I wish it did.
Damn it, I wish it did.
We are coming up the one year anniversary of everything.
April 6th was the first time I coughed up blood. I sat in the bathroom, coughing, coughing, and coughing. Red and red and red. I was watching Netflix’s Baby Reindeer and hating it. That’s not a show to watch while you’re hemorrhaging and don’t realize it. I couldn’t finish it. I finally got in the shower, exhausted, and continued to cough blood. I thought my throat was bleeding due to the coughing and low platelets. I thought the steam would help. Maybe it did. So I sat there in the shower, huddled on my little shower stool, head pressed again the cool wall of the shower, and I coughed and I coughed.
It would happen again, maybe two more times. Each day I ended up in bed, propped up on pillows, watching Pride and Prejudice (the 1995 series) with my son, trying to crochet, trying to rest, with my heart racing and gasping for breath, unable to walk down the hall without rallying all of my strength. I was dying, and I didn’t know it.
On April 29th, I went to the ER due to dangerously low hemoglobin. They hooked me up to a bag of blood, and I started coughing up blood again. They watched me and did nothing. “Well, that’s odd. How much blood?” They didn’t rush for aid. They didn’t order scans. “Oh, yeah, it should stop in like an hour,” I said. After all, I had had this happen before, and I wasn’t dead yet. So they let me cough up blood and then sleep in utter exhaustion. I was admitted, and they decided to do a bronchoscopy in a couple of days.
“Your lungs are like old lady lungs,” one young male nurse said. “You sure you don’t smoke?”
“Never.”
Within a week, I was on the ventilator for the first time.
And my body remembers.
I’ve been fighting anxiety all week. My heart rate goes up, and I panic that something else is wrong, that something is coming for me. It’s anticipation and utter dread. I want to cry and I want to scream and I want to not remember.
Today I went antiquing. I ate good food and haven’t vomited in over a week. I’ve visited with a friend. I’m working little bits at a time. I’m moving towards a new normal, a new me, a more healthy me.
And yet I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin. It’s right there. Behind me. Ready to pounce. And I want to scream and claw out of my body and run far, far away. I want to tear that hospital apart, brick by brick, filled with an animal rage. I want a new body. I want to not feel this dread.
I know that I am so much better, that I am safe.
But I thought I was safe then.
And I was dying.
You can’t feel secure when your brain snaps like that. All the times I thought I was safe, but I was not.
I wish my body didn’t remember. I wish it let it all go.
Because the PTSD is raging, and I hate it. I don’t feel like a whole person, right now. I feel simultaneously disconnected and too connected to my own flesh. I feel like I’m back there, watching my unsuspecting self of one year ago, eating a cheeseburger in her pajamas in that hospital room. Talking to her son while they share French fries. I’d be going home the next day once they got the scans back.
He left with his grandmother, and I started coughing up blood again. I didn’t stop. Not all night. It was worse the next morning, when a nurse FINALLY called a rapid and rushed me away while I clutched the oxygen mask and my giant cup of bloody tissues. Spitting blood into it. So much blood.
“Do we have your permission to intubate you, if that saves you?”
Gasping. Coughing, Bleeding. Unable to breathe. “Whatever. Just save me, please.”
And then it all went dark. I don’t remember anything after saying that.
Not until I woke up and my dad and husband were in the room. I don’t remember anything until I woke up. I was strapped down because they didn’t want me going wild. I didn’t. I barely moved. I knew I couldn’t move. I tried fingerspelling, but my husband had never learned sign language. Do you know how isolating and terrifying it is not to be able to communicate?
I’m crying writing this. Shaking. Remembering. It was hell. And my body remembers even though I wish it didn’t.
Damn it.
I don’t want to remember. I want to live. I want to be now. But I am still stuck back then.
The body keeps the score.
It remembers.
SJ Bocci Writes 