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Friday, January 8, 2016

A step up in my recovery

Rehab Walk/Hike Tumblrs: Descanso Gardens

For the first time, Keith and I hiked the entire circumference of the always beautiful Descanso Gardens. According to my Fitbit, it was a total of 1.64 miles. But I think it would be only fair for me to get extra credit for the verticality of the hike.

We hiked up two steep hills bookending the gardens, and climbed hundreds of steep steps, for a total of 15 floors. (Those weren't all steps, the Fitbit also counts steep inclines as steps.)

At any rate, it was certainly a step up, so to speak, from our first post-coma trip to Descanso, on 12-22-2013. That time (and on many subsequent visits), Keith had to push me in a wheelchair through much of Descanso.

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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.