As a child I often harbored the thought that I wasn’t actually living my life but instead subsisting in a vegetative state. In this state, the events I experienced as reality were merely hallucinations that scrolled through my consciousness while I was strapped to a bed somewhere, saliva dribbling down my chin as my body matured and then grew old over loose bands of atrophied muscles. In other words, I imagined myself as I am at this very moment, a swollen, waxy encasement of failed and failing organ systems, the subject of whispered conversations among family members in the hallways and an occasion for frozen lasagnas left for my husband on the porch steps. I imagined myself as both the author of my life and a total nonparticipant in it. In the future, which is to say after I emerge from this coma and leave this hospital and return to my life, I will still occasionally indulge this scenario, though what I’ll wonder is whether I actually ever got out of this bed. I’ll wonder if it’s possible that I never recovered from the ordeal of late October 2010 but instead slipped from a medically induced coma into a real coma and remained there for years. From there, the life I would have lived will reside solely in my mind. All that’s happened since then—all the meals and holidays and arguments in the car, all the boxes packed and unpacked, all the people and pets buried and cremated, all the revolutions of the warming earth around the unblinking sun—will be nothing more than vivid, interminable dreams. Meanwhile, my family will endure a living hell in which there is no legal avenue for removing my feeding tube or otherwise hastening my death. Weeks from now, my husband will tell me that the outcome he feared most was that I would wake up and be severely impaired. He feared that I wouldn’t be the same person. He will tell me that when the doctors told him there was a chance I’d need years of cognitive rehabilitation and, even then, there were no guarantees, he thought that as much as he didn’t want me to die that if the worst-case scenario came true it was perhaps better if I did. I will find this all very disturbing but also be in complete agreement. The worst-case scenario would not have been dying. It would have been remaining partially alive. This period of grim prognosis lasts approximately forty-eight hours. During this time, a friend is charged with the task of getting regular updates from my husband and e‑mailing those updates to all of my other friends. The names of these friends have been culled largely from the address book on my cell phone, which contains not just close associates but also people I haven’t spoken with in years or, in some cases, people I barely know but whose contact information happens to be in my phone. The result is that everyone from my best friend to my college roommate to a Pilates trainer I worked with exactly once is receiving e‑mails about my platelet count. Some are replying. Some are sending flowers and food and calling my husband incessantly. Some are showing up at the hospital even though they can’t enter the intensive care unit and forcing my husband to come out and deal with them. Some are preparing themselves for news that I have died. Some are thinking it can’t possibly be as serious as these updates are suggesting. Some are praying, even some you wouldn’t expect it from. A dear friend who’s a conservative evangelical Christian has got her husband and her kids and her Bible A Journal of Creative Nonfiction
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