Facebook

Twitter

Monday, June 13, 2016

June Gloom


Miracle Girl: June Gloom

My mood usually lifts once we start out on our rehab hikes. But not yesterday. Not really. Yes, I always enjoy them, but I couldn't shake the pall that had fallen on me after I read about the Orlando massacre.

The dark cloud has yet to lift, as the names of the dead continue to roll out like the cloud banks over Southern California in June.

But will the pain and anger create lasting change?
Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

1 comment:

  1. Monnika JacobSeptember 10, 2021 at 5:02 AM

    I will look forward to seeing you again and hope you will start blogging again soon. Wish you all the best. Assignment Writing Service

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for your comment!

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Contact me!

Name

Email *

Message *

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.