Imposter Syndrome

I have no true recollection of the past few months. Sure I have notes and memories of here and there but everything is foggy. Short-term memory loss is not fun. It has led me down a rabbit hole of my thoughts, trying to put together pieces of what happened. The constant routine that was hospital care doesn’t help in separating the individual days of all my stays. My mind, body, and spirit are still recovering from the wreckage of what happened to me, but I can’t remember why. I physically know I went through something bad. I did right? No one wants to go through something like what I went through but I have no recollection of anything TRULY bad that happened to me. So it’s hard to confirm whether or not it was… bad. Trust me, I don’t want to throw myself a pity party and say woe is me, but I can’t help but want to feel validated in my pain and anxiety. I think about cancer patients that go through full-blown chemotherapy and often wonder if I am being too dramatic. If I’m cosplaying as a truly sick person. My infusions aren’t even close to the amount of chemotherapy that most cancer patients are getting, but it still has its toll on my body. I can’t help but compare myself to those that have it harder than me and think that I may be overdramatic in my recovery. It has been a flip-flop mindset for me because I know everyone’s body is different and each recovery is too. My Father informed me that my 3 trips to the ICU were miracles considering a lot don’t make it out of one stay. That I could’ve died, which morbidly validated my feelings.

The only thing I can remember in detail about one of my first ER stays ,was when I was laying down in the bed in a fever, pain-induced haze, and my dad was standing to the left of me. The nurse was about to give me pain medication, which I was in desperate need of. Right before they pushed it I felt a surge of pain come from my chest. Not the kind where you have to catch your breath for a sec, the kind where you lift your chest in agony and grasp it like you can’t breathe. The pain slowly subsided and wound down. It was only for 15 seconds but within them, a code was called and about 6 nurses came in with heart monitors. You know how in movies there’s a slow-mo moment and you can remember every small detail within a small amount of time? Yeah, that happened. I noticed my dad instantly whip out his phone and call my Mom which at the moment I thought was an odd time to have a chat but I digressed. My Father later told me he wanted to call her to drive over here ASAP, in case I didn’t make it. I saw the panic as my nurse was asking me a million questions. Wheres the pain? What’s hurting? How bad is it? Describe what’s happening? Which annoyed me to no end, because I didn’t know what was going on either. I felt like I was left with the collateral damage of calming everyone down. Telling them that I was okay and that the pain was going away. I had never faced something like heart palpitations or anything similar to it so I simply thought I was having a moment. That if the nurses just gave me a moment I’d be fine, that THEY were being dramatic. When they didn’t stop rushing around and calling out orders I sensed… maybe something was wrong. I remember this as the only time I truly knew and thought something seriously bad was happening. My heart rate was going so fast for so long, then dropped down from 160 to 90 BPM. So yeah my heart just had restart for a second but I was good. However, if you mix in the fact that I had a raging fever, was extremely dehydrated, had an undiagnosed inflammatory disease, had an overworked liver, and was in septic shock, maybe a heart palpitation isn’t something you wanted to add to the mix. They then ran almost every heart test in the book to make sure I was okay after that. I guess it’s good that that was the only time I was truly scared that I was going to die, because I had many more unknown visits ahead . As I was explaining this to my Dad in the car on the way to one of my many doctor’s appointments, he reminded me not to wallow in the fact that I went through something negative and of course I agreed. I don’t want to be negative and look back on the hard times, well I can’t even remember it so that would be hard to do. I just want to know where I stand. Am I making a bigger deal out of something that isn’t?

Photos

Thankfully we live in an age of technology in which I can capture every waking moment if I could. While my memory isn’t serving me at this moment, Sydney was smart in documenting her progress throughout the months even if it was just pictures of her face and what I liked to call my IV tree because it was decorated with various fluid “ornaments” .So enjoy these daunting but almost hysterical pictures of my progressive journey though out the hospital stays. They’re not fun pictures by any means but they’re my story.