7:21am October 14, 2013

Ghost world, part two: after I got out

If you haven’t read my first post you might want to go back and read it. It’s the one before this.

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But it didn’t stop when I left the hospital. The delirium got better but it didn’t go away. I say I was delirious for five weeks… It was much longer, that was just the worst part.

It was either the white mist, or a dark hole, like living at the bottom of a well. I felt like I had left the hospital but I was not the same person I was before I got there. Something was missing. My heart was frozen. And I was looking around at all these people I was supposed to know. And all these things I used to do. And there was this huge chunk of me missing. And most people didn’t notice. Or they knew something was different but they didn’t realize I was still in the other world. The delirium world. With the ghosts I roamed the hospital with. And I was pounding on this wall between the worlds, trying to get back to the world of the living, and I couldn’t. And nobody could see me in the ghost world. They just saw my body in the living world and assumed I was fully in it.

The other world was like winter, but the worst parts of winter. Like flat, endless snow and ice. And it was empty. I can’t believe how empty it was.

My DPA invited me over for soup constantly. She knew if I couldn’t get out of the delirium in six months my prognosis was really really bad. By now the delirium was not really hallucination. It was just my mind going blank and empty. And this sense that I really lived in another world and nobody could see it but me. Well she probably saw something of what sad going on. She was pretty terrified for me. And Anne must have known because she’s Anne. And someone else knew the white world too well because she’d been delirious a lot as a kid. But most people in my everyday life were like on the other side of a wall, in another world, and I could not touch them and they could not see me.

I wrote things at that time that reflected more of that world than I expected. Stories that didn’t reflect any literal memory I had from the delirium, but seemed to deeply touch the truth of SOMETHING that was happening. For instance this one:

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/33763074922/dont-ask-i-cant-tell-i-cant-even-explain

I still don’t know where that came from but I can say one thing. The rhythm of the words is identical to a rhythm I kept hearing while I was delirious in the early part of my hospital stay.

So my friend urged me to keep my mind busy and not let myself drift. So I did my own rehab since nobody had bothered with signing me up for the real thing. And I pulled myself out by my teeth.

But.

I still feel something.

I still feel like part of me is different.

Because of long long long days and nights alone in the world of delirium and severe pain and sensory deprivation with no human contact except for IV changes. Which is the most alone I have ever been in my life at the time I needed people the most.

Because I spent so very long delirious. It was several MONTHS before I could let my brain go idle without drifting into delirium. And I’m still not recovered. Delirium is a form of brain damage. My brain still doesn’t function how it used to. Which is not the end of the world but the experience itself was incredibly traumatic.

Because of spending so long stuck in that other world.

Because it WAS horribly traumatic and I have not gotten over it not even close.

All those things together.

My friend tells me that I’m not really stuck back in the hospital. But it feels like I am. It feels like I always will be. Specifically stuck in that first shadowy part of it where most of my memories of what really happened are foggy but I have my delirium memories and my other-world memories and this bizarre line of memory going through it all that corresponds to no sensory memory but reflects SOMETHING and tells a continuous story I have no understanding of.

She says if I write about it, it fights isolation because other people have been through this too.

She says if I write about it, it will maybe make me start to be able to hold it at arms length instead of being consumed by it or running from it.

I do get so very afraid it will eat me sometimes. Like the entire experience will eat me alive and there will be nothing left. But she says you can’t hide from your own memories, that only makes it worse.

And yet something about this also feels really important. Like something really important happened to me but I don’t fully understand what. I kept thinking how could it be important delirium is worse than nothingness. But I still existed so that depth I sense, it must be coming from somewhere. And it’s centered somewhere in the early days when I was in that endless, deep isolation.

She says isolation is an illusion because we are all always connected to the world.

I hope so.

But it’s still left this mark on me and I don’t know how to make it better.

I don’t know if there’s anything good about it but yet I know there was and I don’t understand.

What can be good about living in a frozen wasteland world cut off from everything and everyone? Living at the bottom of a well for months?

And I sometimes fear did all of me get out? Will I ever get out? Is there still some piece of me in that other world?

And you know… what happened this spring with those doctors trying to get me the tube, that was traumatic. But whatever happened in the hospital last fall. And whether some of it was real or based on delirium. That seems to have given me full blown PTSD or something damn close. I had a genuine bona fide flashback on Friday. And I’m scared still. She says that hiding from it will only make it worse. That’s why I’m trying to write about it.

I’m also now, ever since then, acutely aware that in some parallel universe I could have died during that. As in not while lucid but somewhere with the bugs eating my eyelashes and stuff. Or during one of the black periods where I have no memory. Not everyone dies while aware of the world. Just like lots of people die randomly and quickly with no time to set their affairs in order. And other things I’ve learned from near misses, that people don’t think about because they don’t want to believe it. They want to think everyone dies knowing they’ll die ahead of time, on schedule, and aware. Nope.

I know I can’t be the only person to experience this. But I feel so horribly isolated by it.

And yet in that thing I wrote, someone in that other world threw me a scarf to wrap around my heart. And that seems right. I wonder if I’ll ever know who. I wonder if it was a real person in the hospital. Or some kind of ghost person in the ghost world. The poem (or whatever it was) says she is dead and I am grieving her. I don’t know who she is. But the grief was real and so was the scarf. And the lioness.

Someone I talked to said she was also offered help when stuck in another world while delirious. Maybe there are people or beings of some kind in delirium worlds? Idk that kind of thing is somewhat beyond me.

But… Is it okay I wrote this? Has anyone else experienced anything like this with delirium or illness or even psychosis or something? Will I ever feel completely in THIS world again? Did I really get out? Am I alive? What happened? What does any of this mean? Can there be meaning in delirium even though it’s so damn unreal? PLEASE can there be meaning, because I don’t want a big chunk of my life to be meaningless and shallow like I want to believe? Has anything I’ve said made real sense to anyone? Why is there a sense of depth coming straight out of the heart of an experience of hallucination and being shattered to pieces? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I move on? Why am I so weak? Can I get better than this? Have I gained anything at all from being shattered to pieces and forced to live in some weird parallel ghost world?

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