Originally posted on my alt account on September 7 2022. Don't know why I didn't copy it to over here. My coma was on February 14, 2003, last Valentines Day 2023 was the 20 year. Still pretty fucked up. Brain injuries suck, cancer sucks, life sucks.
"...We hung around until the final band
Called Escape Is At Hand For The Travellin' Man
You yelled in my ear this music speaks to me
They launched into 'Lonely From Rock And Roll'
Followed by 'They Checked Out An Hour Ago'
Closing with 'All Desires Turn Concrete'Those melodies come back to me
At times beyond our heartbeatI guess I'm too slow yes I'm too, yes I'm too slow
but you said anytime of the day was fine
You said any time of the night was also fineI walked through your revolving door
Got no answer on the seventh floor
Elevator gave a low moan
The pigeons sagged the wire with their weight
Listening to the singing chambermaid
She sang 'They Checked Out an Hour Ago'"
The Tragically Hip Phantom Power(1998 ) Escape is at Hand for the Travellin' Man
The Tragically Hip's tribute to Jim Ellison.
It should bug me that I was so callus to jim's friends and band-mates, somehow it doesn't
I don't know where I want to go with this post. Part of me wants to tell the story of how I ended up in the coma,
NO it wasn't a suicide attempt.
It was an accident at work, cut my hand badly, I caught some virus through the cut, and fell into a coma on Valentines Day of all things
Viral encephalitis.
. It didn't help that I was having a argument with my then girlfriend over the cell phone when I needed my full attention to the dangerous fucking machining center I was making expensive microphone bodies in. Having the fucking idiots on the other shifts at Shure spitting in the machine coolant/cutting fluid has a bit to do with it too.
She was so broken up over me being in a coma, that she was there every night, except she crawled into the hospital bed, fell asleep and accidentally pulled out my IV.
THREE TIMES!
that I know of.
One of the weird side effect of the antiviral drug Acyclovir is that it make you think you're dead, a zombie. I'm not joking here, this is one of the real side effects. Lets see, in a coma, intubated because you stopped breathing, and heart stopped several times. Sounds pretty close to dead to me.
I've been dead for 20 years this next Valentines Day.
>
I'd like to do a nursery rhyme)
You crazy babe, Bathsheba, i wancha
You're suffocating, you need a good shed
I'm tired of living, Sheba, so gimme...
Dead!
Dead!
We're apin', rapin', tapin', catharsis
You get torn down and I get erected
My blood is working but my, my heart is...
Dead!
Dead!
Dead!
Pixies-Doolittle(1989) - Dead
(Black Francis probably deliberately worded the lyrics so they form a skull when centered)
I really don't get you women. She was upset at how I was working nights. Her phonecall to me consisted of how she met this dude at a bar from out of town, that were talking about anal sex and she was going to show him a good time. Left as a message I didn't listen to until my my lunch break, nightshift so 3am. This woman is a University of Chicago Masters Alumni. Educated, but still dumb as a stump. Her PoliSci degrees versus my Chemistry and BioEngineering degrees, who's was tougher. I called her back, got the guy she was with answering her phone, told him to put her on. Told her to "never call me again and that I'll drop off her shit at her moms".
Should be done, right?
Fucking cold out,
amazingly clear sky,
all the stars out,
Looked at Orion, then over towards Taurus
The seven sisters of Pleiades glowing blue against the light pollution
February in Chicago
Finished my cigarette, and went back in to go to work.
Fucking a monkey could do this shit, or a robot. Dead end job, I was used to designing dies and fixtures, and building them as well., and I could have designed a better way of making those microphones during a lunch break. Still us men can only think of ONE thing at once, Women need to be reminded, our brains don't multitask, at all. It's a hardwired genetic difference. Division of labor between our hunter-gatherer ancestors, women stayed in the camp tending the children, cooking, fire. A brain that can multitask is advantageous, keeps the progeny alive. The males out hunting, a focused single-tasking brain is advantageous, keeps one from getting mauled by a bear, or trampled by bison or woolly mammoth... Daydreaming gets you killed or injured, and injured is just as good as dead because of infection.
Women need to be reminded, men's brains don't multitask, at all. It's a hardwired genetic difference.
Then my phone starts ringing. I hang up on her.
And again and again...
And I go to the machine to take out one of the finished mics, bump my hand up against the ultra sharp carbide endmill and slice clean through my skin, from the wrist to just below the vein that returns blood from my thumb. It didn't even bleed, at first, that's how sharp the cutter was, sharper than most razors. The skin pulled back, just like dissecting something in biology classes, I could see the vein I just narrowly missed cutting in half and the muscles were intact, just skin, like a butchered animal. Think pulling the skin off an uncooked chicken thigh, just like that. No tendons injured, I could see it all.
Gonna need some stitches.
TungstenCarbide has a hardness of between 8-9, depending on the composition of the binder and the grade. Diamond is 10 on the Mohs hardness scale. The only thing that can scratch, cut, abrade WC is diamond. A sharp edge on a WC doesn't roll over like a razor blade or a scalpel, it doesn't blunt, it does shatter though. The symbol for Tungsten is W, for wolframite the mineral it was first isolated from, the C is obviously carbon. It's dense, denser than lead, some grades just slightly less dense than Depleted-uranium U238. Heavy stuff.
Coolant or cutting fluid is generally some water miscible oil nowadays. Back in the 70's or earlier they used to use just oil. It's this milky white liquid, like milk for the same reasons milk is white, or pine-sol in a bucket of mopwater two clear liquids that turn cloudy white when mixed, little droplets of fat or oil in the liquid causes Mie scattering, the same reason fluffy clouds are white. I got a bunch of this cutting fluid in my wound. When I got back from the ER, the day shift guys just got there, my replacement asked how I was doing, and added in Gross! everyone has been using that machine as a spittoon.
Wonderful. Can the night get any better.
With the extra money from working nights, I bought her a Sybian and an engagement ring. Well fuck that, returned the ring that morning. Won't be needing the surprise for Valentines day anymore. Went to sleep, not going to get 8 hours before back to work.
Well, you wish upon a star
That turns into a plane
And I guess that's right on par
Who's left to blame?If you were a pill, I'd take a handful at my will
And I'd knock you back with something sweet and strong
Plenty of times, you wake up in February makeup
Like a fool and the morning star you're goneThe Replacements- Pleased to Meet Me (1987) - Valentine
Things start getting foggy after this, up the nerves in my hand and into the spine and brain, or it is a virus that can break the blood brain barrier. Drive the 40ish miles from the South west Side to Evanston on the northside, work drive home. Repeat
One of the nights, the security guard comes into the CNC Shop ( that's CNC for Computer Numerical Control not whatever that three letter acronym means here now) Tells the manager something ,then they're both headed my way.
The manager, black dude from Evanston.
"Man you have got to get that bitch under control, you can't be having her come here and disrupt your work man!"
The fun never ends.
The security guard is lecturing me on safety and crime prevention. Brain not processing whatever he said anymore. Takes me up to the door. He made her wait outside in the cold. Good.
"Blah blah blah, appologise blah, plus she brought me a pan of lasagna just like Dante's girlfriend did in Clerks an how much I like that movie." Well somthing like that, braine no workie so good by now.
Subtleties aside, she completely miss the point of Clerks, It's a thinly veiled telling of Dantes Inferno and the food was mana or something. A Kevin Smith Comic book version of it. Love that movie.
Get back together, sure why not, I'm already in Hell.
Homsleepdrive call thecuntdrive work. put down head at tabel for break, finish shift, get in car and turn right out of the parking lot...
THat's it Lights out.
Somehow I managed to make the drive in Chicago morning traffic and not get into an accident and hurt or kill some one else. I woke up in a hospital bed, my arm was completely swollen up, intrusion from the IV needle being pulled out of the vein, pumping saline and antiviral drugs into my intramuscular space. She was asleep next to me. I didn't remember anything yet. Nurse eventually came in and fixed the IV. Morphine or a sedative Lights back out.
I woke up in a hospital bed, my arm was completely swollen up, intrusion from the IV needle being pulled out of the vein, pumping saline and antiviral drugs into my intramuscular space. She was asleep next to me. I didn't remember anything yet. She woke up. and looked at me. I remembered being in love with her, and gave her a look. And then I remembered some of the above stuff and started screaming for the nurse to get her out of my room! Nothing I said was intelligible . Nurse came in and fixed the IV. Morphine or a sedative Lights back out.
Replete of the above for a third time, except this time I started yelling at her calling her a cheating cunt. The nurse said something like we're running out of veins to put this in. Lights back out.
Not horror or fiction, this is real. This really happened.
In the end. got fired at Shure for No call No show. They refused to pay for the earlier ER trip. ICU time was $15,000 per day, CAT scans MRI PET scan, doctors, nurses drugs. At some point the cost of something became some one else's problem, What I owe the hospital Millions? looks like the Hospital has a problem at that point because fuck you! went home with an PICC installed, it's a tube inserted into the crook of my left elbow and snaking up to just short of the vein and valve of my heart. They have a really bad tendency to clot, a blood clot running the length of your bicep to the heart. Syringe of Heparin or Wharfin, Pressurized Balloon of Saline and Acyclovir antivirus meds, delivered right to my heart, then a saline flush. Had to keep on the acyclovir for a while, Its cost was outrageous back then.
4 comments
This post I wrote immediately after the Exit nightclub Liz Phair - Material Issue blog post.
I was a drunken idiot to them that night. Should have eventually hooked up with the busty blond, but it wasn't fated to be.
The first 6 months, I slept, got up to plug in my IV of antiviral medication 3 times a day. There are no pain receptor nerves in the brain. It shouldn't hurt. It does.
The feeling of your brain crushing itself against the inside of your skull is indescribable. I didn't want to get up, or roll over or move in any way, because I could feel my brain touching the inside of my skull.
What a year. Everything that could go wrong, did. Worked for a startup that went bankrupt, the owner was running a scam. Bouncing paychecks, not fun. Had to take that crap temp job at Shure running CNC Lathes and Machining Centers all night. My Dad died of prostrate cancer, like I'm going thought now. I destroyed my kitchen the night he died, punched holes in the wall, broke a finger, shattered every one of his heavy bottomed leaded glass rock glasses that I had. I still was picking leaded glass out of the plaster and patching the room up months after my coma, on days I could get out of bed. About a year and a half after the coma, I was pretty sure it had given me Anterograde amnesia, it happens sometimes with Herpes Simplex encephalitis or Varacella Zoster (Chickenpox virus) It's hard to tell if your memory doesn't work, when your memory doesn't work. I wasn't forming new memories, at least not consistently.
I thought she was the light at the end of the tunnel, Nope A train.
She wanted a spanking, like that would be enough punishment. Instead I was nice, in a vanilla way. If I stared to spank her, I would just lose it.
lex talionis
Code of Hammurabi
No. The world doesn't need 2 brain-damaged individuals.
"Treatment and prognosis
Treatment is with intravenous antivirals (e.g. aciclovir), and if appropriate, antiepileptics and agents to reduce intracranial pressure.
Mortality ranges dramatically depending on how early treatment is instituted. Even in patients who are young and otherwise well, and only lethargic still have a mortality of 25%. Older patients or those comatose at the time treatment is started invariably have a much poorer outcome. Overall mortality is over 70% with only 2.5% of affected patients ever fully recovering."
radiopaedia.org
Because I got the virus from a wound it went systemic, into the brain, brains stem, spinal cord, liver kidneys.... Dodged a bullet, 70% mortality is no joke. Didn't win the lottery with the 2.5% chance of a full recovery, still got it, had a second encephalitis episode about 10 years ago, didn't go the to hospital for that, I was hoping it would kill me this time. If it goes active again this virus usually results in a fulminant haemorrhagic necrotising encephalitis. Fun.
My neurologist did not want to discharge me, but my ex-girlfriend had her brother in law as one of my attending physicians, like what the hell do I need a orthopedic surgeon calling the shots for, and they got the ball rolling early on my discharge from the hospital. Far, far too early.
Life is grand.