Evan
The Living Force
In late January of this year (2019), I was hospitalized with pneumonia and septic shock. I was sedated and intubated for 17 days, during which I lived in an alternate life, died, watched my funeral, and was resurrected. This is an account of that life.
Chapter 1: I Am Sick
I’m in the emergency room, I’ve been told I need an organ transplant, but they cannot help me. I leave the hospital and find myself at a Hasidic rabbi’s home. He sends a young boy out into the night and he returns with some red strips of tissue in a bucket. These are to be transplanted into my lungs to regrow them. I spend roughly a week being nursed by the boy. I believe I’m somewhere in New York City.
I am now returned to the hospital near my home in California. Things are going on in the background but I can’t really tell what is going on, but there’s some kind of crisis. I then see the Hasidic boy, and he’s been brought to the hospital with his father the rabbi, who is now in need of a lifesaving transplant himself. The hospital administrator is sitting near where I’m lying and I tell her that I know the boy and his father. She asks me how to curry favor with the boy so she can be the hero who saves his father, who is evidently being threatened with deportation or prison for organ trading like that which saved my life. I tell her to give him my favorite pistachio ice cream from a specific dairy near where I once lived in Wisconsin. She gets him the ice cream and wins him over. I see a picture of him with the administrator on the front page of the next day’s newspaper. I’m dismayed that what she’s telling the world about the boy is lies and I tell her so. I remind her about the ice cream and that it was me who brought him to her.
I awake to flashing lights reflected on the walls of the emergency room where my bed is. The police have come to take the boy and his father. Apparently there will be some kind of war in the Mediterranean if the man is not freed. I attempt to speak on the rabbi’s behalf but am silenced by sedation.
I awake in a hotel room somewhere east of Gibraltar. There’s a television on and my ex-girlfriend’s daughter is at the foot of my bed telling her father on the phone that I am stable. Then the explosions start to shake the building. I can see fighter planes outside the window firing upon one another. On the tv, Trump has declared war with Russia. Somehow this relates to the rabbi and the organs.
There’s a man in my hotel room too. It seems that it’s his room and I’m just there stuck in my bed silent. He’s betting on himself in a fight on a pay per view channel on the television. Later, I come to understand that he’s my doctor, and the nurses and staff also bet on him every Tuesday. He is drunk and he is on the phone making odds, and he turns and tells me he will cook for me on his boat in the Gulf of Mexico.
The man/doctor will return later in the story.
Next, Chapter Two: Leaving Las Vegas (I Am Dead).
Chapter 1: I Am Sick
I’m in the emergency room, I’ve been told I need an organ transplant, but they cannot help me. I leave the hospital and find myself at a Hasidic rabbi’s home. He sends a young boy out into the night and he returns with some red strips of tissue in a bucket. These are to be transplanted into my lungs to regrow them. I spend roughly a week being nursed by the boy. I believe I’m somewhere in New York City.
I am now returned to the hospital near my home in California. Things are going on in the background but I can’t really tell what is going on, but there’s some kind of crisis. I then see the Hasidic boy, and he’s been brought to the hospital with his father the rabbi, who is now in need of a lifesaving transplant himself. The hospital administrator is sitting near where I’m lying and I tell her that I know the boy and his father. She asks me how to curry favor with the boy so she can be the hero who saves his father, who is evidently being threatened with deportation or prison for organ trading like that which saved my life. I tell her to give him my favorite pistachio ice cream from a specific dairy near where I once lived in Wisconsin. She gets him the ice cream and wins him over. I see a picture of him with the administrator on the front page of the next day’s newspaper. I’m dismayed that what she’s telling the world about the boy is lies and I tell her so. I remind her about the ice cream and that it was me who brought him to her.
I awake to flashing lights reflected on the walls of the emergency room where my bed is. The police have come to take the boy and his father. Apparently there will be some kind of war in the Mediterranean if the man is not freed. I attempt to speak on the rabbi’s behalf but am silenced by sedation.
I awake in a hotel room somewhere east of Gibraltar. There’s a television on and my ex-girlfriend’s daughter is at the foot of my bed telling her father on the phone that I am stable. Then the explosions start to shake the building. I can see fighter planes outside the window firing upon one another. On the tv, Trump has declared war with Russia. Somehow this relates to the rabbi and the organs.
There’s a man in my hotel room too. It seems that it’s his room and I’m just there stuck in my bed silent. He’s betting on himself in a fight on a pay per view channel on the television. Later, I come to understand that he’s my doctor, and the nurses and staff also bet on him every Tuesday. He is drunk and he is on the phone making odds, and he turns and tells me he will cook for me on his boat in the Gulf of Mexico.
The man/doctor will return later in the story.
Next, Chapter Two: Leaving Las Vegas (I Am Dead).
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