Two months ago, while home alone, suddenly without warning my body was wracked with chills. Then for the next four hours I had alternating bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. When my wife Jeanne arrived home she found me in this depleted state and called my physician who fortunately picked up the call and said go to the emergency room. In the ambulance my body temperature was 105 and my blood pressure was plummeting to dangerously low levels. The emergency room team treated me aggressively with antibiotics, intravenous fluids and norenephrenine to regulate my blood pressure. I was in the intensive care unit for five days with a diagnosis of streptococcal pneumonia and severe septic shock made worse by the fact I have no spleen because it was removed twelve years ago as a result of very aggressive lymphoma. On the third day of my stay in intensive care, as my body was recovering unexpectedly quickly, the RN revealed that when I arrived I was the sickest person on the unit. At that moment I became increasingly aware that if everyone(Jeanne, my physician, the ER team) had not acted in such a timely way I would have died.
PLEASE CARRY ME
In the ambulance en route to the hospital, in the emergency room and throughout my five day stay in the intensive care unit I frequently asked my Higher Self, "Please carry me." And it did. My dear wife Jeanne, who was fully with me throughout this major medical crisis - including sleeping on a couch in my room every night - said it was amazing to witness that my consciousness was present during the whole experience. My primary care physician, who is a dear friend, visited me at home two days after I returned from the hospital and asked,"Were you freaking out at times?" I was perplexed by her very understandable question. After a while I realized that at no time in this ordeal did I feel fearful or anxious. WOW!
My Higher Self carried me through what one of the RN's described as "the most massive stress test that your body could ever experience." That transcendent part of my consciousness helped me to be fully present so the I could: collaborate with the medical staff, be unafraid so that fear did not interfere with my treatments and recovery, and most importantly to feel deeply that I was going to be "OK."
This is profound for me. It has deepened my faith that no matter what happens in my life, including my dying, my Higher Self will be present as my companion,as a source of strength and equanimity to carry me through. WOW!!! For many years I have cultivated a personal relationship with my Higher Self - whom I call Wiseheart. This medical crisis bore to me the fruits of that ongoing work. With my psychotherapy patients I encourage them also to develop that ongoing relationship and teach them how to access their Higher Self in everyday life. This experience has affirmed the importance of that work. I encourage you too to cultivate an ongoing relationship to your personal Higher Self.
I AM ALIVE
There are no adequate words to describe the level of gratefulness that I feel to my body, to the medical staff at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton Massachusetts, and to all the people whose presence, love and prayers helped me through this ordeal. Coexisting alongside these feelings of immense gratefulness I was also carrying and contemplating - for several weeks after my return home - this unanswerable psychospiritual question "What is it like to not exist in this form?"
About a month after my hospital stay Jeanne and I felt we needed some time away and we went for three days to a town an hour and a half from our home. Our first night over pizza and beer we were discussing again all the thoughts and feelings we were each having while I was in the hospital. Then a man walked up to our table and said, "Do you remember me?" I looked up and said "Yes,but I don't know from where." He said,"I'm Matt. I was your nurse at the hospital." Both Jeanne and I got up, hugged him and expressed our great gratitude. I said," I can't imagine any hospital in the world giving me any better care than you and the rest of the staff at Cooley Dickinson gave me." He introduced his wife and son and we expressed our feelings to them. After he left Jeanne and I expressed our awe at this moment of synchronicity. What are the odds that at the moment we were talking about the hospital Matt - who lives two and a half hours from this pizzeria - would be there with his family.
Later that night,lying in bed while Jeanne was asleep, I began to have flashbacks of being in the hospital. After a while something inside me said "You are alive." Then it shifted to "I am alive' and then became a robust "I AM ALIVE." To affirm this statement I decided to do two things that I could not do in the hospital: one,get up and walk around; two, open a window and breathe outside air. Since that moment I say aloud robustly several times each day "I AM ALIVE." I do this to strengthen that inner feeling and to respond to the call to be more fully alive. The earlier question,"What is it like not to exist in this form" has receded. It is as if that synchronistic moment of Matt's appearance acted as a psychospiritual bridge to move me along from my thoughts that I almost died and ruminations about non-existence to a way-of being-in-the-world more connected to the life force. WOW!!!
