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Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Never on a Sunday...but always on a Monday, a Wednesday, a Friday

My first walk at the famous Vasquez Rocks in 2014. No, I wasn't running from a Gorn.
Sundays are usually dedicated to my rehab walks, where I walk until I'm exhausted. Writing a blog a day has been a form of exercise, too, but it's also been exhausting (and it's been interfering with my formal writing). So starting from today, I will be posting blogs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This will allow my to keep the quality up on the blog, while continuing my other writing.

I will do my best to not to be tiresome.
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Coma Girl

Coma Girl

Not a miracle recovery, but a miracle of modern medicine

In 2013 I fell into a six-week coma and nearly died after I contracted legionella. The Legionnaire's disease was in turn triggered by immunosuppression caused by the prednisone I was taking for my rare autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis.

I suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when the sepsis caused my blood pressure to plummet. I fell into a deep coma. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, as my body was began dying one organ at a time. My doctors told my loved ones to give up hope for my full recovery. They expected me to die, and even if I somehow lived, I would remain a vegetable or at best left so hopelessly brain-damaged that I would never be same. But unbeknownst to them, while they were shining lights in my eyes and shaking their heads, I was telling them in my coma-dream--my secular version of a near-death experience--to leave me alone because I was trying to get back to sleep. I was experiencing what is known as covert cognition, the subject of my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," which appeared in their July/August issue.

But it wasn't a miracle--despite what so many continue to believe--that I recovered so fully. I owe my life not to God, but the miracles of modern medicine, as well as the nature of the watershed-area brain damage I suffered, as I detailed in my article and in this blog.