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1:50pm January 7, 2013

She told me if I gave up right now, I could fall straight back into the same chaos I’ve been fighting for months.

Everything she tells me reassures me I can make it out of this. Everything she tells me says it’s going to be a struggle.

But it didn’t hit me until I started reading up on delirium. I’m in most of the risk categories. The kind of delirium I have been dealing with is the most dangerous. The statistics looking at my situation, even after leaving the hospital, are incredibly grim.

She says I have the advantage of being young. That I’ll be part of the 20% who survives and avoids institutionalization after having continuous cognitive problems for three months – that for my age the odds have to be better than 20%.

But she also says she’s been saying all along how serious this is, and I’ve been not getting it in a big way. She says she’s been telling me all along that I won’t bounce back quickly, that I was seriously, dangerously ill, that delirium makes all medical outcomes worse, even making the death rate higher, and that I’ve got an enormous hole to dig my way out of.

I guess I didn’t understand until I started reading the statistics?

I don’t know. I don’t want to say I’m scared. But this is sort of scary.

Delirium has a gravitational pull. She says I need to retrain my brain until gravity pulls it elsewhere. And I can’t imagine wanting to give up, because delirium is a nightmare.

But I can imagine, I know very well, that when I get sufficiently tired, it starts seeming like a relief, rather than a version of hell.

And that scares me. I’ve known it ever since I asked the question a year and a half ago. About why both death and delirium seem to suck you in. Of course back then I didn’t know the two were so correlated in other ways – that delirium is as serious as it is. But I remember how with both, first you can’t fight, then you slowly gain both the ability and the will to fight, and you do it. At least – that’s how it goes if you live.

But I do want to live. And that means I want to keep pulling myself out of this.

This is confusing. My feelings are so weird and combined together weirdly I couldn’t even begin to understand or explain them. All I know is I want to get through this, but there’s a lot I don’t understand. And the idea that I could just voluntarily fade back into the chaos is scary even if I’m clearly not doing that.