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.