Awake: Where I've been for awhile.

Waking up after six days in a coma is not like waking up from a deep sleep. It is not as though you have had a long rest and you feel great. There’s no big stretch, smile, flinging open the shutters to a bright and shiny day. It is violent and deeply confusing and downright scary.

The first realization I made upon waking up was that I felt uncomfortable. It was a sensation as though I had been powered down and was now being rebooted. It was not like waking up. I remember hearing voices, my mother’s voice, talking….. at first I could not figure out the words, everything was jumbled and blurry sounding. Then like vision, my hearing slowly came into focus and they were talking about me and my staus. I willed my body to move; catching the attention of my mother. Then it’s the questions both mine and theirs. Namely, the nurse wanted to know what I had taken to cause all this. I mean I can’t even see right because of the ointment they rub in your eyes and here they are accusing me of drug use. I just burst into tears because I hadn’t taken anything. Livvie and I had gone to the park and it had been a relatively good day. I have no clue as to what set off all of this that they were explaining to me how I got to the ICU with all these tubes coming out of me. A lot of tubes coming out of my head would have to be removed before I could even move properly, but it would be three days before that happened.

I remember being most disturbed by the sense of the loss of time. This gap in my personal calendar was so bizarre, everyone talked about things that had happened and I was just stagnant. I am having trouble finding the words to explain how it feels to lose any significant time gap. Again, this isn’t like falling asleep hard and waking up thinking it’s the next day. This is much more like being turned off and rebooted; complete and total darkness. Maybe the best analogy is the one in the movie Get Out where he just falls into a hole inside himself. Sometimes you can hear things sometimes they tell me you dream…. I don’t remember any of that, I just remember the nothing.