+397 Days: Echoes of emotions long buried

"I don't want to live like this. I am ready to die"

… And suddenly, it was 1999 again, and I was back in the hospital in Berlin.

All week long I had been way off-center emotionally, and I couldn't put my figure on just why. Today it became clear what the root cause of this was.

In 1999 I was studying abroad in Berlin, Germany when I wound up in a hospital with a massive tumor almost dead center in my brain. The tumor had cut off fluid drainage, and I now know that I had been experiencing a condition called hydrocephalus - CSF fluid build-up in the brain. I had been dealing with this condition for over a month before it was properly diagnosed. And between the time I first had symptoms to waking up in a hospital with tubes coming out of my head and beakers of brain fluid filling up next to my hospital bed, reality had become fiction, and fiction my reality. I thought I was on an alien spaceship. I thought the parents that I'd always known were just a sinister fiction. I had full blown paranoia, and where reality seemed to reemerge in the day time, night time was always a reminder that the reality that I was so desperate to latch onto was false. It got to be so bad sometimes, and so unending. Having lost touch with reality, I was so deeply desperate. And all that was real was my pain, the tubes coming out of my head, and the nightmares enveloping me. "I can't live like this" I thought. and the desperate idea  of death as an escape from the pain and delusions was something that I started to contemplate.

Back to my father: A day or two after he had been hospitalized, dad wrote a note on his pad and handed it to me:

"I don't want to live like this. I'd like to die in dignity". "Oh dad!" was all I could say. I gave him a soft hug. I knew right where he was, and I remembered my distant memories of being so desperate.

I left the hospital and went back home. I thought I was dealing with this just fine. What I didn't realize was that seeing my dad in the hospital and reading his note that he was ready to die triggered old memories of my paranoia and desperation in Berlin.

Today, the old emotions and feelings from being in the hospital in Berlin that I thought I had handled burst through my sub-conscious into my conscious brain. And all of a sudden I was back in the hospital - the feelings of paranoia, desperation and powerlessness came flooding back. I broke down and wailed. It flooded through me, and the paranoia and desperation that I hadn't felt or been able to summon for years was suddenly right back upon me. "Just stay in the moment" Caroline and our friends were advising me. I knew this was all I could do.