10:50pm January 4, 2012

Clarity is wonderful.

After days of mental murkiness. Culminating in that uncomfortable sense that delirium is right across a thin membrane.

I’m told that this is a side-effect of having experienced delirium in the past. That delirium comes about because of brain damage, and this damage can make it easier to experience delirium (or also weird “twilight” states, in my experience) in the future.

Whatever it is – it can get creepy as hell. And I’ve experienced delirium several times, so now it seems like I can slide closer and closer to it with even mild illness. In this case I suspect I was building up to another bowel blockage but never quite got there, solved it in time.

(I love Miralax. I know that sounds weird but it’s saved my life many times over. And it is both more effective and tastes better than the crud they gave me as a kid – where it could be five different kinds of laxative, all tasting utterly foul, and I’d still end up in the ER experiencing really painful medical procedures to keep me out of the hospital. Yes I’m deliberately avoiding getting graphic. Suffice to say my father once stood in front of me and told me to hit him, so I wouldn’t hit the nurse instead. That’s being a real father.)

Anyway, it’s really kind of weird knowing how very nearby delirium can get. This summer when I got all those infections at the rec program, I finally got word to someone to take me home (not easy when they won’t let you talk to anyone except through them). And I got home, got in bed, and a few hours later this weird thing happened where I could move my body and feel the bed under me, I think my eyes were open, but literally all I could see was this weird landscape I was flying over. Even when I stopped being effectively blinded-by-hallucination, things got, and stayed, very strange until I had been on antibiotics a few days. I suspect none of that would have occurred without previous experience with delirium. And I’ve had instances where I wasn’t anywhere near that sick and still got these weird traces of it. Like the past few days.

It seems like blockages or even near-blockages are the fastest route to these experiences. When I was hospitalized in August for a blockage, I literally have only a couple brief memories of the first three days (and one of them involved the nurse dancing with a flying saucer), and the next couple I only remember hazily and what I remember could not have happened (like the room getting filled with replicas of my cat). I have some utterly hilarious Skype logs from that last couple days before they released me. (At least, me and my friends and family find them hilarious, but maybe we have a sick sense of humor. Or maybe they’re just funny.)

The weirdest thing though was this moment of… not lucidity, but as close as I got. And just realizing how much of my normal brain didn’t seem to be functioning the way it usually did. And not in the way my brain normally shuts off functions it can’t use – more like things getting ripped out haphazardly in a way that resembles my general post-seizure state more than anything. I don’t remember fear, just a sense of bottomless weirdness. And then the memory just abruptly cuts off again.

I have to say the most unsettling parts are the in-between states, like the past few days. Where it feels like there’s the real world and delirium-world side by side, and I can almost see what’s happening in the other, and it would take only something very tiny to have everything shift over.

But, very suddenly, things shifted into a level of clarity I haven’t seen in days. And I’m glad. Delirium often seems to have a gravitational pull, and I enjoy suddenly being outside that.

I told a friend about how both delirium and death can try to pull you in – not in a suicidal sense but in a “just stop fighting and rest, it’ll be better” sense.

At first, there’s no resisting and no ability to conceptualize resisting. Then you can sort of see you need to resist but you can’t. Eventually (if you live through it) you become able to resist, and you become more and more able to, until suddenly you’re outside the danger zone and resisting takes no effort.

She said that living beings spend our whole lives cheating entropy by taking energy from food and such. But that if we get too worn down – beyond exhausted, I’m talking medical emergency – then we can’t fight it anymore, and at that point our life depends on getting back the energy required to fight it. She said the same applies to delirium, because it takes less energy for the brain at times like that to be delirious than to make sense of things.

I didn’t dare tell these “gravitational” experiences with death and delirium to any of the residents who saw me in follow-up visits after my August hospitalization. But I figured my doctor had been practicing long enough to understand. And he did – said he’d heard these things many times before. Also said that they were really worried about me this time because it wasn’t just a blockage, my white count was way up and I wasn’t even remotely lucid. So he wasn’t surprised to hear I’d experienced that. He also said my friend was probably right about the entropy thing.

So I really, really need to take constipation seriously. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. (As my ER/hospitalization record tends to show.)

For some reason I have trouble, at good moments, convincing myself that it really was that bad. At first, I kept thinking that the main reason I should be careful is that it scares the crap out of my family and friends when I’m in the hospital.(*) A friend told me that she didn’t quite realize how little self-respect I had until she realized that was the only reason I was deciding to take better care of myself. And I know she’s right. It’s very hard for me to remember that it’s bad for bad things to happen to me.

At any rate, I seem to be out of the gravitational well of delirium for now. Even though I was only in the furthest orbit possible, it feels good to be out of there.

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(*) Yes, an autistic person showing empathy. Quick, call SBC!

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