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Monday, May 23, 2016

So Always Look on the Bright Side of Death


Miracle Girl: So Always Look on the Bright Side of Death

Monty Python's Life of Brian is one of my favorite films. I can't count how many times I've seen the movie. It seems unlikely that it could've been made today, so we have the pre-Moral Majority times it came out in to thank for its release. Not that it wasn't a subject for protests, of course.

But I digress. My second Miracle Girl post is really about how life is indeed a piece of shit, when you think of it, as Eric Idle sang on the cross.

Yet atheists don't wonder why God put that shit in front of their shoe. And when a door closes, they don't wait for God to open a window. They do it for themselves.

And so have I, as I've coped with my illnesses in the last few years. Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.
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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.