Awake

Things are kind of a blur for the first couple of days after they woke me up from the coma. I didn't know how many kids I had, I didn't know what year it was, I didn't know where I was.

I'm sure there were doctors and nurses around when they woke me up, but I only remember my husband. And him telling me that I had been asleep for a while. They woke me up on March 7th 2011 and I thought it was the year 2012. But I also thought that it wasn't Christmas yet and I thought that I'd missed our son's 3 year old birthday, both things that had already happened a couple of months before.

In my mind I was talking a mile a minute, asking questions, and more disturbingly, getting answers. I heard my own voice when I was talking. No one else heard this, because at first I was still intubated.

I don't know how long after I woke up they extubated me. But this is how I remember that procedure. There was a doctor there telling my husband to remember what he told him before about what he could expect would happen with me. Enigmatic yes. Somehow in my mind I had decided that this doctor was sort of a cocky know-it-all, but good at his job. There was also a nurse there who I in my mind had also decided that she didn't like this doctor at all.

They told me to cough while the pulled out this really long tube from my throat. And in my mind there was like a projectile of mucus that came out with the tube, shooting towards the door, narrowly missing the doctor, much to the nurse's amusement. In reality, they just pulled the tube out and I coughed for a long time getting all the mucus and spit out, which they suctioned away.

I was so weak I could barely move my head or my arms. Muscles actually start to deteriorate after only 8 hours of inactivity, and I hadn't moved for 21 days. My body was mush. It was shocking not to have a pregnancy belly anymore, I was 30 lbs lighter, my nails were long, I had hairy armpits, but I think some nice nurse may have shaved my legs below the knees. My hair was a mess. A nurse told me they had fun playing with it, braiding it so it wouldn't get in the way of the machines. In my mind I thought they had had to shave some part of it off and was wondering what kind of haircut I would have to get after this.

My vocal chords were raw from having a tube rammed in between them for 3 weeks. I talked and talked but my voice was barely a raspy whisper.

What was happening in actuality and what was happening in my head were two very different things. First I thought I was at a hospital in Iceland and that there had been complications with the birth so they had to fly me to another hospital, the one I was at now. Which in my mind was in India, in Bhutan even.

To be continued...