I looked for a window, but all the windows just led to more halls, rooms, and escalators. There is no outside in hell. Everything is wrapped up in the dusty oily resinous exhaust that builds up between the acrid cleaning sessions that happen so infrequently. Touch anything and that grime finds its way on to you with even the slightest brush. Mirrors laugh at your reflection.

I kept waiting for a phone call in hell. All of the cell phones in hell ring incessantly. Not mine. I was surprised to see that there is cell reception in hell. Probably because of AT&T. To this day, I am not sure if that call would have been a pardon or my final sentencing.

I was in hell for over a year. Trying to tell time in perpetual twilight is like vertigo for the timeline.

Next week I begin the observance of my third year since entering the coma. This story was just one of many dozens that came from that experience.