That One Time When I Died

I just got back from visiting a nephrologist.  I was scared.  My primary care doctor said that I had chronic kidney disease.  This is a case of knowing too much and too little.  Because, shit.  Kidney disease?
It has been two years since I had that really freak accident.  I don't  like to even think about it, let alone write and make it even more real, but there are just some undeniable ...I won't call them facts, because I sort of don't believe in facts...but, let's call them reports. 
Coming back from the incident, I was told over and over by a number of people how I shouldn't even be walking and talking right now, let alone having lived through that experience.  If the world is logical, at all, that is.  Here's why, in order of how it all strikes me right now:

• driving in commute traffic, leaving the road and wrapping the car around a tree
• having to be cut from the car while there was
• no oxygen to the brain for more than 15 minutes, at least
• no oxygen to the kidneys for more than 15 minutes
• other organs shutting down
• three times toxic dye injected into my system, when even one time is enough to have killed people before
• heart stopping
• heart stopping more than once
• V tach with heart beats over 280 beats per minute
• coma
• dependence upon respirator
• and more, but I can't do this part anymore

I've been to a few different doctors since then and each one exclaims how unreal it is that I survived. I sort of take it in, because I am alive, but I can't really take it all in.  It feels like just a story. And not even really an unusual one, at that. I recuperated, got over several broken ribs and even went camping a couple of months after the accident.  I went back to work after a month and didn't even use up all of my sick leave.  And occasionally I find myself sitting in a chair after yet one more doctor has come in to talk to me after having read my medical reports.  They marvel, and this last one even exclaimed that I had angels attending me, for sure.  He said "We would have to try really hard to kill you...you're going to live to 90." 


An ICD was implanted under my clavical and attached to my heart, which is set to shock my heart back into rhythm when and if  I have another episode of Vtach.  I take drugs to control heart rhythm and blood pressure.  One or more of those drugs has damaged my thyroid and now I take thyroid medicine.  This latest discovery of kidney disease might be attributed to the blood pressure medication.


I have always, always been a believer in homeopathic and other alternative remedies for what ails a person, and this new experience of taking these pharmaceuticals messes with my head.  But let's face it.  I'm scare-able.


And I don't really want to come off as dwelling on my maladies or other physical conditions, but I don't think I've ever put this much together in one telling.  And it's not this telling that motivates me to write, but I feel like what I really want to write about needs to be prefaced this way.


So, it's the head trip I want to write about.  Maybe I had angels attending me, maybe it just happened the way it was designed and I didn't need angels because it was all orchestrated from the "beginning."  I know that some things happen to some people and other things don't happen to them.  I reject the notion that some people are more favored to receive the good fortune of not dying when they "should."  I think all happenings happen as they do because they are happenings.  And just because I'm alive right now to be happy that I survived, what if I would still be this happy if I died?  Or maybe even more happy, but then again, there really is no such thing as "what if."