I woke up. The pain was excruciating. For moments I lay there. Trying to recollect my senses and reorient my thoughts. Oh, it's come to this, after all those years of suffering with pain, the years of false diagnosis, the many different doctors I had seen; flam in the stomach, they parrots they would all repeat themselves. I kept saying different. No, it's something more serious. But they were persistent with their diagnosis. Could they all be wrong?
Yes! They could and were. Now it has come to this. I lowered my hand beneath the blanket, slowly letting my hand slide down my chest, down to my stomach. A cold chill traversed my spine - a long elastic tape ran down to the stomach. It felt a mile long. God, I mumbled beneath my breath, what have they done to me? They have half butchered me. Was all this necessary?
No, it wouldn't have been had the doctors stepped beyond their egos and referred me to a specialist. In this they failed. The diagnosis was simply appendicitis, a complaint I bore for several years, which finally caused the appendix to burst, leaking poison to the back of the spine with gangrene taking hold.
I was now on my way to hospital by ambulance with flashing lights. The hospital doctors, after I had angrily admitted myself, suddenly realising that I was hovering between life and death, quickly decided to transfer me to a larger hospital. In the meantime, my parents having been informed about my demise, stood anxiously in the wee hours of the night by the gate knowing that the ambulance would pass their front gate.
In the ambulance the pain was excruciating to such a degree that I could feel myself slipping into a coma. I have since come to believe that we all have a threshold of pain tolerance, call it an act of nature, once we have reached that threshold we slip naturally into a coma, then death. During my intense agony, with a nurse fussing around me, I could feel a calm come over me, the pain slowly abating. I was relaxed and at peace. I was drifting out of the body. I knew the pain was still a part of the physical body and I could sense the sensation but did not feel the pain.
At this point I was no longer inside the ambulance, but floating outside, about two feet above the roof. Oh, I knew I wasn't dead, or that I was dying, just on my way to hospital. I could still readily sense my physical body and the trauma it was experiencing and that I was still strongly connected to it. As we passed my parents' house I could not help but smile to myself as I saw them standing by the gate, watching me go past. I could feel their anxiety, their concern, just two small figures standing there quietly in the dark. I could have reached out and touched them.
My peace was about to come to a shuttering end. We arrived at the hospital. I was immediately drawn back into the physical body, back into the agonizing hell it was experiencing. The emergency team was there waiting for me. Hands were grabbing me everywhere, off one stretcher onto another, wheeled at high speed through doorways into corridors, elevators, x-ray chambers. There were at least six nurses manhandling me in every conceivable manner, tearing off my clothes, shaving where they shouldn't be shaving, sticking injections, sliding plastic tubing down my nose and throat and other unmentionable places. The whole process seemed at super speed with one male nurse continuously asking me annoying questions. I then suddenly came to the realization - hell, I'm going under the knife.
Then suddenly I was pushed through these double swing doors, into a darkened narrow passageway. I was now taken by a team in green surgical gowns with their faces masked. There was a nurse beside me, she was stroking my arm in reassurance. Her eyes were bright and penetrating above her white mask. It was surreal. I couldn't break my gaze from her. Her eyes were the last thing that I saw.
Continued…..
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