Braids of Contemplation

I've been told to write about my life. A lot. From people that know a bit about me and what I've been through to fans of my mom to psychologists. Problem is I never knew where to start. Do I do it chronologically? Do I do it by assigning each person a chapter? Do I make it fiction story? How do I approach all this?

I decided that I'll decide that later, and I'll just get all my junk down first. The snippets from the thread of my life can all be aligned together and braided, and we'll see if a pattern emerges. As long as it doesn't end up as Vogon Poetry in the long run, then we will be ok.

The Best Day Ever

It was the end of summer break in 1986, and I was about to return for my final year of high school, Grade 12. The trees were losing their summer emerald green and starting to take on the olive green they get before they turn gold in the fall.It had been a good summer, I got to lease a horse, Beejay, and ride him whenever I wanted. Cute little black quarter horse.

But now... now I had just gotten the best news a horse obsessed girl could get. See, four years ago we went to go and see a newborn filly, only 4 days old. She was an appendix quarter horse (which means she had thoroughbred blood) and a deep golden palomino with a star and one stocking on her back leg. I had the cutest photos of her. She became my dream horse.

But now, four years later, her owner was going on Sabbatical and needed someone to care for her horses for 6 months. In some sort of twist of fate, my parents actually agreed that I could take her to my boarding stable and she would be just like my ow horse for 6 months. Nothing could go wrong, it was the best thing ever.

So we drove the hour or so to South Cooking Lake to the little farm with the four horses: the big bay appy showjumper, the grey old cobby mare, and Solitaire and her mum. The horse trailer hadn't arrived yet, so we put a bridle on Tara and I got a leg up onto her bare back. Apparently no one had thought that I would need a saddle. But I was 17 and confident and I has my mom to myself for the day and the sun was shining interspersed with puffy little clouds.

I straightened my helmet, it was a few sizes too big for me but we'd stuffed the inside of the brim with tissues to make it stay on, it was a bit wobbily, but it was all I had. I rode Tara around in a small circle at a walk and then a figure eight at a trot. This was hard for me, just about all my riding experience had been in weekly lessons in an arena, plus the month with Beejay, and my bareback riding was minimal. There is a huge difference between being held snugly in place with a comfortable saddle on an experienced school horse and balancing on the wriggley hide of a greenbroke filly with 30 days training.

Mom wanted to see me go faster, and that sounded like fun so I thought I'd take Tara down the little hill and canter her back up. I turned her towards the hill and it was like she didn't want to go. I asked her again, using a bit of leg and rein and trotted her down the hill.

Tara's mom neighed. The horse van arrived and rattled. Tara whirled around back towards her mum and dropped her shoulder and I lost balance and slid down a bit down her neck. My helmet fell off and rolled down the hill, uselessly. I wasn't able to get back up and fell to the ground.... Bright Yellow. Dandilion Yellow, Lemon Yellow, Yellow Like the Sun. Palomino Yellow. Every Yellow there is filled my vision.

I was lying face down in the dirt. I lifted my head up, kind of embarassed that I'd fallen in front of the owner and the trailer driver. There was blood in the dirt. "Shit" I said. "Nicola!" I hear my mom shieking and her running towards me. "We're going to the hospital." The... what? I tried to touch my face by my mom pulled my wrist away. "Keep your hands away... don't touch your face." I didn't get it. My mom drove the car and backed it up to me and I was really weak for some reason and only managed to get into the back of the stationwagon. Mom drove very urgently. She stopped at the next farm, some other people we knew by cooincidence. "I'm goingto try and get you some ice." We drove up the bumpy road to the next farm. The bumps were very uncomfortable. Luckily, someone was home and we got a bag of ice. They stood there inspecting me and discussing what to do. I felt very embarassed. My face itched. I tried to touch my face again and my mom grabbed my wrist again and said that it was very important that I don't touch my face. We left the farm and started the hour long drive to the hospital.

I sneaked touching my face while my mom was driving. my nose was flat and for some reason when I went straight up I could feel my left eye. That wasn't right. Left of my nose was too sore to touch. I tenatively felt over to the right and felt the edge of torn skin and felt a strong gut feeling to keep my hand away. I laid in the back of the station wagon and tried to focus on the clouds in the sky, but everything was blurry.

Finally we got to the hospital. They put me on a gurney and rolled me straight in, and I thought "wow I must be bad". There was blood trickling into my ears and I kept needing to wipe them and they kept swatting my hands and saying don't touch your face. I must have been unable to speak because they just ignored me saying "my ears are itchy". They put in an IV and must have put some strong painkiller in there because nothing hurt. It didn't hurt in the car, either. I lied there patiently while the doctors and nurses fiddled and mussed around my face. My stepdad arrived at some time. I was glad my brother wasn't around.

We went to X-ray. The technician said there was two things he hated, that was horses and baseballs. I didn't like the technician.

 A nurse, Ron or Rob came in and I was to hold his hand. They said they were going to do something that would be "a little uncomfortable". They couldn't put me to sleep cause I might go into a coma.

My parents said they were going to go for coffee.  They left on me.

A bunch of nurses and doctors surrounded me. My arms were tied down. Rob held my hand. Some people were putting their hand on either side of my scalp. "Ready" went a mans voice and they started pusking my nose. "noooo don't...." they pushed harder. I held Rob's hand tight, so tight, I was going to break the bones in his hands. The sound of bone crunching against bone. Rob's hands were short and squat and hairy and his nails were wide and flat. Ipressed my feet against each other. More Crunching. I held Robs hands so tight I swear I would have broken anyone else's hands. I wonder if he remembers me now, 25 years later. The kid with the crushed skull. "We had to put your nose back in the middle of your face". At the time I didn't know why I wasn't put under or put out. I was upset my parents abandonded me for this worst thing, my mom was an ER nurse she should have been able to stay. But she didn't.

I guess they did all they could that night and rather than have me stay at the hospital, surprisingly, they sent me home for 2 weeks. The Swelling had to go down enough so they could do surgery. They sent me home with some T3's and a tin barf bowl.

Mom set me up in the basement on the Lazy Boy chair. I was tired and I wanted to lie down in bed. She got ice to put on my face and water to drink and and a bell to ring if I needed them and a huge bowl to puke in. I wasn't allowed to lie down because the blood might pool in my lungs and I would drown in my own blood in my sleep. There were 2 boxes of tissues, a garbage bin, hydrogen peroxide, vaseline, everything. I wasn't go get up and go to the washroom on my own in case I fell. She thought of everything.

I didn't sleep that night, I survived. I worked on getting the godforsaken blood out of my ears but my skin had become super tender and so I had to keep doing it with breaks. During the night ny eyes swelled shut from the broken nose and the eyelashes glued together with blood.

So I got to work, cleaning myself up. Any sip of water was immediately expelled along with clotted blood, there was so much blood I'd swallowed it was unreal. I kept doing it thoughto get rid of the blood from my stomach, it felt like the right thing to do. I gingerly dabbed at my ears and eyelashes with wet tissues and wet Q-Tips, trying to dissolve the dried blood.

I had one bowl for clean water and one for dirty water. Soon the dirty water looked like it was blood as well. I think I eventually got a few hours of sleep.

One of the Worst Days Ever

I don't know why, but news travels fast and my school friends wanted to come and see me. Holy fuck, no! They can't see me like this all nasty with blood everywhere and a fucking Tampax taped under my nose to catch the blood and my whole face practically covered in nasty black stiches.

So 3 friends came over even though I expressley told them I didn't want visitors. I put a shawl over my face to save them from the horror. They kept saying it was ok, that I could take off the shawl and that they are good friends and would be forever (Where are they now? Oh yeah my PAIN was too much for them and they "got on with their lives". One said she didn't like me any more because the pain changed me.) and it was ok and they were sure my face wasn't that bad and I could remove the shawl. So finally I was convinced. One of them gasped. I tried to hold open the corner of one eye to see them (my eyes were swollen completley shut by this time and projected out further then my nose from being full of blood) and I saw their looks of horror. I felt vindicated and hurt at the same time. I replaced the shawl. They made excuses and left.

I went back to cleaning up the blood. I spent 8 days in the chair before my nosebleed was down enough that I could lie down and it took 2 weeks before the swelling was down enough that I could have Reconstructive surgery 1 out of 4, the one where they put the damn wires in (I got as many wires taken out as I could but they can't remove them all and they can't do an MRI of my head because of them).

(My horse was never delivered to the stable, they sold her to someone so I never got closure, never got to tell het I fogive her, never got to say goodbye or pat her. You would think I would deserve at least that.)

What it was really like

What it was really like

Like many other people my age, I used to go to the bar quite often,  to fend off the pain from being under-treated and to fend off loneliness. The bar I went to had an interesting mix of people from various backgrounds; most of them had something interesting to say. I met Robin and his friend by proximity, we just started talking. We had a few things in common, web design, and Robin was from a farm so we talked horses.

This went on for a couple years, it was just small talk, about Monty Roberts the horse trainer, and that sort of thing, all I knew is that his name was Robin, his parents had a Black Angus farm in Saskatewan, and he made the soup bases that went to restaurants like Earl’s. He had short, mousey brown hair, old 80’s style round glasses, ice blue-grey eyes, and a slight acne problem. He was medium built and maybe 5’ 11”.

I’d just gotten out of a bad abusive relationship and was taking some time to myself. Robin asked me if I’d like to go home with him. I said I’d rather not, that it was too soon after this bad boyfriend. He asked me out. Same answer. Besides, there was something “off” about him that I couldn’t put my finger on, but he was a little creepy at times. For example, he told me about a photo he has in his living room of a horse defecating, he said he thought it was funny. I thought that was gross and tasteless but I didn’t think it was reason enough to just dump someone as an acquaintance. I thought he was fine with the “let’s be friends” and the subject was dropped and he didn’t bother e about it again.

At the time I had terrible boundaries. If someone made an off-color joke I would laugh along, I didn’t want to be the wet blanket to stop it. I wanted to be “one of the guys” and accepted… by everyone. I worked very hard at that.

So when he brought a friend from work, I tried to laugh politely about the rape and GHB jokes… but they just didn’t stop. This guy was short and stocky with red hair, unshaven and a green lumber jacket on. Was this guy deliberately trying to push my buttons? I started to object, “I had no sense of humor” and “these were just harmless jokes” and “I don’t actually think they are planning on raping me are they?” I felt ashamed and said no. But they went on and on and became worse and worse. I said to the friend “enough of these jokes. I’m going to the bathroom and when I come back I want the subject changed please”. Stupidest move EVER. I thought Robin was my friend. I thought I could trust him with my drink. It didn’t occur to me that these “jokes” were outlining what my near future was.

I came back and very soon I was feeling very very detached. I remember Robin sort of holding me to him and him telling my friends that I was very drunk and he is just taking me home so I would be safe. My friends said ok.

Next thing I was in his car, a small white coupe with red seats and lots of stickers on it. Then we were in the apartment. He handed me The Man Who Listens to Horses by Monty Roberts. I was sitting on the floor for some reason, trying to take off my boots. It was very difficult.

I woke up out of my body looking down on two people… well… in bed. The bed and sheets were dirty and the room was sparse. There was a desk lamp, a clock and a picture of an arial view of a Black Angus farm on the bedside table. The girl wasn’t moving and looked asleep. Nothing seemed strange about this, I’ve dissassociated before. But what was going on down there? It seemed as though something was wrong… I thought about “Real Dolls”. Real Dolls are anatomically correct mannequins that men use as masturbation aids. I felt dead like a doll. I felt my hip bone get grabbed and I felt vertigo as I was being flipped and a deep cracking sound in my back and… oh my God this is me what is going on here stop this must end immediately. I did not want to be touched by this man. Especially not like this. I felt naked and vulnerable. I was naked and vulnerable. I began to panic. I remember feeling around for my clothes and then I was stuck to the ceiling at the corner of the room again. “Move!” I tried to command by body. I wondered if this was like what it felt like to be a “Real Doll”. Nothing happened, there was just a crumpled up shell being assaulted. It was like being a passenger in your own car with a bad driver at the wheel. “Move get out of there don’t worry about your clothes, run!” No response. I was the puppeteer and the marionette strings had been cut. My back hurt so much where it was snapped, each and every time he moved.

Next thing I knew it was daytime. Maybe 11 am. I got dressed and felt really dizzy and sat down in the hallway. I had no memory of the previous night. I got my riding boots on and I managed to find my way out of the three story walkup apartment, the door opened to a parking lot and past that a hilly park with people sunbathing. It was hard to get oriented but I managed to get home and went to sleep. I threw up a lot. My back throbbed.

It was the following day and I called the Sexual Assault Center. They said that from what I had to say, that it sounded like GHB and they said I could come in later that day to talk to someone. I went into the Pain Clinic. The doctor there examined me. He did a blood test for HIV and a pregnancy test. He asked if I wanted to call the police. See, the thing was, at the time I didn’t know if Robin was guilty; if he knew about the drugs. I figured the red headed friend put the drugs in to play a prank on Robin. I didn’t think Robin would intentionally do such a thing.

What they don’t tell you about disasscociatives like GHB is that the memories come creeping back over time, one puzzle piece by one. Later the key unlocked… the one thing that I needed to know. When I was flipped over was his voice, “Do you like me now, bitch?”

I saw him once. He looked happy to see me. “You drugged me,” I said. He went white as a sheet and ran. Too fast to get the police. Some skank staggered up to me and wagged her head like a chicken and said that he was very sweet and would never do that. I said “Yeah I used to think that too.” She swore at me and staggered back to her chair.

I looked for someone to accompany me to the police for help. Of all people that you think would be there to help you after an incident like this is your mom. Sadly, this is less often the case than we think. My mom was too busy and blamed me for being in the wrong place. Now they call that “victim blaming”. The bartender said “I was really drunk” well duh, that the effect those drugs do on you, give the appearance of extreme inebriation. That not an excuse for rape.

I went between wanting to forget about it, not being ABLE to forget about it because my back hurt so much, and worrying about my responsibility to press charges because of reoccurrence. The system makes it very hard to press charges. I’d had trouble pressing charges with baddan and the cops are rude, condescending, and they question you and your motives. I needed support to go through this.

The Near Death Experience.

This is jumping way ahead, but I kind of want to talk about it now. So we’ll toss any sort of senseical timeline to the wind, and put drips and drops of my life in and maybe eventually they will start to make some sort of sense. Like a puzzle coming together or something. It seems wrong in a way to through this cookie in the pile so early, but I have to get it off my back.

In 2008 I had a Near Death Experience.

Wait, let me back up. I currently live with chronic pain, or the unshortened “non-cancerous multiple-trauma intractable complex chronic pain syndrome with complications”. Basically it means I had a few serious traumas to my body that were bad enough to outweigh my personal toughness and knocked me down into a person I never thought I’d be: I knew I had it tough through life, but I thought I could handle anything they threw at me: broken skull, fiancé suicide, unloving parents and no support system, an extremely abusive relationship, and a violent rape in which I was almost killed. I will go over all of these later.

Still leading up to it, the pain that I was experiencing from the broken skull and two spinal injuries were making it hard to function. I didn’t have a proper pain doctor at the time and my pain was being under treated. I’d get dizzy spells from the pain but I’d brush them off and keep going. The pain though, gave me a general grand mal seizure.

This brought me to the attention of the pain management doctors (finally! It only took 20 years of being in pain to get taken seriously) and one of the meds they tried me on was dilaudid. This worked on the pain well enough but I got severely constipated from it.

Without getting into too much detail, the abdominal pain started to get worse and worse. I started to hallucinate. My friends online convinced me to call 911, and I went to the hospital and after minimal treatment they sent me home. I told them I still felt very sick and wasn’t ready to go home yet, but they sent me in a cab.

Over the next 5 hours the abdominal pain got worse and worse, and I began to get confused. My friends told me to call an ambulance again, I guess I was starting to not make any sense but I only get one ambulance ride per month on my current insurance plan and didn’t want t pick up the $350 bill for it. This example shows how distorted my thinking was: I couldn’t make the decision about getting a life saving ambulance ride and paying $350. Eventually I found that logical track though and called 911 again.

I started to get tunnel vision and they took my vitals (I don’t remember what they were but apparently it was very serious) and they strapped me into the gurney just as my vision started to stretch out into tunnel vision. They asked me if I had anyone to phone, I had frantically searched for the phone number of a long time friend of the family but was unsuccessful at finding it.

We got to the hospital and I was having moments of lucidity but the first strange thing that happened was that I could hear things from very far away: things I would not normally be able to hear. I could hear the conversation between the triage nurse and the EMT perfectly even though there was a lot of commotion between us, it was as if I had a microphone near them so I could block out all the unnecessary noise and tune in on what was relevant for me. The triage nurse turned to look at me and I must have looked a mess because she shielded her eyes and looked away. The look in her eyes was fear. I’ve never seen an ER nurse do this. I knew at this time I was in real trouble. I could hear the nurse say “they never should have let her leave the other hospital”.

Things started to get weird. I know and can recognize hallucinations from reality quite easily, from 25 years of chronic intractable migraine and sometimes certain medications would have some strange side effects. At this point, things weren’t that much different from this.

The floor had dropped away around my gurney; the gurney itself seemed to be about 10 feet high. I needed to use the washroom and required the help of the EMT’s to get off the thing and to walk to the toilet. They stood awkwardly outside with my IV drip kind of going through a crack in the door; the bathroom was too small to accommodate the IV pole. I cleaned up and getting back onto the gurney was much easier than getting down despite how weakened I was.

I was obsessed about thoughts of my parrot, Pteri, she had a real fright from the EMT’s coming in and clomping around the living room and testing my blood sugar by making my bleed (and filling the room with blood smell) and she had fallen off her perch in fright. I had the notion that she had broken a blood feather in her tail and was bleeding out. That started to become an obsession, I didn’t have anyone to call to feed and water my animals so I mustn’t die because they will slowly die from being starved of food and water. A recent night terror kept returning to me of me holding Pteri’s limp dead body in my arms while emergency workers buzzed around me. At least my horse would be ok; he was at a boarding stable.

The pain was surreal. I think I had told the EMT that it was a “15” on the 1-10 pain scale, and my blood pressure and pulse were very abnormal. I was sure that this had all been a ruse, that having been in chronic pain for 20 years had made me a nuscience and that “they” were trying to kill me since I mattered to no one. Yes, that was it. The Dilaudid Overdose, all this, they were going to kill me.

I was wheeled to a corner cubicle in the ER with the curtain pulled open so that the nurses could keep an eye on me. An ECG was applied, and they brought painkillers which I refused because I thought any little bit of morphine would put me over the edge and I would die for sure.

So I Rode The Pain.

The Louge Ride

Things stretched out horizontally, forever. Time slowed. I was in a tunnel, and I was accelerating at a tremendous rate, the G-Force was really heavy. The Nurse Triage stretched away from me, miles away, light-years away; although just like the sound trick it was also right up close if I focused on it. Things were becoming very crazy. I focused on the triage and crossed my arms in front of me and rocked and murmured “I must stay alive, I must stay alive, I must stay alive, I must stay alive” in 4’s like that. It became a song. I quietly chanted it as I rocked back and forth and held on to the sides of the gurney alternating with holding myself as the gurney sped along close to the speed of light. I was seeing double, and everything was slowed down, I watched a nurse walking towards me in slow motion, he looked like a statue, mid stride. Everything became animated looking, that is it was as if reality had animation or movie frames. The tunnel began to get twists and turns in it so I had to hold the rails so that I wouldn’t fall off. I was speeding along like Eleanor Arroway in the wormholes in Contact, only the tunnel looked like clear warped glass or water or something, distortions of the real world.

The “blue tunnel” appeared sometime around now, it was blindingly bright and it was pulling like a vacuum on my sternum area. I turned my back to it, if I acknowledged it I’d be vacuumed up. I thought of my friends online worrying about me, not knowing what was going on.

The main tunnel in front of me started to branch out, small capillaries coming out of the main one. The tube became larger and larger and soon they were large enough that I was able to one way or the other, I had no control. The mood of things started to go from surreal to sinister. A scuttling started in the pit around the gurney, and I had the sense that there were creatures down there, looking part wolf and part human, grey with no fur and glowing red eyes. Since I wasn’t taking the blue tunnel up, they started waiting for a FEEDING.

The lucid part of me thought this was very interesting. I was hallucinating but I could analyze it. I was getting a guided tour of the world between life and death. Most people get Near Death Experiences when they are unconscious and low on oxygen or whatever, I was awake and things were going on and I was able to communicate. I was however trapped in the tunnel going at an enormous rate of speed. From across the room I could hear the EMT listing my meds, he kept saying “MS Contin”, and at the time I was on “CS Contin” and I would shout out and correct him. He kept saying that he couldn’t understand how I could be lucid with the vitals I had, or how I could hear them talk. He was very sweet, he walked by my gurney three times to see how I was, and I’d say “I’m not dead yet” and he’d deny walking past to check in on me.

I started to get tested. The tunnels’ capillaries arteries became big enough to travel through, and so I would go one way or the other by thinking the direction. When I would go through the splits in the tunnels I would get an image of my double vision and I had to choose which the “right” one was. They were identical. The first 5 or so time I chose the right path and was rewarded with a serene image of a forest in the summer with sunbeams visible and the sound of life everywhere, insects and birds and frogs, very warm and peaceful. The next time the right direction was the “wrong” decision and I was startled with a close-up face, ashen grey with a ghoulish grin of Schadenfreude, broken teeth and a mouthful of blood grinning right in my face. “Rape face”, I’ve heard it called. Someone so impaired with bloodlust that they are enjoyment at making someone suffer so that they aren’t even noticing their injuries.

The demons face was so startling and so naturally the next time I chose the left path. Demon again, laughing at my pain. I started to search for differences in the images on the double vision. Was one brighter then the other? More colorful? A different but close animation frame? Some small difference in the images? In the split second I was viewing these “photos” of reality I had to decide which the “good” image was and which the “bad” one was. The demon face was gathering more and more power each time I accidently selected it. The tunnels were getting bigger and faster. I must have been approaching light speed for nearly an hour by now, and the forest and the face images were become more and more tangible, as was the blue tunnel above me. I had my back to the blue tunnel and its vacuum effect, I was not ready to go up it and the best way was to not acknowledge it. That was the fastest path to death. I wasn’t ready to go there.

I imagined Pteri’s water drying out and her waiting for someone to refill her water dish and dying, trapped in her cage. I imagined that Pteri had already bled out through the broken blood feather and already died. These were all very real to me.

I knew it was of utmost importance to focus on reality or I might never escape this crazy nightmare. The “slideshow” became more and more frequent, soon I was micromanaging my heartbeats by guessing the right or wrong picture of my double vision. A huge tunnel approached and the gravity of it made me go faster and faster. I was using logic to try and figure out the right picture, was one brighter, was one smoother, was one more crisp, was one slightly different? This one had a sense of urgency to it. I guessed in the large tunnel and there was glee all around me, the teeth and the bloody ghoulish grin. The dog things below got very excited. I heard my older niece’s voice saying “Auntie Nicky is going to Heaven!” They were so young that’s what they thought death meant. “No no no” I thought “this isn’t right.” I thought about my friends and Pteri and my other pets and my horse and my loved ones… and I fell out of the grip.

We are not designed to go backwards in time. Vein’s valves are not designed for blood to go the other way, you can’t un-digest food, things just don’t go backwards. We are designed for linear 1 dimensional forward time. But the universe folded like one of those origami fortune tellers that little kids make. It reversed, and folded inside out. The walking nurse went backwards a bit. I went a fraction of a second back in time and it hurt. I was sucked backwards with gravity from the other direction and managed to make it back to the forest. I’d paid a price for it though, the demon was enraged and there was now a strong suction coming from the scary side.

But I had figured out the codex, the key. My niece had given it to me. You have to choose the pictures with your heart, your instinct, rather than rational mind and logic. From there forward the double image puzzle was much easier, I didn’t make many mistakes and the ones I made were relatively small ones. I began to get accustomed and almost bored of this place, it was about 6 hours by now. Coincidently, my stepdad would be coming into town within a couple of hours and he would be able to come to the ER. The nurses left a message on his machine.

I began to feel around and explore this inner world. I knew I couldn’t look directly at the blue tunnel but I sort of felt what it felt like; just like a vacuum sucking on an intangible part in your sternum. I tried to look through the fluid walls of the forward tunnel but I was unable to focus on what was out there, it looked like distorted glass or water of what was really there, only stretched out in tunnel vision. The nursing triage was still infinity away. I became less afraid if the forest and walked towards it. I saw a demon dog trying to fight the good, but the good was unconditional and shone on the dog and made it have less motivation to swipe and claw; it couldn’t get a grip on the intangible sunrays anyway, they were just warmth and love and peace. It exhausted itself and laid down for a nap. Good will always win over evil because of this.

The Doctor came in and we talked as she examined me and we talked about my horse and she said even though I’m too sick to ride now, I should keep him because he represents hope. My stepfather showed up and the hallucinations dissipated a bit, but I had the hallucinations and the pull from death for a good two weeks. I was very sick and weak.

I marked down what I could remember in the chatroom, and my friends were happy to know that I’d made it. Two strange things happened from this; I got an Astigmatism from staring far for such a long time, far sighted, and had to get my first pair of glasses ever; and Pteri had broken a blood feather but luckily didn’t bleed out. “You just had something like a bad acid trip” my stepdad said, immediately skeptical and dismissive of my experience.

Later I’ll talk about the fallout from the experience.