Back to the Desert

This past weekend, I drove out to the Mojave Desert to meet my graduate school adviser to work some unfinished business. The drive out was fine, meeting him and his current crop of students went well. I realized soon after arriving, though that it may have been a mistake. A painful nervous knot formed in my stomach. It's slowly grew till almost my whole body was quietly shaking. Fear. It was fear overtaking me, the way detergent spreads oil in water. At first I didn't know why, but I soon realized, remembered why I was feeling like this. When I was...gone...when I was in a coma, sadly, it was not blissful nothingness, in fact to my memory, not a single moment of that long 6 weeks was nothingness, instead is was an unending stream of nightmares. The most horrible, realistic nightmare you could imagine. One the most prominent, possibly the first nightmares, I can remember having took place in the Desert, the Mojave Desert, and to make matters worse, my adviser was there, in my nightmare (not in any sort of sinister manner, he was just there). Lying there in the back of my truck, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't escape. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. I know, I knew that they were just nightmares, that they hadn't really happened, but even when I had awaken from my coma, it took me several days to be convinced that they had just been nightmares. Still, here they are, a part of me, for the rest of my life, I think, just like my scars. I went home the next afternoon, after the work was done, but I couldn't bear the thought of another night out there.

So I made it back to Pasadena late afternoon, prepared for a restful evening of hanging out with Cady. Instead, though, my friend Nick invited me to his house for BBQ. At first I was going to refuse, but I remembered that his parents were in town. Without his parents help, I would not have been able to create Wendy's engagement with nearly the success that I had. So I wanted to see them. I packed up Cady into the car (she likes to play with Nick's dog Hank), and headed over the valley. Everything, was fine until just before dinner.

Minutes before the food was ready, I began to experience pain, in my chest, and in my left arm. For those of you not paying attention, I was at Nick and Nora's for a BBQ the night that I had my heart attack. My instinct was that it wasn't a big deal, yet that was exactly what I thought at first on July 30th. The pain never got too terrible, just annoying, but I decided to excuse myself from dinner, head home, and check by blood pressure (the first check for problems). On the drive home, I resolved to call my Dr. , even though it was 10pm on a Saturday night. I knew he would be annoyed, but I also knew that he would be ANGRY if I didn't call. So when I got home, I called him (the Cardiothoracic Surgery Dept has a night answering service). He assured me that the pain wasn't my heart (it's disconnected from the nervous system, I CAN'T feel heart related pain) and that is was likely muscular. I'd overdone it with all the cross-country hiking earlier in the day and my body wasn't so happy with me.

Honestly, this wasn't as bad as the previous night, but it was just too much for me. But, just as the night before, I realized that that night will always be with me, like my scars, as a reminder, a painful reminder, of what I went through.