Ten Year Anniversary: That Time of Year

That time of year
Michael Sedano

 

Ten years ago, July 2014, I met my fate. I died in post-op ICU.

 

Trouble started two weeks before with sharp abdominal pain that grew over a few days. I followed a doctor's advice to aguantarlo and take a tablet analgesic, call him if it grew worse. Pain grew worse and I aguantared as the weekend begins. Pain drives me to lie in a darkened bedroom delighting at the laughter from kids splashing in the pool. I wanted those to be the last sounds I hear, fever and pain totally overwhelm me. 

Barbara insists I go to the ER. She drags me off the mattress, directing me get in the car. Barbara always knew best.

 

Peritonitis raged from a perforated colon, the source of that pain. I'm wheeled quickly to an operating room and lights out. I'm fixed.

 

I come-to in a comfortable room where kind women have settled me into a hospital bed and get me on my feet. The surgeon visits to explain what he's done, and brags to me he cured my diverticulitis by removing two feet of my large intestine. The surgeon feels all heroic that, with a camera and robot knives he’s poked into my insides, he’s redesigned my midsection, cut an organ, added a plastic bag at the waist for waste, and sealing off the rest.

The doc doesn't know he's mucked up. My spleen, an innocent bystander in the process of peritonitis clean-up and sigmoid colectomy with end colostomy, was nicked by a robot knife. 

My post-op ward nurses encourage me to take walks, side-by-side with a stainless steel tree dangling tubes and swaying hanging bags bulging with fluids. 

I take an experimental short sojourn and tolerate the effort. I take a much longer walk and even cross over the bridge between Huntington Hospital’s twin towers to gaze across the city rooftops to the mountains. 

Inside my sinews, where the sun don’t shine, I'm bleeding from a Spleen busy consuming itself, doing its job.

 

The day after my bridge walkabout, Barbara begins her daily visit making small talk and concerned inquiries. I mumble fatuous responses or not at all. I can't keep my eyes open. I feel myself slump down in the recliner chair I occupy, eyes closed, aware only that I am surrounded by room noise.

 

"He’s turned grey", or "He’s all grey", Barbara calls with alarm out the door. A pair of rubber-soled shoes squeal as the nurse wheels out the door to pick up a phone. In a minute, strong hands lift me onto a rolling table, strap me down and wheel me at high speed along hallways wheels protest at hard left and hard right turns. The gurney hits aluminum thresholds hard with the front wheels then hitting hard with the rear wheels. Each ka-bump intensifies pain in my belly forcing my eyes open to prove I'm still alive. Ceiling tiles scroll past interrupted by fluorescent fixtures marked by brown waterspots, dead insect shadow, the light too bright but only while I’m directly under.

 

Into the incredibly bright surgery room someone pushes the gurney. For a moment I grow alert. Dang, there’s a lot of people here. Some of them grab me and pull me onto a tiny hard table. A woman on my right whose masked face doesn't conceal beautiful brown eyes and skin pushes a needle into a tube someone has stuck into my arm. Here it comes, she announces.

 

The next time I come to is after being sent back from the other side. I wrote about it in La Bloga ten years ago, almost as soon as the big pain had subsided. Here's a link to that column.

 

https://labloga.blogspot.com/2014/07/get-out-of-line.html

 

I was three days in ICU before I woke momentarily to whisper “burn sage.” Then I woke to a deluxe corner room with the hospital’s best nurses and nurse assistants, people came to visit me and see the dead man for themselves, after 21 days in that bed I got solid food, pooped, and got sent home again. Thanks to the teachers union contract, Blue Shield covered almost every expense.

 

Science calls my crossing over a “near death experience.” NDE inform a rich body of academic writing and study, I'm not unique. A large majority of researchers offer chemical-based explanations for NDE, that stressed human brains produce psychedelic DMT, the entire NDE is a freak out, a mind trip. There is no ‘there’ there. 

 

Ni modo, the DMT tipos are wrong. Raza know there's another side because we live with cucui. I've been to The Other Side, so have others. I’d read about NDE back in grad school, dozens of years before I died. There's lot of material on the computer.

 

People who come back share a variety of profound perceptions about what happened to them. Over time, people realize their NDE brings behavioral consequences. A model of post-NDE behavior called the Life Changes Inventory, says gente show  “increased concern for others, lessened fear of death, increased belief in an afterlife, increased religiosity, and decreased desire for material success and approval of others.” Link to PDF 

 

Some of these outcomes describe me, but more that anything, for years after, I wanted to know why the heck it happened, to me in particular. Why did I get sent back in 2014? I wondered and marveled. Indeed, it was a gift. Now I know.

 

The ancestors sent me back in 2014 to take care of Barbara during our life with Alzheimer’s Dementia. We were diagnosed in 2018. She lived until 2023. 

I understand, now, the ancestors knew Barbara would need me to be there for her. It all makes sense. Barbara saved my life two times before I got sent back--dragging me to the ER and noticing I was bleeding to death--so I could give her the best life possible when she had no choice but to depend completely on me, as we promised, all the days of our lives.

 

There is life after Alzheimer's. I have a new life. The bare ruined choirs will have to wait, I hear the sweet birds sing.