[Mrs. Don-o]

In 2015 I was in the ICU for 21 days, 16 days on mechanical ventilation. It was an E. coli blood sepsis with multiple organ failure: cardiac arrest, airway collapse, renal failure. They kept bringing me back.

I remember thinking (if it can be called "thinking") in a panic, "They're hurting you! They're killing you! FIGHT BACK!"

I remember trying to spit at, and head-butt, the respiratory therapist.

I remember grabbing for a nurse's nitrile-blue fingers and trying to bend them backwards and break them.

I remember thinking (not quite sure how to explain this) that they were trying to "fold me shut" like slamming a book shut, when they were just trying to change my position in the bed.

I remember a man dressed in blue looming menacingly over my face, and me (unable to move) wishing I had a knife under my pillow so I could stab him before he could fling me, naked, over his shoulder and carry me to a heliport...

Much later, when I was in my right mind, I tried to apologize to some of these good people, and they just laughed and brushed it off. "ICU paranoia. We see it all the time."

I learned something very important, I think, about the unreliability of the human mind in the throes of bacterial toxins, abnormal metabolites, and powerful therapeutic drugs.

[j.havenfarm]

I always say I almost died of SARS before SARS was cool. I was intubated but still lost 30 0pounds in 28 days... I was cooking. I couldn’t fight but tried to escape. They ended up tying me to the bed. The whole thing was sheer terror.