Dead for Nine Seconds at a Time
For Real
I didn’t keep my blog up as I kinda fell off the earth in October. I had been plagued by increasingly disturbing symptoms over the past few years and when a physician friend took measurements after I climbed a flight of stairs, I took his advice and went to a hospital. I’m so grateful that I ended up at Hospital Biblica in San Jose, Costa Rica and became the patient of Dr Fanny Rojas Robles. Months before, while in the US, I was given an echocardiogram, which did not show the damage to my heart that was evident when Dr. Robles personally provided the test. I was admitted and put on monitors. After a day of readings, Dr. Robles told me I could not walk the hallways, that I had to stay in bed until I received a pacemaker. As it turns out, my heart stopped on a regular basis, for as long as nine seconds at a time. I was essentially dead on a regular basis.
Years of secondhand smoke as a child, my not-the-cancer surgery as well as my genetics are the underlying causes of my heart’s damage. OK. And few devastating experiences with humans.
After receiving my pacemaker, I experienced a feeling of shock and dissociation. This was a lot of take in: I now had a piece of machinery in my body that ensured my heart would beat. I felt a vulnerability that I’ve not felt before. Death certainly became a reality, rather than a concept. An experience that put life in perspective…. definitely time to let more things go and definitely time to do more of what I wanted. It brought me to new levels of learning to please myself and let go of a sense of self-imposed obligation to be better, do better, and help others that dominated all areas of my life. And an interesting paradox: I felt both more forgiving and less likely to suffer fools.
So, here I am for another chapter, long, short, or in between. Stay tuned. Or don’t. I will be having fun. At a whole, new level.
Pura Vida,
Tree
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Traditional Trauma Resolution helps one develop the ability to center more quickly after overwhelming incidents. Check out the my presentation: What is Traditional Trauma Resolution