Fresh Hell

A non food related post.

When I was 29 years old, I contracted bacterial meningitis and was intubated, in a medically induced coma for three weeks, and in the hospital for three months. This is going to be long, my grammar is terrible, apologies in advance 

For those who can't begin to fathom the fresh hell that being intubated is like, ALLOW ME to elaborate for you. Perhaps it can help encourage someone to get vaccinated and avoid the fate I suffered.

Honestly? You’ll be lucky to die or have a near death experience. It will relieve your suffering, even if just momentarily. The only peace I had was when I almost died from bleeding to death internally. I’ve never felt so comfortable, and then got slammed back into my mortal body.  

During intubation, one of my front teeth sustained a hairline fracture. It's not bad enough for a root canal (yet), but is way sensitive and has changed how I have to eat cold foods.

From having the tube in my mouth for a week instead of being immediately trach’d, my vocal cords are damaged permanently. If I catch even a whiff of a cold, have allergies, am around smoke, or talk too much, my voice becomes hoarse for days. My voice sounds different now too.

After about a week of the tubes going down my throat, I had a tracheotomy. They CUT A HOLE in my throat to insert the tubes into. Before removal there was a wager going of what my 1st words would be. It hurt, BADLY, so I said "Son of a bitch!" as they removed the slimy tubes.

My tracheotomy scar feels yucky, I don’t like to touch it. It’s faded now, and I hardly notice it anymore unless I’m thinking about it (kind of like eating squid, or is that just me?).

Do you know what happens when you're in a medically induced coma? Imagine having nightmare after nightmare for the entire duration of your sedation. I wove what was happening in the ICU into hellacious hallucinatory dreams that I still remember.

*And as an aside? Coma patients can hear everything you're saying. Treat them like people/responsive patients, not dead bodies. Thanks for coming to my TED talk interlude*

You will be incredibly, miserably hot the entire time and not be able to do anything about it because nobody will know because you can’t tell them. Also, your body’s internal thermostat will likely be forever broken from the experience. Congratulations.

I had a gastric feeding tube installed in my stomach. This caused the most pain I've ever been in during my entire life, during and after. You know how they "uninstall" one of these? They hold your stomach and yank it out. Duladid didn't even touch that pain. Sadists.

My gastric feeding tube scar is something I feel whenever I move, right though my ab muscles. It's such a gross feeling. And if I move wrong or pull it in any way, it hurts constantly for weeks. This is over a decade later, mind you.

Oh, you know how you relieve yourself when you're intubated? You're catheterized. But did you know they stick a tube up your ass? Yep? Imagine having a tube up your ass for a whole month. And that's not even the worst of it.

Because your rectum has done no work for the entire time the tube is IN YOUR ASS, your rectum muscles don't really work. And if they weren't careful during the insertion, the rectum muscle can be damaged, permanently. It might take years for you to shit normally again.

And there's more! All of the bathroom cues you were used to before? Yeah, those don't exist anymore and never will again. You will have to relearn how and when you need to relieve yourself. Like a toddler, you'll shit yourself a lot before you figure this out.

I hope you were in good physical shape when you were intubated, because being prone and unmoving for a long period of time results in asthenia - basically muscle wasting/lack of strength. You won't be able to sit up, turn over, or raise your hand above your head any time soon.

And because you're so weak, you won't be able to walk. YOU WILL HAVE TO RELEARN HOW TO WALK. Your musculature will have to realign itself to figure out how to hold you up again. Your gait probably won't be the same. Your mechanics of walking will be different than before.

You'll get to learn how to use a wheelchair to get around! How to brace yourself to get in and out of it. How to brace your body in ways you never had to before in order to stay upright. You'll go to Physical Therapy and it will be incredibly hard and painful, and humbling.

This will result in pain as your body isn't used to how and where you are putting weight and pressure on it. This physical pain lasts for years, if not a lifetime. Knees, hands, back, pelvis, ankles. You name it.

Asthenia affects all of your muscles, and because a machine was breathing for you, your diaphragm will hurt for at least a year afterwards. Like a sore muscle that aches with every breath you take.

My leg muscles hurt for an entire year, like I’d done a hard workout and the soreness just didn’t fade.

These are just the things I can think of off the top of my head that are just related to being intubated and put into a medically induced coma for a month. I have LOADS MORE side effects from having meningococcal septicemia that I won't even list here. However -

Like the neisseria meningitides that infected my blood and led to multi system organ failure - COVID does the same thing! Super fun to have your heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, (and in COVID, LUNGS!) and heaven knows what else, fail.  

If you're lucky like me and live to leave the hospital, that's when the *fun* REALLY starts. I left with stage 4 chronic kidney disease from how badly my kidneys were damaged. Was told I needed to be on a transplant list but somehow have made it into stage 3 CKD.

I take medicine for high blood pressure. I have a large AM/PM pill organizer. I have to see a kidney specialist every 6 months for monitoring for the rest of my life. My life expectancy is lower now because kidney function drops as you age, and now I'm already starting lower.

In order to stabilize my blood pressure in the ICU, I was pumped full of 100lbs of fluid. I went from 100lbs to 200lbs in less than a week. My skin stretched and is wrecked in many places around my body. I honestly don’t notice the stretch marks these days, but they’re massive.

I was released to the custody of one of my parents (FML) and had to live with them for a month. I couldn't drive my brand new truck. I couldn't work. I couldn't stay awake for more than an hour without needing to take a nap. 

I couldn't walk more than 50 feet at a time. I continued physical therapy for months afterwards. Exhaustion like I have never known set in, permanently. It comes and goes now, but was present all the time for AT LEAST the first 5 years.

Another fun side effect is that I thought I was dead for a year afterwards. Like, honestly though I had died and was living in hell. So that was a totally fun mindfuck (NOT).

I went into the hospital in the winter and came out in the spring. Losing a month to a coma fucked me up for a few years afterwards. Time still feels wobbly to me because of that experience.

Once you almost touch death and live to tell the tale, people will act differently around you. People will ask you invasive questions in an attempt to figure out how to keep themselves safe and away from the same fate you suffered. 

You’ll come to understand innately that people are terrified of their own mortality. You’ll lose friends and relationships.

I was lucky that when I was in the ICU it wasn’t full. There were times during the first couple weeks that I had a nurse assigned to me 24/7. You will not be this lucky. Healthcare workers are burnt the hell out, ICUs are full and have people stacked anywhere they can fit them.

I was SO UNBELIEVABLY, INCREDIBLY LUCKY that I had good health insurance when I got sick. My out of pocket costs were around $5000, while my hospital bills totaled over a million dollars. My insurance settled for a negotiated $275k.

The body you knew, the brain you knew, the life you knew will be forever changed. It will be like a terrible episode of Quantum Leap (google it), where you have to figure out everything from scratch again. Do not recommend, 0/10 stars.

It's been 11 (almost 12) years since I was intubated, and there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think about it or how it forever changed the course of my life. Please do yourself a favor and just get the vaccine, it’s easier, I promise.