In the fall of 2012, I was hospitalized for roughly five weeks with aspiration pneumonia related to gastroparesis and bronchiectasis, and I now know that undiagnosed adrenal insufficiency played a huge part in why I got much sicker than anyone thought I should be.  (My doctor now thinks I probably should’ve been in the ICU during the first part of that stay.  At the time, the first of several hospitalists took the position that he was only going to treat my pneumonia and was going to ignore all of my other conditions.  It was hell on earth and there were times I only existed by the skin of my teeth.)

It was a grueling and traumatic experience.  Especially things related to the severe delirium I dealt with both in the hospital and after I returned home.  And the aftermath of that delirium, which took over a year to fully dig my way out of.

The worse your cognitive impairment after a period of delirium, the more likely you’ll die later on.  So delirium isn’t just this weird thing that causes disorientation, cognitive impairment, and sometimes hallucinations.  It’s also something that can kill you.  It’s a form of brain damage, as far as they know, and each delirium makes you more vulnerable to further delirium.  But exercising your brain can help.

So I started taking classes online, to try to keep my brain occupied.  One of the classes was a class on comic books.  The big assignment for the class was to make a mini-comic.  I’m not good at that kind of drawing, and I’ve never been able to finish anything like this before.  But to my surprise, this comic pretty much poured out of me.

I want to make one thing clear though, before anyone reads it:  This is not the literal narrative of what happened to me.  It combines elements of things I experienced in a literal way, elements of things I experienced in the delirium, elements of a story I wrote later on in order to try to deal with the feelings the delirium and hospitalization caused in me, elements that are pure metaphor, and elements that are put there to make the story flow easily.  This comic is about emotional truth, not literal truth.  For instance, I didn’t just “wake up from the delirium and squeeze someone’s hand” (although there was a period of time when holding someone’s hand was quite important) — that’s just a shorthand for a much more complicated process than I could do in seven pages of comics.  The tube feeding came months after the first hospitalization, not immediately.  And obviously the person I drew looks nothing like me.  Some of the story follows a stereotypical story pattern for certain things, specifically so that I could explore others without having to flesh out every detail that varied from a stereotype.

The PDF of the comic is available at the following link:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92647909/TheScarf.pdf

Here’s a picture of the front page:

There’s two things that I hope about this comic:

1.  That it can express something of what I went through.  Because it was one of the most profoundly isolating and lonely experiences of my entire life.  It seriously felt like going into the underworld or something, and after I came back I felt like that world was all over me and I couldn’t break through to the world that everyone else was in.  And nobody could talk to me about it, and nobody could offer any advice, and I felt like I still had a foot in that other-world for over a year.  And like nobody could really see me, because I was in that other-world, and I couldn’t see anyone else, because I wasn’t in their world, and it was very frightening and isolating and I most of the time had no words to articulate any of it.  Except occasional bursts of almost-poetry.  But it felt like whenever I said anything, people just stayed silent, they didn’t know what to say or how to respond, and that made me feel even more distant and frozen and dead.  Also whenever I was hospitalized or sick I’d fall back into delirium even more easily and that didn’t help either.  Writing this comic was the first way I felt I could express any of that feeling in a big way.

2.  Even more so, I hope that if anyone else has gone through anything like this, that it speaks to them in some way.  That’s the other reason I’m posting it here.  My friend urged me to make it public for the sake of people who might be feeling the same isolation.

Also, that holiday season, my mother bought me a red scarf and pinned a note to it saying “to wrap around your heart”.  It means everything to me.  I still have it, and I especially wear it when I’m feeling like I’m being dragged too close to the delirium-underworld again.  Which happens, but less and less often, especially since treating the adrenal insufficiency.

I hope this is meaningful to someone besides me.