Blogger-rhythm

Hrm, that vaguely-mathematical piece of word play didn't entirely work out (but I'm still keeping it).

I realize that there's a certain rhythm to blogging, and if you lose the beat, it's hard to get back on track. This isn't an excuse, just an observation.

Obviously, I lost track of the rhythm, and it's been a little longer than forever since I last posted. For that, I apologize...that, and a bunch of other things, like how I'm about to drop some information that some people that (hopefully?) read this blog may not have heard.

I died on December 19, 2008.

First off, I have to apologize for the overdramatic kickoff. If I was poetically/literarily (is that a word? blogger.com is telling me it's not...) gifted, I'd probably be able to put more meaning into that statement, but alas, I'm not known for my subtlety, so I'm going to stick with what actually happened.

On Friday morning, I went into the local maternity ward (it's true, I started at Sutter) to have surgery on my shoulder, which I dislocated in a hockey-related crash. This in itself is funny because I play in a no-contact league, but we'll ignore that for now. From what I can gather, everything was going fine (they were embedding anchors in my scapula, to which they tie the main stabilizing ligament - the labrum - to), when my heart started to go into arrhythmia. My heart stopped for 5 minutes, and they had to use a defibrillator to restart my heart. I was rushed to Dominican hospital and kept in the Intensive Care Unit while they performed a bunch of procedures on me to keep me alive. I was on life support (breathing support, IV, wall of machines) in the ICU until Saturday, but thanks to the legions of doctors and nurses that worked on me during that ~36 hour period, I was stable enough to be sent into the normal hospital area. During this period, some punk-ass bitch of a doctor apparently came out and told my parents that all they could do was pray, and I can only imagine what they felt at the time. Unacceptable.

I woke up confused, groggy, but allegedly fairly lucid on Saturday night (don't remember that much from my first waking moments), then slept and woke up to see my parents and sister (the middle sister, Hanna; my oldest sister Anna had to go back to NY for work). Sunday was fairly uneventful, other than the splitting headache and the various hospital-related discomforts, so I'll just say that I slept fitfully throughout the day and leave it at that.

I was discharged from the hospital on Monday. I was wheeled out to the front by a nurse, where I hopped into my parents' car and was driven home. On the drive home, I mentioned to my sister, "It's weird, the trees look really green, and the sky's really blue." She replied, "Oh yeah, it probably should...it rained over the weekend." Hahaha, classic. I was home in time for Christmas dinner, though it was a bit awkward because of the not-quite-good-as-new shoulder.

It's strange in retrospect, because all this happened over such a short period of time, and I wasn't awake for the most important parts of it. You hear about how your life hung in the balance, how it was so surreal to see that wall of machines attached to me, and about how everybody was so worried (I feel horrible about that...I apologized when I saw everybody, but nobody was having it). You hear all of this from others, so really your death and rebirth, in a sense, is second-hand. I'm not sure what that implies, but it does occur to me that my temporary loss of life affected others more than it affected me.

That is, of course, a ridiculous thing to say, and just as clearly, an obvious truth. Both aspects of the statement have merit in my eyes though, because the sources of both facets provide an argument to continue living to your fullest: 1) Simply because death is not an alternative that you want to choose (circular, no?) and 2) because you would cause too much pain to those around you. I created more chaos and sadness in those two days than I would care to imagine, and though the reaction was genuinely touching (curious how such negative concepts are heartwarming), I never, ever, want to put anyone through that again.
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My cousin James asked me if I felt any different, or if I had any sort of revelation. Before I could even think, I simply said, "Haha, nah, not really." Even as I was saying these words, I knew that wasn't exactly correct. It's not like I was lying to him; it was as if my body was instinctively avoiding a long discussion about the state of my being. I mean, I truly don't feel as if I were reborn. My overly logical, practical approach to life hasn't changed, and I haven't really changed the way I live. In fact, I'm so unchanged that it's almost disappointing, even to ME. Yet, I could swear that you automatically start living your life with a little bit more abandon, with a certain joie de vivre. Maybe I'm looking too hard for a change of some sort (like the trees and the sky), and want to be affected, but I don't think that's it. You just care a little less about your every day worries, and become a little more uplifted by the loved ones around you. I think that's why I'm genuinely inspired by some of the posts on this blog, even if a large majority of them are simply bits of internets hilarity.

Ah well. Maybe nothing's changed. I'm fine with that too; it's just great to be blogging like this, ya know? Hahah.

Now, I'll just abashedly scratch my head and apologize for the gnarly post that I just dropped on ya'll, and apologize for the huge delay in preparing said gnarly post.







(that's the wristband from Dominican Hospital)










Now if you'll excuse me, I'mma go to sleep because I gotta get up for physical therapy. But until I see ya'll next, Joie de Vivre, bitches.

Joie de Vivre.