Chapter 7 – Disorientation on a whole new level

I woke up in a hospital bed, in a high-rise building somewhere in southeast Asia. To my left was the entrance, I couldn’t see this area too well, the majority of what I could see consisted of a rather boring neutral colored wall. To my right, however, I could see a little step up leading to a balcony with a sliding glass door. Out of the window was the skyline of some major Asian city, which I could only determine from the particular architecture and building tiles used. How did I get here? What the fuck is happening? Where exactly am I? I start to hear familiar voices… Through the fog I could hear my sister and my dad. I could feel my shoulders relax, metaphorically speaking, because not only was I paralyzed, but I was on a metric fuck-ton of painkillers and sedatives.

Well, it turns out I was still in the ICU at Boulder Foothills Community Hospital and not in some Asian high-rise apartment. Why did I think I was in Asia somewhere? Well, I remember overhearing a conversation between my dad and my sister about going out to get food. My guess is that they discussed Asian food and my brain built a whole scenario around the availability of that food. The cityscape I was seeing? Well, that was either a view out the window of the hospital or I was simply looking at all of the monitoring devices and flashing lights of the machines I was connected to.

Every time I woke up, I had no recollection of the things that had happened before, so certain realizations happened multiple times. My already shit memory had been further reduced to that of a goldfish… though, for scientific accuracy, goldfish memory is not as notoriously bad as has been popularized; rather than three seconds, they have memories which can persist for at least six months.

I closed my eyes, relaxed, and let the sedatives take over as I slipped down another level away from reality. When I opened my eyes again, I was being moved; there were people all around, something significant was happening. I couldn’t quite focus long enough to figure out who was doing what and why, so I pulled back and just tried to take in my surroundings. Whose garage was I in this time? I got the distinct impression it was the doctor’s house. Also, this is definitely not the first house we had been to. Somehow, moving from house to house didn’t seem so unreasonable. I mean, where else would we be? I was just glad the garage door was open so I could see outside. Was this all just my brain trying to escape the setting of the hospital, presenting me with the reality that was more familiar or comfortable? A couple months later, on the bus during my first field trip from the hospital, I got to talk to two other guys who were recently paralyzed and we all realized we had the same house to house or garage to garage hallucination. As it turned out, we shared a lot of very similar hallucinations.

When I was younger, I did my fair share of hallucinogens, including LSD, LSA, psilocybin [mushrooms], peyote, DMT, and so on and so forth. I was 11 years old in a cabin in the woods on a school trip [pun intended] the first time I remember hallucinating. Because of my anxiety issues, I was taking Benadryl [diphenhydramine] to help me go to sleep during the 6th grade camp trip, a week of activities somewhere in the woods of Missouri. The thing is, if you take a bunch of Benadryl and you don’t fall asleep, reality just seems to slowly morph into a dreamland. In the middle of a rather violent pillow fight that felt more like a fight where pillows were present than a “pillow fight,” I realized something was off. A short while later when we were outside, the sensation grew; now my body felt tingly, not a physical sensation, but more of a mental or visual sensation; like a mild form of synesthesia, where certain senses get crossed and someone may see sounds as colors or ascribe certain shapes to different tastes. At the time, I had no idea what was happening but I just knew that I couldn’t tell if I was awake or asleep. Everything was too clear and too full sensory to be a dream; but at the same time, this was definitely not a reality I was used to. It was certainly no mind-bending trip, everything just felt… off. Ironically, that growing confusion caused an anxiety attack and I was sent to see… the nurse?

My first intentional trip was in high school one summer. I was at work as a lab assistant in a medical lab when I got a call from my girlfriend at the time asking if I wanted to trip with them after I got out. I wasn’t sure, I was actually pretty apprehensive, but I agreed and planned to meet them in Forest Park, a huge park in the middle of St. Louis; As every St. Louisan will tell you, “It’s bigger than Central Park in New York.” When I got there, without much further consideration, I ate a few tabs of LSD and sat back and waited for the show. However, 30ish minutes later, when I thought the acid wasn’t working, I ate 1/8th of an ounce of mushrooms; I realized shortly after swallowing the mushrooms that the LSD was working just fine and I was in for a double feature, one that would involve me walking through the woods having a conversation with the Good Luck Bear [A stuffed Care Bear]. I’m not sure what they said to me but I remember just thinking, “nnnnope…” and flinging them deep into the woods; something I kinda wish I could do when sober talking to actual humans, not just stuffed animals.    

The difference between the plethora of times I took hallucinogens and the hallucinations I had in the hospital, was that I was only sober for brief moments during my two-week stint in the ICU. All of those anchor points to reality just melted away and my brain was left scrambling trying to make sense of this new reality, where anything was possible. Having video and pictures of those times is helpful, but the hallucinations from the ICU seem just as real to me as those actual images. In a paper in the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, Dr. Patricia Boksa highlighted that one possible mechanism for hallucinations [mostly auditory] was an increase in activity in a particular region on the brain, creating internal stimuli, coupled with a reduced ability to distinguish internal and external stimuli. Basically, your imagination or internal dialogue ramp up, but the line between your imagination and reality becomes all woobley, to put it technically.

Whenever I took hallucinogens, I always knew where the hallucinations were coming from, but in the ICU that line just disintegrated; my brain quickly went from Piet Mondrian to Jackson Pollock.

One night I woke up in what looked like a high-tech gaming arcade, with banks of reclining chairs adorned with overhead screens facing another beige wall which had a door on the far-left side and a glass window in the middle. The hallway just beyond it was lit up with that slightly off white from fluorescent tubes, and occasionally I would see a doctor or nurse passing by. My brain must not have enjoyed trying to justify so many doctors and nurses being at a gaming arcade and so I remember coming to the conclusion that I must be in some sort of overflow room of the hospital. I slowly started to realize that I had spit building up in my mouth and due to the tube in my throat I was unable to swallow. While I was awake, I would simply try to get someone’s attention and they would suction the spit out of my mouth. However, this time, I wasn’t supposed to be awake and so there wasn’t anyone around to help. I started running through the options of what I could do, only to realize I didn’t really have many; I couldn’t spit forcefully, I couldn’t turn my head to the side to spit because of the neck brace, couldn’t swallow… Even with the machine breathing for you, spit slowly building up in your mouth begins to induce a sense of panic. After hitting what I thought was the call button for the medical staff [who knows if it was real or something I made up] about a million times and failing to get anyone’s attention, nearly in tears, I went with the only option which was basically to weakly spit it out and let gravity drag it shamefully down my face.  Which isn't really a big deal when you are also probably regularly shitting yourself, but when one of the last bits of control you have, not drooling down your face, is taken away… it doesn’t feel great. It feels like a little twist of the knife as I could only feel a very small portion of my body, 90% of which was just the sensation of pain, and now I had just turned at least 5% of the remainder of conscious sensation to “oh… gross…”

Another night, I remember waking up at some point, my sister was asking what I wanted her to read to me. She ran through a list of options, likely what was available on the Kindle. I was in such a panic that anything even remotely complicated or new felt like it induced more panic, which may be why “they” say that people with high anxiety tend to rewatch or re-read content, satisfying that craving for familiarity and predictability. Then, she mentioned Roald Dahl’s The BFG, The Big Friendly Giant, and it immediately triggered something in my brain. “That one! That one! That one!” My brain screamed, but I’m sure it only came out as a mild whimper and a head nod, as that is all I was actually capable of. Something about the familiarity of the story brought me back to my childhood and made me feel safe; all, I’m sure, in some way linked back to my mother reading me the story when I was a kid.  This one moment, surrounded by delusions and hallucinations, stands as a moment of surprising clarity. I know that I had a painfully clear understanding of my situation and where I was, and I can still feel that sense of panic and helplessness. I remember my sister getting to different parts of the story [particularly the frobscottle soda, with its sinking bubbles that I think could probably be made with Xenon gas, as it is quite heavy and unreactive] and my brain being able to latch on to something familiar, something comfortable. I’m sure I was in and out of consciousness over the course of the story, but the overall calming effect was significant.

I opened my eyes and it was dark in the room, there was no real context for where we were, but I got the sense that I was in… the hospital? Though, if this was a hospital, I started to question what all those animals were doing on the far wall. There were at least two sugar gliders, a raccoon, a rabbit or two, and other small to medium-size Rodentia, all just hanging out on top of a cabinet against the far wall with the sugar gliders climbing up the netting against the wall. I remember watching them for a significant period of time, I don’t know how or why, but in some way, they were vaguely comforting. They weren’t doing anything in particular, and I couldn’t interact with them, but I felt better with them there, maybe I just didn’t want to be alone. At the time it just seemed logical, they were meant to be there.

I remember turning my head just to the left… well, as much as I could while in that neck brace, and in the other room there was Boulder native climber Sasha Digiulian. She had somehow injured herself and was there for rehab, my dad was out there helping with her rehab so she could get back to competition. My attention would go back and forth between the small community of animals gathered in my room in the distant vague notion of my dad helping somebody in the other room. Obviously, neither she nor the animals were ever there, and while my dad is a doctor, he certainly does not specialize in sports medicine or rehabilitation. However, in a strange twist, exactly 5 years after I was in the ICU there, to the day, she ended up having surgery at that very hospital for an injury.

At this point the darkness was starting to lift and I was at least aware that I was in the hospital, but my brain was still struggling against the sedatives and painkillers, trying to keep up with reality. The whole thing felt like trying to read station signs from a speeding train. Next time you’re in the car on the highway or on a train, look around outside, you can see where you’re going and things seem to approach a comprehensible speed, think about all of the things that you can see, read, and just understand. Now, turn your head so you’re looking directly out the side window of the car and put your hands up as blinders to block your peripheral vision. How much can you see, read, or understand? All you can see is that moment, no concept of past or future or logical progression. Things just became a blur of meaningless half recognizable flickering images.

Lying on your back in the hospital, there isn’t much to look at. On the ceiling, there were these large silver railings that act as the overhead supports for a sling that allow the hospital staff to lift the patient and slide them around the room, typically to transfer from the hospital bed to another seat/bed.

It was one of the only things I really had to look at, but I just kept asking myself, “why are there so many hamsters running on top of those beams? Where did all these hamsters come from? Was nobody else in the hospital concerned with their presence? Unfortunately, when lifting your arm is the only movement you can accomplish, your face is packed full of tubes, and you are heavily sedated, communicating your concern for the number of hamsters is somewhat difficult. All I could do was stare at my sister, who seemed to be able to preemptively understand what I was trying to communicate most of the time, with a look of “what the fuck dude? Hamsters? Nothing? We’re just not gonna do anything about the hamsters?” I must’ve been aware that I had a trach tube in and aware of the large hole in front of the C collar, because I remember being particularly worried about getting hamster hair or droppings directly into the hole in the front of my throat. I remember being perplexed that no one had bothered to cover the hole, but I didn’t have the ability to get either hand up past my collar bone, so there was nothing I could do about it.

Continuing the animal theme… I can’t remember exactly who brought them, but I found myself in the company of a stuffed owl and a stuffed penguin from the gift shop. Now, had I not been fueled with IV sedatives and painkillers at night, they would’ve made the perfect companions. Instead of being the proverbial safety blanket they were intended to be, they turned out to be agents of pure terror; the two sets of giant white eyes, unblinking, staring at me from the far side of the room, encapsulated by the two shadowy silhouettes. Every time I would open my eyes, there they were, just waiting for me to go back to sleep so they could continue whatever maniacal plot they had in the works. And it wasn’t as if I could just turn my head, the C-collar had my head locked in place, leaving those piercing eyes constantly in my peripheral vision m  , à la A Clockwork Orange. Needless to say, at some point I apparently demanded they be placed face down, which I’m sure confused and amused those involved.

My hallucinations would gradually decrease in severity and frequency as I was slowly weaned off of the sedatives and painkillers. Thinking back, those hallucinations were as real, if not more real, than any other “memory” that I had at the time. Many times, I have a clearer, more vivid memory of the hallucinations than I do of what was really happening.