So I died. Now what?

[Fritz]

It has helped me through some pretty fucked up times.

[snowsprite]

Wow. you really said it best. I died on the table (ironically) giving birth to my son 15 yrs ago and was brought back. I have never been the same person. I am still kind of in shock over what I went through. It kind of destroyed my innocence in a way. I have never regained the feeling of security I had before. But in a sense I woke up. I guess it's all good. It's part of evolving into who I am today and it's what I had to go through.

Thanks for sharing Ice. Glad all the feedbacks have made you feel better/less alone.
Peace,
Sprite

Read your blog, and skipped the rest, so maybe this has been said.

You're in mourning. The hyper-sensitivity to sad stuff (crying at the stupidest things) is a sure sign. You had a major shock to your psyche; all your assumptions (known and subconscious) about the stability of your world have been stripped away, and now you're walking around without armor. Whether you know it or not, you're mourning the loss of the stable world you believed you had created for yourself. Now that you know it was all an illusion, you're feeling lost.

This is common; you are NOT alone. I was in a similar place a few years ago (long story); I described it like this: I lived on an island surrounded by a raging sea of uncertainty. On my island, I was safe; I know it well, and was comfortable there, safe from the chaos. Then a storm came and swept me out to sea. My original island was gone, and it took me a long time to find another island where I felt as comfortable. It wasn't the same island - but it was just as nice. I now live there comfortably, but the false sense of security I had before is gone - I now know that a storm could come again, and I could lose this one too. But this time, the knowledge that I can find another island gives me a different sense of security. And when I found my new island, I got to leave behind all the crap on the old one that I thought I needed, and/or wanted.

Take some time to reevaluate what's important to you, and don't let religious kooks use your uncertainty as a tool to get their hooks into you. You now get to look at life from a whole new perspective, one not many of us will ever have a chance to understand. You get to reinvent yourself, and that's a gift.

[Benny Profane]

OK, burned in memory from this and other incidents. Call 911, shout, whine, be a pain in the ass if you're conscious.
Damn, I don't think I can handle one of those things down my throat.

Ice, what blood pressure meds are you taking? I've been prescribed a few, but they make me sick as shit. I'm borderline, though.......

[iceman]

Ice, what blood pressure meds are you taking? I've been prescribed a few, but they make me sick as shit. I'm borderline, though.......

Really? Maybe this is a better PM. If the unwashed masses call for the info I have no problem sharing, though.

[Art Shirk]

Sprite: giving birth to a 15 year old is gonna be tough for anyone.

Ice: sorry to hear about the gag reflex. We all thought you were past that after your cameo in Lawrence of Alabia.



In seriousness, wish you guys the best.

[iceman]

Commonlaw continues to move up in the rankings.

I KNEW somebody would go after that "gag reflex" comment, but I figured it would be stupid and unfunny.

I was wrong twice. Good on ya, man.

[mock vomit]

Commonlaw continues to move up in the rankings...

Wait. We're being "ranked" here on TGR?!?! WTF.

[iceman]

Wait. We're being "ranked" here on TGR?!?! WTF.

Damn, you just lost some serious points. ++vibes++

[RaccoonFace]

***I have not read this entire thread***

Dammit, how am I supposed to not post in here if you keep asking me questions? I think I'm gonna go skiing for a couple hours later, I slept like 12 hours last night and I'm just chilling right now.

One thing that seems important for some reason for me to clear up for the rest of you morons is that I'm not some multi-million dollar trust fund baby. I come from no money. It would take a book to explain my childhood but trust me, we were busted.

I started a company and it did pretty well. We made a couple of real estate investments that worked out really well (I don't think this condo is going to be one of them, though) and then we had kids.

We decided we were going to have one of us stay home with them. My wife loves to work and is really good at it and gets paid really well for it, and she's also pretty hyper so we decided that if she stayed home she'd be an alcoholic and the kids would be crazy. So I sold my company. We paid off the house, funded the kids college with 529's, and I wrote, played with the kids, skied, traveled a lot as a family and fucked around on the internet.

Everything was cool until the aneurysm and for a while now I've been kinda lost but I'm starting to move on I think. I'm pretty sure yesterday was a kind of turning point of some sort and I really do feel a lot better, in large part because I finally spit out what I had been stewing about. I hadn't even talked to my wife about it, 'cause well, big boys don't cry, y'know?

So anyways everything's gonna be okay after a while and life goes on.

See you morons in some other thread.

Dibs if I blow off skiing I'll give you a call.

no more blogs, I promise.

Boom! There's your problem, and I assure you the answer is not religion or some bullshit about Jesus, Allah, God, Mary, Yahweh, et al.

You need a fucking job. Start another company, do something. You've lost yourself being useless and posting on TGR so much. When you have a purpose then you'll feel better about yourself... You're just bored.

okbye

[FNG]

This is the first time I've read a seven page thread in its entirety in quite some time. Quite frankly, it's scary to me. I've never had a medical emergency or a near death experience; however, I find similarities some of your situations and life outlook, and that's what scares me. If you can't find some sort of clarity, well, I'm fuct. Then there's the side of me that thinks life is about the journey, enjoy the ride, and all that jazz. I think there's some merit to that ideal. Life isn't something you can figure out, and if you did, what else would there be to do but die? Pushed by fear, compassion, and wonder, I'm not ready to go Hunter S. Thompson on it all just quite yet. In the mean time, I do my best to embrace the strange inconsistencies, the pitfalls, the crevasses, the sinkholes of life. There's more to be found in the moist ground under mossy rock in my backyard than on a hopeful, shiny TV show. When the pressure of life really starts pressing on me, I remind myself that Failure is beautiful.

I'm not sure what kind of writing you do, but I like to explore complex emotional, metaphysical, and existential issues through fiction writing. Burrow into the thoughts of a character. Ask him/her the questions that trouble you, and listen to their answer. See how they react. Feel for their troubled insides. Write different characters with different outcomes, different reactions. At the end of it all, you may not end up with a clear picture of what to do with your new life, but you'll have possibilities. You'll have hope. You'll have some interesting short stories that you can look at and be proud of.

"What am I supposed to do with my life" is an awful question to pose to yourself. Asking it incites anxiety and pressure. Answering it binds you to the pursuit of some goal, to achievement or failure. Try not to stress too much about anything. A little anxiety is productive, a lot is crippling. Relax and let the whole experience of life envelope you, and ignore you, and kick you around a little. It's written on Bukowski's tombstone, "Don't try." All you can do it be.

"Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it."

I'm glad you're still with us Iceman, and I hope you find some enlightenment (but not all of it) from your experience. You'll still need something in life to search for to keep it interesting. In jeans.

[phUnk]

First Tanner, and now Iceman. WTF.

[Benny Profane]

Strange, I just had someone very close to me describe how they came this close (thumb and forefinger a half inch away) from dying because of, um, medical incompetence and hospital bureaucratic inertia. People, if you've learned anything here, don't be passive and die in the waiting room. Shout, stomp and scream if you think you're in trouble. Call 911.

[Trackhead]

At first they thought I was having a heart attack but there was no pain anywhere except my lower back and my heart was beating strongly, if really really fast. So they took me to the ER, where they took me right away. The nurses thought it was a kidney stone, they gave me some dilaudid and did their nurse stuff, ekg, whatever. After a little while they asked about the pain and I honestly said it was worse than before. So they doubled the dose of dilaudid and gave me something else that starts with a "T" and called for me to get a CAT scan. Despite the percocets, dilaudid and whatever else it was they gave me, and somewhat unbelievably to me, the pain continued to increase.

Flank pain, sweating, severe/intractable pain is classic for kidney stones, but the ER's always consider other stuff. Usually a urine dip positive for blood will point in the direction of a kidney stone, otherwise, CT scans.

One thing about all this is that a very large number of patients with the same problem die in the ER waiting room. They look fine enough except for the pain, so they get triaged and wait while they deal with some kid who broke his ankle or whatever, and they bleed out internally and die. Among other things, my insistence on 911, an ambulance, and the fact that I saw a Doc almost immediately saved me. So stick up for yourself if you find yourself in a fucked-up situation like that.

.

When people come to the ER diaphoretic (sweating), pale, and have symptoms anywhere related to an aneurysm, they typically get rushed the fuck back with quite a bit of pucker factor on our part. Sick, and near dying people are usually very easy to spot from a long ways away, not always, but usually. Takes about 1/2 second to figure out something is VERY wrong and it's time to hustle.

But you're right, in 15 years of this ER shit, I have seen one person who came in with atypical groin pain and stable vital signs and ended up in the OR an hour or so later.

Thanks for the write up.

[The Suit]

You've obviously drifted away from your Buddhist upbringing.

[QuikR12]

Sprite: giving birth to a 15 year old is gonna be tough for anyone.

Ice: sorry to hear about the gag reflex. We all thought you were past that after your cameo in Lawrence of Alabia.

Holy shit that's funneh

But as far as my perspective is concerned, I'd agree with most everything in here, except that another dog will cure your problems.

to summarize what I've heard:

1. bored, not enough constructive things to occupy your time. do something new.
2. mourning, and will pass with time.
3. post traumatic stress, also will pass w/ time and shared doobies w/ SFB.
4. too much money, I have a solution: pm for details.

[Zeedashbo]

you can't die until all of the maggot whiskey drinkers get loaded together. start reading some confusing quantum physics books and it will all boil down to whiskey.

[iceman]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs"]YouTube- Monty Python-Bring out your dead![/ame]