Origin Story

My latest Secular Spectrum post tells the tale of how I transitioned from agnostic to atheist and finally evolved into a skeptic. Here's the link: Origin Story.

I was raised an agnostic, so when I realized I had become an atheist when I was 13 or 14, it was hardly a wrenching transition. But I reveled in tales of the supernatural and such pseudoscientific subjects as ESP and clairvoyance. I even thought I might be a bit psychic. Something changed when I began identifying as an atheist, however. Slowly, I began seeing the world through a critical filter. So long ESP, hello confirmation bias.

On This Day

Two years ago, yesterday, according to the On This Day Facebook app, Keith shared the above photo of me on my four-hour tour of our house during my second furlough, as they called it, from the nursing home, Country Villa Sheraton. Furlough, as if I were getting out of prison. Country Villa was far from the Sheraton, but I was receiving desperately needed physical therapy. One of my most difficult exercises was to stand. That was it. I would just barely struggle to stand up, over and over again. "That's ten," Denise, the occupational therapist, would say. I would rest a bit, then she would say, "Let's do another set." It was like musical chairs without the music...or the fun. The prize was that I would be able to get up from a chair without help. It was utterly exhausting for me--that's how weak I was. Only a month before I could barely lift my head from the pillow.

I have many more readers than the last time I wrote about this, but this previous post makes a good primer about what I went through as I struggled to walk: A Journey of a Thousand Miles. As it details, another physical therapist confided to me that the other therapists thought John Silva, the main physical therapist helping me to relearn how to walk, was rushing my walking.

John Silva helping me on my first walk outside the nursing home.

But if John hadn't put me on such an aggressive program, I wouldn't have even been able to leave the nursing home when I did, and I would've lost my Kaiser Permanente health insurance. I had to be out by November or my coverage would've gone bye-bye. As woefully unprepared as I was to return home, I needed that coverage, considering that I still had a serious autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis. I could've continued with non-Kaiser Medi-Cal coverage, but my quality of healthcare would've suffered without Kaiser's superior care. And, we would've had to pay the nursing home out of our own pockets because it's likely that Medi-Cal wouldn't have paid to keep me there either. A Kaiser social worker who worked at the nursing home confided to me that in a few months time, what Kaiser was doing to me would be illegal. That was because the unfairly maligned Affordable Care Act--better known as Obamacare--would be taking effect then.

During that first furlough, I slipped and hit my head on the toilet because I wasn't used to a four-wheeled rollator. Don't worry, I wasn't hurt; I have a hard head. I'm lucky I didn't crack the toilet. John had instructed me to sign out a walker to be used during my furlough, but he was off for the weekend. A tightly wound physical therapist who disagreed with John's methods refused to allow me to sign out a walker (though this was a common practice). Without John there, I was at her mercy. So Keith went to a large local drugstore to buy one for me, but they only had four-wheeled rollators. The kind of walker I had been using had only two wheels, with rubber stopper ends on the front legs. I later learned that four wheels aren't recommended for people with little physical control. But Keith didn't know that either. If that therapist had allowed me to take a walker with me, I wouldn't have hit my head. As I said, I was okay, but that was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

After I returned home, I tricked out the walker with a tote and a cupholder.

The second home visit went smoother because Keith had ordered a two-wheeled walker from Amazon, which I continued to use until I was strong enough to handle the rollator. To the right is a photo taken on one of my first rehab walks using the walker Keith bought. And below is a photo taken on our first rehab walk at Vasquez Rocks, when I was finally strong enough for the four-wheeled rollator. The rollator opened up areas like Vasquez Rocks that would've been too difficult to manage using the walker, which created a lot of drag, even with the ski glides we put on it.

I wasn't walking fast; it's really windy at Vasquez Rocks.

This Friday, we will be carving pumpkins for Halloween. We'll also be holding a belated birthday celebration for Joella, Keith's mom. During her birthday, she was away on her annual summer pilgrimage to visit her other two sons and their families. Friday will also be the second anniversary of my return home. My homecoming was on the day before Halloween. I did not, as our custom, carve a pumpkin. A knife in my feeble hands was not advisable. I didn't want to return to the hospital so soon after leaving the nursing home. I was still recovering from MRSA pneumonia and I was experiencing painful spasms in my right foot that were eased somewhat by vibrating slippers. Thus, instead of my usual jester costume, I wore a warm sweater coat and matching vibrating slippers, since wearing only one would've looked weird. Yes, it was Halloween, but it wasn't that kind of fun-weird. I was dressed as a sickly person who had just gotten out of the nursing home after a six-week coma. I think the bandage on my tracheostomy site was a nice touch. The gloves were to hide the open sores on my hands, which had not yet healed, a legacy of my dermatomyositis. Maybe I should've used my hands as part of a zombie costume....

Handing out candy and toys to the trick-or-treaters with Joella the day after my return.

Last year, I was strong enough to carve two pumpkins and I wore the jester costume.

Last Halloween with Joella and her dog Sadie. Traditionally, I hand out the toys and Joella gives out the candy. Sadie handles the sniffing.

This year, I will have fuller hair, but more importantly, I won't need to use a cane. I only use it now when I'm out to provide stability. Everyone needs a bit of stability in their lives. I would've benefited immensely from a few extra weeks in the nursing home, but it was certainly nice to be home.

“Please Put a Blanket on Me” — I Was Aware in My Coma

This photo was taken on the day I was transferred to a nursing home, five days before my awakening.

My second post for the Secular Spectrum explores covert cognition, like I experienced, and explains why it negates the arguments for mind-brain separation. NDE true-believers insist that the brains of experiencers couldn't generate what they perceived because their brains weren't functioning. Well, my doctors claimed that I was profoundly brain damaged and wrote me off as a vegetable even as I was experiencing a rich fantasy life. My brain certainly was active enough to produce my coma-dreams.

Here's the link to the post: “Please Put a Blanket on Me” — I Was Aware in My Coma

Coma chameleons

Now that I'm a contributing writer for The Secular Spectrum, I have a new outlet for my skeptical and humanist writing. Therefore, I feel free to write more directly about my recovery again in Coma Chameleon again. This blog is subtitled, My Recovery Chronicles, after all. This post, however, is also a continuation of some of my recent subject matter.Yes, that's right, my fellow coma victim and experiencer, Eben Alexander.

A few months ago, I finally received my hospital records from my 6-week coma in 2013, after being mistakenly given the records from my two-week 2014 hospitalization. Both were due to Legionnaires' disease, caused by immunosuppression. Thanks, prednisone.

The 2447 pages of the PDF (I received it on CD) is a treasure trove of details, sandwiched between mountains of repetitive information. I don't have the space to go into all the information, and I've only skimmed through parts of it. But I did learn one juicy tidbit. I knew that my lungs and kidneys were failing, but apparently my liver wanted to get into the act, as well. When I mentioned this, Keith joked that my spleen was doing fine, as was my appendix. Everything else was going south. My impression is that the liver problems weren't as severe as the other organ failures, a speculation my neurologist later confirmed. Otherwise, I would've been given a Charlson Comorbity Scale of 3 instead of 2. Think of what it would've done for the miracle-believers if I had managed to survive a score the maximum of six out of the twenty-two frequently fatal conditions that make up the scale.

In Proof of Heaven, Eben Alexander actually implies that the very rarity of E.coli meningitis in an adult is evidence that God chose him as His Special Messenger. After all, as a neurosurgeon, he was the perfect emissary to the disbelieving medical and scientific community. Yeah, right. Wouldn't neuroscientist Sam Harris have been even better? I suppose his argument is that God chose a rare condition as a sign that this was an act of God. Isn't he special? According the famous Esquire expose, Alexander has a reputation of arrogance. And he hides it so well.

At any rate, he seems convinced that the severity of his illness is another sign of God's hand. But as someone who was at least as close to death, you'll have to forgive me for not being impressed. My doctors were every bit as convinced that my death was imminent. I'll take one life-threatening bacterial infection--in my case, Legionnaires' disease--and raise him multiple strokes on both sides of my brain, severe sepsis, lung, kidney, and liver failure, as well as another potentially fatal bacterial infection, listeriosis. And compared to his measly seven days of coma, I was comatose for six weeks.

Take that, Eben Alexander, messiah to the scientific world.

My first Secular Spectrum post

The theme of my first post for the Patheos Atheist Channel group blog The Secular Spectrum will be somewhat familiar to my regular readers, but I took a particularly satirical tack to introduce my story to a unfamiliar readership. It's not hard to satirize the fact that so many believers think God bestowed a miracle upon such a committed atheist. Here's the link: Miracle Girl?

Without tunnel vision, but on a new path

Eben Alexander didn't see a tunnel either.

One of the complaints I've heard most often from near-death experience true-believers is that my NDE wasn't one because I didn't see Heaven. Needless to say, that's about as circular an argument as is possible without passing out from the centrifugal force. They also complain that I didn't have a life review or see dead relatives. Or, that I didn't die.

Eben Alexander didn't experience any of these either, except for the first (unless you count the iffy identification of the girl on the butterfly, and she wasn't waiting for him in the tunnel, as in classic NDEs). He writes that he would've liked to have seen his father, but Dad was MIA. Maybe he something better to do instead.

Indeed, when you read Proof of Heaven, it becomes clear that it's only his later interpretation of his NDE that categorized it as Heaven in the first place. He saw butterflies, an idyllic landscape, and an orb that emitted an "om" sound. That's more like what you might expect from a New Age guru, not a Judeo-Christian God. And have any of those true-believers ever wondered why other NDErs haven't flown on butterflies or languished in the Earthworm's-Eye View? If this is the afterlife, shouldn't all NDErs see these realms too?

He claims that his NDE was typical, but was it really?

Of course, I've viewed my NDE through my own filter, but as a skeptic, I not only didn't see anything with a spiritual quality, I didn't search for any larger meaning in what I experienced. I think we both had elaborate coma-dreams. End of story.

The back matter of the book is filled with thanks to the flakey New Age and near-death experience groups he's joined since his NDE. There are acknowledgements to NDE researchers and his fellow experiencers. He's obviously drunk deeply from the New Age Kool-Aid cup. In Proof of Heaven, Alexander repeatedly claims that he was a skeptic before his NDE, but he also refers to his wife's supposedly psychic and "intuitive" friends. Yes, spouses can have completely different views on these subjects. Indeed, there are many atheists with religious spouses.

And speaking of which, I will soon be a regular contributor to The Secular Spectrum, a group blog on the Patheos site's Atheist Channel, home of the Friendly Atheist. My editor is Dale McGowan, author of Atheism for Dummies. Do they have a Religion for Dummies or is that redundant? Sorry, I had to make that joke. At any rate, Dale wrote a cogent post about his wife, who was an evangelical when they married. So, of course it's possible that Holley Alexander could've been associated with beliefs Eben doubted before his NDE. But I can't help wondering how firm his skepticism could've been if he so readily rejected the more scientifically sound explanations for his NDE. I mean, come on, the neurosurgeon in him must surely know that his brain couldn't have been offline during his NDE. After all, how could he remember his experience if it had been?

At any rate, as I mentioned, I am now a blogger for The Secular Spectrum, nicknamed SecSpec. I'm also still in recovery, and I have to devote hours every day to rehab. I therefore have no choice but to reduce my blog rate here at Coma Chameleon: My Recovery Chronicles. After all, it wouldn't make sense to have my recovery blog cut into my rehab time.

I will continue to post at least one full blog a week, plus links to my SecSpec posts, with behind-the-scenes content. I'm not abandoning my first love just because it's now an open marriage. ;-)

About face

Today's blog harks back to some points I made in a previous post about the claim that Phyllis and Betty Alexander saw a "perfect rainbow" heralding the awakening of Eben. This was proven to be impossible by the famous Esquire expose of Alexander. I argued that they could've I either mixed up the timing of the rains and the rainbow, or the memory could've been implanted in their minds by the very suggestion that it had happened. My hypothesis was based on the groundbreaking research misinformation effect research of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and many others.

This is a related phenomenon. Alexander claims that soon before his awakening, he saw six faces in the muck of the Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View. All but one of them had been praying for him that day or the night before. He draws the conclusion this this is due to their prayers reaching him in Heaven. I would counter that he was simply hearing their voices, just as the voices of my loved ones leaked into my coma-dream. These were all people familiar to him, after all.The other face belonged to Susan Reintjes, a long-time friend of Eben's wife. She calls herself an intuitive and claims to be able to psychically reach people in comas. I intuitively think she's a flake. She says she contacted him remotely from her apartment, and Alexander believes he picked up the call in Heaven. Coincidentally, he learned about this after his awakening.

Proof of Heaven ends with what is supposed to be the big reveal. The girl on the butterfly was actually his long-lost dead sister Betsy, whom he never met because he was raised by adoptive parents. How does he know it was her? He was sent a photo of Betsy. So, he immediately recognized her when he saw the photo, right? Nope. He says that the next morning he was reading Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' book On Life After Death when he was struck by the story of a young girl recounting her near-death experience to her parents. She tells them about being comforted by her brother, only she didn't have a brother. Wait for it...yup, it turns out that she did have a brother who died a few years before she was born. (You think maybe she could've overheard something about the brother, or that it's a complete coincidence?) Then, suddenly, it dawns on Alexander that the woman in the photo--the sister he never met--was the very girl on the butterfly! Wooooooo! It was the clothes that threw him off. Yeah, that's it. It couldn't be that image the girl on the butterfly, after all those months, suddenly morphed in his mind into his dead sister? And perhaps the same thing happened after he was told the story of Susan reaching his spirit while he was in the coma?

Nah.