V-Log: Who I Am. The Spirit In the Body

Juhi discovers her Life’s Motto just days after her coma

The first time I walked after coming out of the coma in 2014. I would spend another month in the hospital.

My daughter made this video the first time I walked, perhaps two weeks after my six week coma during a three month hospitalization in January-April 2014. It took me a full three minutes to walk around a hospital bed. Unlike the jokes we were making on camera, we did not post this or the next video anywhere on social media, and only my children and I have ever seen them until now.

Something about where I visited during my coma changed me significantly.

In this video:

1. I did not know that the PFA’s job was to walk me around the floor three times during one shift, so the hospital was legally justified in moving me to a unit with fewer nursing staff, and dangerously hurry my discharge along. I stayed for five more weeks, three of them in Rehab. My muscles had atrophied from lying in bed for months.
2. Jonathan was not my bff.
3. In case you missed it, I said I could feel my nakkoo (snot). I was very excited about this. I’m surprised it didn’t drip down my face during the entirety of the video.
4. I called my about-to-be daughter-in-law Blossom, who was not in the room, and which is not actually her name. I lost a lot of my vocabulary for a few months, and sometimes still have brain farts that make words escape through the holes in my face. But maybe that’s just my age. Please note that I did not forget the cuss words.
5. After I returned home there were members of my birth family who did not believe this “coma” had been real. Because I was sometime awakened for medical reasons did not mean I remembered any of the “awake” times, even if I had been on audio and video calls with them. There is another video which I have not shared. It is of me lying in bed intubated, moving my hands to the music my child is playing for me. Then I stop, hand in midair, frozen for an entire minute, like a statue. It is not my job to convince non-believers. That was the purpose of the memories-not-forming drugs, and the memories-forgetting drugs. Apparently they are still working six years later. No no, there are two types of drugs used in medically induced comas such as mine: ones that cause amnesia, and ones that cause sedation. Both worked as expected. I slept through it all and have no memory of the pain I was in with an open chest wound that needed to be cleaned every third day due to infection.
6. I did actually dance with my cardiac surgeon the next week, after I had been transferred to Rehab. Here is the video for proof. He was shocked and pleasantly surprised to dance with me on this day because when he had left a month before for a conference, he had left me dying. Ta Daaa!

Patient Jk M dancing with her cardiac surgeon just weeks after her coma.

To deny death is to deny Life. When the possibility of Death is just around the corner, living takes on a sweet urgency.

This has been my take away even as I lost some parts of my trauma and some parts of my life but gained all of my sanity during this illness and the years that led up to it. That all the weight I carried was not just fluid that my body had accumulated over the years, but trauma that had not been tended to and resolved through those years.

Although I may have an occasional low energy day during this pandemic, though I may give in to stress behaviors that are detrimental to my overall health sporadically, I do not deny that death is waiting for me patiently and I shall meet her soon enough. Sometimes it is easier to become introspective after having come face-to-face with death, but it is not necessary to have such a face off. Sometimes those who are constantly faced with death become immune to the finality of it and so fail to become introspective at all. I hope that this unforeseen crisis we are facing as a planet will allow many to become self aware, and to find greater meaning and purpose in their lives.

Only I can save myself, not from death but from a life lived half-heartedly and without wonder. Wonder at the vastness of the Universe and the microscopic focus of our relationships that define our lives. Wonder who my grand baby will look like when she is grown. Wonder when I’ll be able to have cake again.

No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.
~ Gautam Buddha

I am only tagging my constant readers so that I may share this very personal memory with them. I can see that being confined indoors has changed how many of us are managing our time, and I hold no grudge towards anyone who does not have the time or motivation to read or write on Medium at this time.

Pamela Edwards, Markham J Moody, Daphelba DeBeauvoir, Bonnie Flach, James Finn, Farida Haque, Kathy Jacobs, Simran Kankas, Guérin-Kairu Asante, Charlotte Franklin, Roy, Michael Stang, Mrs. Roy, Tracy Aston, Mark Starlin, A Maguire, Jef Littlejohn, Meg, Julia Kantic, edh lamport, Terrye Turpin, Indira Reddy, Harper Thorpe, Jack Herlocker, Rebeca Ansar, Sherry Kappel, Ré Harris, Wild Flower, Zarina Dara, Lisa Alletson, Elizabeth Helmich, Stephen M. Tomic, Linda Caroll, Kay Bolden, Annie Caldwell, Adam, Diabetic Cyborg, Tre L. Loadholt, Dennett, Justin Deming, Debra A Herlocker

Photo credit Rafa Paz Photos. 7 months after leaving the hospital, author with her own hair color and curls.