The first day of my new life.

A silent flash.  Blinding.  There was no sound.  My eardrums had ruptured instantly.
Floating.  No senses.  No sight.  No body.  No gravity. 


Is this death?


I'm dead.  This must be the last seconds of my life.  Nothing to do now but wait for consciousness to fade...

It wasn't supposed to be like this.  Dang, that were still things I wanted to do.

The chemicals kick in.  Sorrow, rage, blind desperation.

FUCK.

SHIT.

My mind screams, emotions beyond anything I've ever known overtake me by force, washing me over like a tidal wave, engulfing all other thoughts.  Coherence flies out the window.  I can't even form a sentence in my mind.  Rational thought has given way to the beast.

Instinct has taken over.

I'm stumbling.  I can only barely feel the sense of weight, gravity coming back.  I'm not dead... how long did I float?  20 seconds? A minute?  Time is warped, irrelevant.

I feel the walls.  There's only one exit in this room... the door, where's the door.  I stumble blindly bumping into walls, splattering blood everywhere.  Chunks of flesh dangle, skin sloughing off, blood trickling down from 30% of my body.

Not that I can see yet.  I continue my reckless motions, moving along the walls until I come to an opening.  Down the stairs, tumbling, shouldering the walls to stay upright.

Out the door.  I can't grasp the handle, the blood too slick, my tendons torn.  Body numb.  Cold...  Somehow I open it.  Even running on pure survival instinct I remember to push into the door to close it... the body print of blood remains as a testament.

It's well below zero, but I can't even feel the Alaskan winter.  I stumble along the path to the road.  I fall into the deep snow many times, feeling around for the hardpack of the path until I find it again. 

I'm on the road.  Was it always this hard to breathe?  Did my chest always feel so heavy?  I can see basic light out of one eye now.  The fire station is on my left, the light from the windows the only contrast against the dark of winter.

I know there's a door somewhere but the window is all I can see.  My vision is nothing more than a vague sense of light and dark, as if looking at the world through 10 meters of water.  I lift my arm and slam my hand against the window, desperately hoping someone is in there to notice me.  I have no idea how hard I'm hitting it... perhaps that's where I broke my pinkie into 8 pieces.

The door opens!  I hear muffled, distant voices.  I stumble towards the opening, sobbing incoherently. 

"Help me... help me.."

I'm crying and pleading.  In retrospect the uselessness of it is comical.  Yeah, obviously the naked guy covered in blood needs help.  Way to make it clear to them.  Way to be pathetic.

I'm on the floor, roughly being pushed around, lifted.  Lights swirl above me, muffled voices surround me.  I'm on a stretcher?  Into the ambulance.  Warm blankets.. heated?  Warmth never felt so good.

I take inventory of functional body parts.  One lung definitely isn't working, but the other is gasping shallowly.  I try to breathe deeply and feel pain that cuts right through the adrenaline.  One eye can make out light, and the water isn't as deep now.. but the other is nothing.  Shit, if I survive I'll be seeing in 2D.  Hearing is... distant but coming closer.

By the time I get to the hospital I can hear them well enough to understand my situation.  Pneumothorax, that's bad right?  Tubes into the throat, machines breathing for me.  Needles into my arm, fluids and medicine rushing into my veins.  Pain, everywhere.  I move in strange ways trying to make the pain stop.  The nurses ask me what I'm trying to do...  what am I trying to do?  Nothing helps.

Surgery.  I've been paralyzed.  Am I supposed to be unconscious for this part?  I can't control my breathing.  The machines take uniform, slow deep breaths... far slower than I feel like breathing.  I try to gasp for air but nothing is responding.  Constant suffocation.  Drowning.  The feeling is as bad as any I'll ever know.

One lung is filled with blood and collapsing, they say.  I feel pressure and touch on my right side...  and then it enters.  A scalpel?  I'm on fire, unable to move, consumed by panic.  It slices repeatedly at my side.  The ribs are too close together, so they force them apart.  I feel like I'm being ripped in two.  Metal grasps at me, prying the bones, pushing tissue out of the way.

The Versed kicks in.  My memory fades.  For days, it is nothing.

Beyond these memories lies the ICU, the burn ward, the extensive rehabilitation.  Finding out that a Medavac from Alaska to Seattle costs $73,000.  But these are tales for another day... for now, I have merely survived.  I have faced death, I have known pain.  I have learned of panic, fear, and desperation.  For now, I have overcome.

------

I barely remember my life before that day.  It's like a distant memory, like I'm looking at my life before then through someone else's eyes.   Everything about me changed that day... I became a new person.  I was born in that explosion.

This was tough to write.  It took an hour and a half.  I had no clear plan, no real start or end.  When I finished I didn't go back to change anything or organize it.  I'm sure its sloppy, disorganized, and rushed... but it's merely a record of hazy memories.  Perhaps I will revisit this for myself one day and finesse all the details...

If you have to go through something really traumatic, avoid Versed.  It's a great drug, does all kinds of useful things from a medical perspective, but it also causes anterograde amnesia, meaning you will forget everything that occured while it was in your system.  Perhaps for some painful memories are a burden, but I believe suffering helps define us.  The memory blank I have during one of the most important events of my life bugs me to this day.