Sometimes it takes a crisis to put things in perspective.
To bring out the truth.
Lying in that hospital bed in absolute agony, I started to realise that my whole life had been spent following other people's wishes.
I had been in denial of what I wanted. I had silenced my own inner voice to please others.
I was a puppet and somebody else was always pulling the strings.
I hadn't slept for 4 whole days or was it 5? It is hard to know once you get past a certain point.
Time extends out and loses any relationship to objective measurements.
Beyond a certain point without sleep your brain goes into short "fugue like" states where you disappear for a few moments at a time - bursts of slow wave activity that resemble sleep.
These are called microsleeps...
THE PAIN again. That pain. It is there it is present. In an instant I can go back there. It is everything, it is ALL.
It is like I never left it. In some dark moments I feel like I am still there.
Perhaps all the time since is just a brief dream from one of those microsleeps and in heartbeat I will back in that bed.
Back in that pain that never ending PAIN.
These little absences were a sweet escape from that searing, unending pain in my chest.
Just as they would take me away from that reality, so in a moment that pain would wrench me back.
I have never felt pain like that before.
No matter what position I took, no matter how I sat or laid down it was there.
Everywhere.
Filling every sense, every moment. Every breath was pain and nothing else well almost nothing else.
Pain and thoughts. In order to feel the pain you must be conscious and if you are conscious there are the thoughts.
You feel the pain and you think about it and in some ways that makes it even worse.
"When will it end?"
"Did it end?"
No amount of morphine or even diamorphine (heroin) even touched it.
It was just there, bigger, more intense more dominant pushing its way into evey conscious waking thought.
I just wished they could have knocked me out, anaesthetised me against it.
"Please just let me escape from this pain" I thought or am I still thinking it?
It is so hard to know - to be sure.
One thing is for sure I literally wanted to die.
It felt like someone was stabbing my lower chest with a red hot machete and then pouring boiling acid into the open wound.
I couldn't eat, I couldn't drink, I couldn't sleep (much though I wanted to).
That whole week is etched into my mind like the words chiselled into a granite gravestone.
It is funny how time perception changes under extreme stress. Those several days were an eternity of suffering.
A week becomes a lifetime.
Time slows down. The tick-tock of every moment moves at a snail's pace.
Tick then tock, then...t-i-c-k then t---o---c---k as the pain intensifies.
This is hell. Or was hell - it is hard to say? Is it in the past or am I still there dreaming of a future that will never come?
In those moments one wishes for the mind to stop - a kind of oblivion, some form of escape no matter how brief - but it doesn't come.
All you can do is endure and wait. Just wait.
T-i-c-k then t---o---c---k and so it goes on...
Those thoughts keep coming though. Always coming, hand in hand with the pain.
The pain gives them a laser-like focus.
A new clarity emerges and you have all the time in the world to contemplate your situation.
I imagine it is similar in some ways to how people describe their life flashing before them in a matter of seconds during a near death experience.
In those 7 days of hell I realised that my life was a lie.
The pain allowed me to confront something that I was too uncomfortable to allow myself to see in my conscious waking life.
My life was based on conformity and adherence. I cared too much about what other people thought.
I had taken a back seat in my own life and I had stopped thinking for myself.
Worse than that I was deeply unhappy but I couldn't even allow myself to accept that fact and had hidden it deep down in my unconscious mind.
Nothing hides from that pain though. The pain shines a light on all those uncomfortable truths.
All those little skeletons in the deep recesses of your mind come out to play and fight and do all those thinks they have never been allowed to do.
In those terrible moments I become myself again - or should it be "became" - hard to say like I said before.
I think part of you remains in that moment forever.
I am still there and always will be. Perhaps there are some experiences which never truly end.
They are there with you forever and in a strange way you are forever with them.
Sometimes it takes a crisis to put things in perspective, to reveal the truth.
-To confront what can't be confronted. To feel what you don't want to feel, to see what you have hidden from yourself.
Sometimes it takes a crisis - but it doesn't have to.
We can confront these things right now if we would just be honest with ourselves.
Thank you for reading.
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