Last Friday I’m pretty sure I came the closest to dying since being diagnosed with end-stage renal disease six years ago.
The dialysis machine is supposed to shut down immediately if it senses any air in the blood lines, but it didn’t. Last Friday, about halfway through my treatment, I heard a quiet “whoosh” sound and looked down to see a very large air bubble—probably 10cc or so in size—traveling quickly down my venus line. I had the foresight to quickly crimp the line and then a nurse clamped it. The bubble was two inches from making it into my bloodstream. If it had, it would have killed me. The nurse tried to convince me—probably to keep me from freaking out—that the bubble was saline but I showed him that squeezing it just caused it to move on down the line, rather than dilute the blood in the line as saline would.
The experience was quite psychedelic and similar in nature to the day I was diagnosed when the doctors had to drop my blood pressure very sharply, very quickly. I didn’t hallucinate or anything—no death seen over my left shoulder—but everything just really slowed down visually and temporally. Instead of quickly crimping the line, it was like I was watching a slow motion, ultra-high-definition film of my hand crimping the line. I wasn’t really outside of myself—I only seem to have out-of-body experiences during vivid dreams—but it was like I was watching myself. Robert Hunter’s “The Wheel” (Garcia and Kreutzmann’s arrangement from the 5/19/1977 Fox Theatre in Atlanta show) kept echoing through my mind until this afternoon and I had a distinct visual image of the Buddhist Wheel of Life in my mind’s eye for several hours afterward. This afternoon one of my co-workers found four boxes of Utne’s “Wheel of Life” poster we’re going to offer for sale on the Utne.com website in the next couple days. Synchronicity grips hard and never lets go.
Most frustrating was my experience during my treatment the following Monday; I couldn’t keep from studying the machine and the blood lines every few seconds.
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