For Context: This post is the second in a series which talks about my experiences of the last year, my illness, and subsequent hospitalization and recovery. There is a LOT of stuff that I simply don’t know. Things happened that I was not aware of at the time. I will NOT try to explain the illness too much, as I want this to be about what I experienced, and not a report on my health, nor a treatise on the health care industry. This is more or less a list of things that happened, and not a narrative story. Someday maybe I will get to write that. This post is a summary of events from around 12/9 to around 12/15/2009.
What is Real?
“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste, and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” – Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
I’m honestly not sure these days, how much of what I remember was real, and what was a hallucination. I had a lot of dreams about what was happening to me. For a while I was convinced that I was captured or kidnapped. There were ‘Doctors’ in my dreams, and they were usually good guys who wanted to help me but simply couldn’t. They couldn’t let me go. That’s all that I wanted. I wanted to go home. I thought about my wife, our son, and the baby that was on the way, and all I wanted was to get back to them.
Sometimes I thought it was Al–Qaeda, sometimes it was aliens, sometimes it was the ‘Shadow Government.’ What I couldn’t figure out though, was what they wanted from me. I kept telling them that there was no reason to hold me hostage. “There’s no money. No one can give you money for me,” I kept telling them. But they wouldn’t listen. They never listened.
I did try to escape, and almost made it a couple of times. Although, where would I have gone? I can remember when they started putting the ‘mittens’ on me. They were huge wrapped pads on my hands that were supposed to keep me from pulling my wires and tubes out. They started with plain Velcro, but I was able to pull that off with my teeth. Then they wrapped them with tape. And I think they ended up doing something even more drastic, but I can’t remember. Pretty sure that I was tied down at one point.
What was really happening was this:
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