As chance would have it, as I was finishing this book, I was struck with appendicitis. I checked into a peaceful little local hospital, on the advice of my wonderful friend and gifted healer, Dr. Henry Ealy. That was not a horrible experience.
But then I sustained an infection after my surgery, and was rushed to a terrifying major urban hospital, where I came very close to death. I am now home from the second hospital—the “Vortex Hospital,” as I think of it, a hospital of near-no-return—and am pleased to report that I am:
Not Dead Yet.
I suffered in ways I won’t trouble you by describing, but suffice to say that my stay at the Vortex Hospital involved the final three of what had been five days with no food or water, as I had lain, hooked up to an IV, with an acute abdominal infection, post-appendectomy.
I watched my vitals being taken again and again and saw that over time my blood oxygen levels had started sinking into the 80s; I could not get them back up into the safe 90s range, no matter how hard I inhaled and exhaled. I knew that when blood oxygen levels drop too low, people are intubated, and I knew that meant that the lungs could get damaged irrevocably. The internal infection raged on.
The morning of what was supposed to have been the day on which my procedure was to have taken place—one to treat the severe abdominal infection—we sustained a four-and-a-half-hour power outage (“Unprecedented,” the staff said wonderingly), leaving the massive brand-new hospital facility in unnerving darkness, even as the small, cozy, 1970s-era original building, right next door, trundled along with all its lights on.
By the end of my Day Five with no food or water, the staff at the Vortex Hospital told me that, due to the power outage, the procedure for which I had been transferred to that facility was being delayed further and further into the future.
“Maybe tomorrow,” said the RN vaguely. “Maybe the day after.”
When I expressed panic that that would mean seven days or more without food or water, the RN said, with no emotion, “People can live for seven days without food or water.”
The unsaid observation was: “Then, they can’t.”
And then she “reassured me”: “If you don’t get seen after Day Seven we’ll just put you on a feeding tube.” This terrified me. Finally she said, flatly: “Your vitals are stable.”
After this exchange, I truly panicked. I knew that while my vitals might look fine, I could feel that I was losing the ability to keep fighting for my life. I felt the subsiding of my will to fight, as clearly as if I were watching water swirling around an emptying drain.
I was exhausted, and had stopped caring about outcomes. I just wanted the suffering to end, in whichever way it might. In conventional nursing, I am sure that that collapse of my will to live would have been visible to a caring observer, no matter what my “vitals” had to say. But the machinery of data-based management ground on.
When I could fight no longer, I thought weakly of my loved ones; and realized that even though I no longer cared if I survived or not, they would care if this was indeed the end of my life.
So I asked God to please save my life. I also told God that if He spared my life I would write all the things I was currently scared to write—I knew He knew exactly what those things were—and then I collapsed into a feverish dream.
I found myself coming to consciousness free of pain, and feeling light and small. For good reason: I was myself, but I was now a nine-year-old version of myself, and I was all spirit. It felt good and very simple—as if I was made of light and energy. I was on a beach, and my dad (who has passed away) was there with me.
The beach was incredibly peaceful. But there were some unusual things about it. It faded into mist in both distances, so that all I could see clearly was the stretch where my father and I were present together. And it was “pearly.” So much so that I almost laughed. “Really?” The waves were edged with a bioluminescent quality, even though, as I watched a single wave break near my foot, the water itself was extraordinarily clear. The mist was edged with a silvery and lavender glow.
Then there was my dad—whom I felt completely unsurprised to see, just as he seemed to take seeing me there very much in stride. His age and mine in that scene were not in accordance with our earthly timelines. He was not the forty-plus father of my actual childhood in the 1960s; here on this beach he looked about thirty-five. He was dressed the way old photos show him to have dressed in the late 1950s, before I was born—before the crazy 1960s.
Here, he wore a pale moss-green fisherman’s sweater, and chinos with the ankles rolled up. His feet were bare. (“Mom, did Dad have a moss-green fisherman’s sweater, and did he wear chinos, in the 1950s?” Mom: “Yes.”)
He looked extremely well; his hair was fully black, not streaked with gray as it had been from my earliest memory of him. My father had had very distinctive feet, with high arches, in life; those were indeed his elegant feet on the sand. His hands were dry and warm, in life; he put his right hand gently on my hair and yes, that was his hand.
Then we had a calm, serious, direct talk. It did not matter that I was nine and he was thirty-five, or that I was alive—somewhere—and that he was dead. It seemed as if that talk was the purpose of this encounter.
After my father’s death, I had learned about certain aspects of his life that had confused me, and that had led me to struggle with my memory of him. These questions had become a barrier to my properly mourning him, and certainly they had kept me from feeling his presence. But in this chat we were having—thoughtful, father to daughter, transparent, not sentimental—I got to ask him every question that had haunted me, and he answered them one by one, and the answers set my mind entirely at ease. As that conversation unfolded, and he was accountable to me in my questions, I felt the spiritual connection I had had with him, which had been blocked, reopen like a channel; and all the love that he felt for me—and that I felt for him—sluiced through to connect us once more, undeniable, as it was intended to do, death or no death.
At one point, I asked him what God had thought about a certain issue. My dad replied, in the context of explaining that God was more forgiving than humans—“God is different from you and me.” That was another moment in which I enjoyed evidence that this really was my dad; that is just the kind of thing he would have said; he was an English literature professor; and that is a witty paraphrase of a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote.
After all the questions had been answered, I asked, neutrally curious, if I was staying there. He gestured toward a broad silvery stream, like a runnel on an estuary, that cut off the wet sand on that strand of beach from some other place; and indicated that no, I was now to cross back over that shimmering divide.
There wasn’t a leave-taking or anything else dramatic—I simply found myself again at length lying on my bed of pain, the infection raging still.
By this time Brian had done his wonderful Brian thing, of making things happen when they are not happening, by saying certain things, in a certain way, and leaving certain things unsaid. I don’t know how he does it, but I thank the US Army for its training of him in this arcane but useful art. For the second time, he saved my life. After he made a call, the orders came from above, and I was rushed at last into the room where my lifesaving procedure took place.
I will skip over those details.
Then, after a night of recovery—after seven days without food or water—I was ordered a breakfast—half a pound of dehydrated egg “skillet,” a quarter-pound of home fries, sausages the size of doorstops, a bowl of instant oatmeal—that contained 1010 calories and 65 grams of fat. I looked at it in aversion and sipped some juice.
And then, I was free to go.
I did not have any street clothes with me, but the minute the RN said I could leave, I asked for some scrubs, and just kept my hospital gown on; and we fled, before they could all change their minds.
The sunlight outside was dazzling. I wanted to kiss the earth, and every human being I saw. I loved the mulch. I loved the Hondas. I loved the security guard.
The red tiger lilies in front of the parking garage looked to me like the most beautiful flowers I’d seen in my life—trumpets of rusty glory.
The instant I was seated on a concrete bench outside the hospital, breathing, I began to feel better—which made me realize that for two and a half weeks, medical staff, all of whom were of course vaccinated with mRNA injections, had been “shedding” on me continually, by leaning over me and breathing into my face while taking vitals, or by constantly handling me.
This situation had been bad enough in the small local hospital, where at least my window opened a crack. But at the massive Vortex Hospital to which I had been transferred, the windows—overlooking a spectacular vista—did not open at all.
(We know that “shedding” is real because it is in the Pfizer documents, and that Pfizer defines “exposure” to the mRNA vaccine as transmission through skin contact and inhalation.1 And we know that spike proteins cause systemic inflammation—which, sadly, is the opposite of the condition one needs in order to heal from an infection.2 Who knows to what extent it was the exhaled spike proteins themselves, in a completely sealed facility that housed thousands of vaccinated people, that had been helping to kill me? The pharmaceutical industry has managed the greatest of ironies—it has managed to turn hospitals’ staff, whose jobs are to help patients heal, into physical vectors of a biologically destructive agent that creates a shared environment thoroughly antithetical to healing.)
Being able to breathe at last, without inhaling each time the effluent of an entire ward of constantly recirculating spike proteins and other toxins, immediately made me feel as if I could surely find a way to recover.
The day I was liberated from the hospital was our nation’s birthday. Independence Day. Our forefathers and foremothers risked their lives, and many died, in order to create a blessed society grounded in sacred values of freedom and justice.
In its lived reality it was not perfect because they and we and history, as remembered by us, are all human, and thus not perfect. But the values on which they founded it, are indeed perfect, and sacred, and eternal. No one yet had done so beautifully in establishing a human society according to the Divine Plan of freedom and justice.
For three years, evildoers sought to murder our Republic.
But looking back over recent history, and out over this land, we see: our victory is that we are not yet in a state of defeat; on this Independence Day of 2023, our Republic is Not Dead Yet.
The fight to save our Republic, waged over the last three years, did indeed wear me down, and did indeed, just now, as an aggregate, nearly kill me.
But I too am—you got it—Not Dead Yet.
I think of that passage from the Jewish Haggadah Ve’hi She’amda:
And this is that (promise)
which sustained our fathers and us.
That it is not one (enemy) alone
that stood up against us to destroy us.
But that in each generation there are those
standing up against us to destroy us.
But the Holy One Blessed Be He
saves us from their hand.3
I thanked God on that Independence Day for second chances. I would try to make the most of my restored second chance at life.
Thanked God, too, on that day that “the enemy” did not yet succeed, three years in of trying, at murdering our Republic.
Not.
Dead.
Yet.