Perspective

Before this illness rececdes into that murky fog of memory there were a few things I wanted to jot down before I forget them that I also thought you might find amusing or interesting.

During my hospital stay, especially the first three nights, I was incredibly sick. My kidneys had started to shut down, I was very dehydrated and had a very hard time breathing. I also hadn't slept more than three hours in four days. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I don't think I am. Every time I would doze off I would wake myself up coughing. Repeat every 30 minutes, and you end up a little delirious. By the time I was in the hospital I was out of my gourd. Mind you I was still quite lucid, but the hallucinations! My god, I had no idea they could be THAT real. In the room there was an observation window which was covered with a curtain with some sort of tapestry pattern on it. I spent hours during the night watching the pattern of the curtain flip in and out, sort of like an advent calendar, watching characters out of Hieronymous Bosch paintings look to me, wave hello, and morph into something else. It was fascinating yet quite disturbing as the characters became more grotesque and more evil as my stay wore on.

The second night I was there I asked for something to help me sleep; between the full re-breather mask and vitals being checked every 2 hours I was hardly sleeping at all. They offered me some Ativan and I took it, and rather than make me more sleepy it made me hallucinate even MORE. The turning point came when I was describing to Steve and the nurse, quite calmly, how in the reflection of the window there was the three of us, the hospital bed, and then two children right behind the nurse. A boy, about age 4, from the early 20th century perhaps, wearing a tweed hat, white shirt, knickers, and his sister, just behind him, both of them talking to each other (although I couldn't hear them) and looking directly at me, smiling and waving. When I looked back to the nurse and to Steve their eyes were are big as saucers. I told them that wasn't the HALF of the stuff I'd been seeing over the last few nights. I'm not sure if they administered something to either make me go to sleep or what, but after that I think I blacked out, and as my hydration returned to normal and my kidneys kicked in, the room wasn't quite as terrifying as it had been those first two nights.

What was absolutely amazing to me was how REAL the hallucinations were, and how LUCID I felt looking at them. I was clearly conscious, I was oriented for almost the entire time (at the end I had trouble telling people where I was or what day it was), and it was just a fact that I was seeing all this STUFF, all these people looking in and out of that window, peeking from behind that curitain, standing off in the corner. It was was, similar to how we assume that London exists even though we might not have been there ourselves.

Reality is so incredibly tenuous, tied so closely to a couple million cells packed into our cranium that only shares the same reality as all the other craniums in the world because biology makes it so. Mess that up and reality becomes a whole different matter. What is real? What we see? What we measure? What we believe? In those 48 hours reality was kids coming to visit, old guys with evil smiles and long fingers passing in and out of that curtain, medieval peasants walking to and fro across the window, and that brother and sister, stopping by to say hi.