Storm Stories: Rising Storm: Part One

If ever there was a defining moment in my becoming TheNorEaster, which took a great many years, this is it…

I WANT TO FEEL THE SUN

by TheNorEaster

I had slept for sixteen hours, which was very unusual considering my mad schedule of college and work, but I had a class that night and decided to go.  My body was drained from all that sleep because I hadn’t eaten anything in so long.  I had stopped at a local market and got a Granny Smith apple, which I ate while driving on the highway to get to my class.

After I got to class and settled into my seat, the girl sitting next to me started passing me notes (when the teacher was looking).

Monique was her name.

Beautiful Hispanic girl.  Long, dark, rich, curly hair.  Olive-green eyes.

She noticed that something was wrong with me.  Our notes went back and forth for a while; I remember trying to change the subject, asking about her new truck, but she was persistent and wanted to know if I was okay.

I feel like I can’t get enough air!

She grew worried, of course, probably more so when I got up in the middle of class and left.  I was getting scared so I took the elevator from the basement to the third floor, where the payphones were, and dialed 911.  By this time, I was in a panic.

…I’m having trouble breathing!

Okay.  I’ve contacted security.  Just stay on the line until they get there.  Can you do that?

A security guard showed up a few seconds later.  A couple of minutes after that, the emergency crew arrived.  They set me up on oxygen, laid me down, wheeled me off campus, and drove me straight to the hospital.  I had never been in an ambulance before, but I only remember the bed moving around on its wheels, which couldn’t lock, as the ambulance went around corners.

Next, I remember waiting in the emergency room.  By this time, I was so short on air and energy that I couldn’t even call for help.  Instead, with a great deal of effort, I kicked my books off the end of the bed, hoping someone would notice them on the floor and come see me.  A couple of nurses finally came and took a look at me.  They couldn’t figure out why my stomach wouldn’t stop moving.  If I’d had the energy, I would have screamed:

It’s not my fucking stomach!  I can’t breathe!

FFor “insurance purposes”, I was transferred to another hospital.  The memories are so vague, but I can recall the ceiling lights moving by as they wheeled me to get x-rays of my lungs done.  It was the middle of the night by now.  And I had to move from one bed to another bed so they could take x-rays.

My lungs were filled with fluid.  I had a viral pneumonia.

And I was dying.

In my next memory, I am laying on a bed in a bright room with a mask over my face blowing a wind tunnel of oxygen into my lungs, while trying to answer questions from the nurse.  At one point, I vomited into the oxygen mask.  In an instant, the nurse ripped it off and I saw the apple I had eaten ten hours ago.  It fell to the floor in chewed chunks, and I could see the skin.  My system was so taxed I couldn’t even digest an apple.  I had wanted to keep the mask off, but the doctor immediately insisted that I keep it on.  His reasoning was simple:

The alternative is much worse.

After answering a million questions from the nurse, I finally fell asleep.  Again.  When I woke up, I was in a room somewhere and I could see the sun rising.  It had just come up above the horizon; the land was still dark, but I remember thinking that it was now Friday morning.

The nurse came, and I fought my exhaustion with every ounce of willpower I had–I knew I was dying–begging the nurse to stay with me.  I asked about her marriage, her children.  She smiled and stayed and answered my questions.  Until I fell asleep again.

In my next memory, I am heading for the intensive care unit when I vomit again.  Only this time, it isn’t anything I had eaten.  It was a thick, deep-purple fluid that came from my lungs.  I remember thinking that I didn’t know what that fluid was because I had never seen anything like that come out of my body before.

There are dozens of people standing around my bed, talking to each other.  I see a bald man with glasses and a red beard at the end of my bed.  He is wearing a blue jacket with a striped tie and tan pants.  He sets his hands on hips and takes a deep breath.  Someone puts a mask over my face that is blowing more air into my lungs, but there is such a wind-tunnel, again, that I can’t even inhale.  The doctor tells me to relax and breathe.

I…I…I can’t…i…it…it’s…it’s…too…too…strong!

The doctor tells someone to “turn that down a little bit.”

And I was out.

A few minutes later, I woke up and felt something down my throat.  When I tried to take it out, I felt a sharp pain in my arms, which were filled with needles.  Slowly, I moved my hands toward the apparatus set in my throat, but the nurse screamed:

Don’t touch that!

I set my hands back down, again feeling the pain from the needles stuck in my arms.  After a while, and I have no idea how long, the doctors took out the respirator (which felt like a piece of plastic had been caught in my throat).  And something that went up my nose and down my stomach (and that was the single most disgusting thing I have ever felt in my entire life).  The nurse took out the catheter (and that was the single most excruciating thing I have ever felt in my entire life).  And I had no idea how they could do all of that to me within minutes.

Except, it wasn’t minutes that had passed.

It was days.

They had put me out on Friday morning and I had woke up on Monday afternoon!

At the end of my bed, I saw a sunbeam coming through the skylight.  So when the nurse asked if I would like anything, my answer was simple:

I want to feel the sun.

So they set up a chair for me, and–after twenty minutes of walking to the end of my bed–I sat down.

And I felt the sunlight on my face.  It was like being wrapped in a blanket of warmth and light and heat all at once.  It was the greatest sensation I had never felt.  So bright I couldn’t see what was going on around me, but I sat there for as long they let me.

And I was so grateful just to feel the sun again.

It was glorious.  And I was so glad to be alive.

My father still gets a kick out the first time he saw me when I was finally off the respirator.  I had said to him:

Hi, Dad.  I think I’m sick.

It isn’t very often that I have seen my father cry.  But he did that day.  And he told me that he had been to visit me many, many times over the weekend.  My family, too.  But my Dad said that when I was connected to the respirator, I had tried to fingerspell something to him using the manual alphabet (sign language).  My mother, whom I had taken a sign language course with, tried to make out what I was fingerspelling, but my movements were not coherent.  She told me that I would spell “C…O…H…” but that didn’t make any damn sense to anybody.

Finally, my father wrote the letters on the alphabet on a piece of paper and he told me to point to spell the word.  But I still wasn’t coherent enough to make any sense.  We both got frustrated because I would point out “C…U…H…”

Then, my lungs vomited.  And my face turned red as the fluid filled up in the respirator.

My father had screamed for the nurse, who quickly came and, when she saw me, shouted:

JESUS!!!

She immediately vacuumed the fluid out of my lungs.

I have no memory of these events, the ones that took place after the doctors put me out; I just know what my family told me.

It was like my very own death and resurrection.  But when my body was finally free from the threat of death that day, the world I would wake up to was…I want to say “different,” but the sad, simple truth is the world hadn’t changed at all.

I know that now.

A few hours after getting off the respirator, the doctors finally took me out of the intensive care unit, though I would spend the next five days recovering in the hospital.  On the third day, one of the nurses turned on the television in my room.

It was then I saw it.  Right there.  On the news:  the world was on fire.

Vandalism.  Looting.  Burning Buildings.  Murders.  Riots.  Rapes.

The verdict in the trial of four white police officers who had beaten a black man, Rodney King, had just been delivered.

All that time I had spent fighting to live…

…in a world where people were fighting to die.

I want to feel the sun.