A sudden hiatus

I’ve been away for a while, unexpectedly and involuntarily. The reason is that I was in a hospital for two weeks, the majority of which were in an intensive care unit (ICU). Such an experience changes your entire life perspective – inadvertently or not. You are forced to see things differently because you came close to never seeing anything at all. And that clearly affects you.

Getting to the point where you need to be placed in an ICU, sedated and intubated, means that you are in a very grave – life-threatening – condition. When you’re sick, you never believe it’s ever that serious. But sometimes, life never happens as you wish or plan. Even if it’s a one-in-a-million chance of happening, sometimes it happens to you and you’re left wondering why. But that’s not really what’s important. Priorities change after this. Significance gains a new meaning. What’s truly important is surpassing it all, getting back up and recovering as best as possible.

A week in the ICU makes you view the world differently. It forces you to find ways to communicate even when you can’t speak – to innovate in getting your need across despite the tens of things you want to say. You learn to pay attention to the little things – the taste of water, the feeling of fresh linen, the sensation of cleanliness, the refreshing feeling of a bath, the touch of a loved one, the sounds and smells of life. Everything somehow feels different. You learn to appreciate the caretakers who fuss over you; their kindness and attention even when you’re not in a state to understand much. You can feel the people around you. You can sense the love, concern, and presence of all those who care and are in a state of frenzy when you appear to be sleeping. And you’re grateful for it. But most of all you learn that nothing – absolutely nothing – in this world is more important or more urgent than your health and well-being. If you collapse, nothing else matters.

The whole adventure teaches you to become more resilient, to have more patience as recovery demands time; to take things slow even if you don’t want to and are discouraged by the pace of progress. But it also makes you accept the things you cannot control and deal with the situation at hand. Whatever happened, happened. Now, there is a need to overcome it all; to slowly and steadily get back up, to heal.

Sometimes we’re dealt a hand we never expected. Perhaps it’s to understand that we’re stronger than we think. To reduce the pace we’ve been overwhelming ourselves with. Or simply perhaps to alter our entire mentality for the better.