Ventilator horrors: I came back to tell you what it’s like
After weeks on a ventilator, and deeply under anesthesia, another hallucination came to me: Family, friends and even old business partners filed into my hospital room. Bizarrely, the doctors asked me to sit up so they could slide a flat board under me. The board was a valuable painting. And everyone was in on using my death for the heist.
And then I seemed to see what lay beyond six weeks in a medically induced coma, dying from an upper respiratory disease. Nothing. All that I could see ahead was absolute darkness, the end of everything in life, all joy, all sadness, all replaced by an absolutely dark, silent nothing. And then my heart, in real-life, flatlined. Eight seconds. Then it started and stopped again.
In clinical terms, I was not dead; I escaped with barely enough oxygen and brain activity to not be declared clinically dead. But I count it as having died and returned. I was in an intensive care unit dying from a vicious upper respiratory infection, exactly four years ago. While not the new coronavirus, it was the sometimes-deadly super bacteria MRSA, with over a 50 percent fatality rate when caught, as I had, in the lungs. In reality, there were no friends but rather a circle of doctors and staff. The valuable painting was just an X-ray taken from the back as my lungs filled with fluid.
I recount this now because as tens of thousands die and tens of thousands more fight for life amid the pandemic, they are not in a blissful sleep; they are fighting in their minds to survive.
It all began for me with a simple cough. But it just wouldn’t go away. I did have a history of illness: a few years earlier I had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, the result of an undetected electrical arrhythmia. Because heart failure is so often ultimately fatal, it made me reas