Dying in my sleep

We have all heard about it. Some people hope to pass on that way. But when it happens at a time that you are not ready to move on, you fight against it. At least I did.

We have all heard about it. Some people hope to pass on that way. But when it happens at a time that you are not ready to move on, you fight against it. At least I did.

The autonomic nervous system is designed to keep essential parts of the body running without conscious effort. Even while you sleep. When I had a stroke, it struck the very control center responsible for those automatic functions. So many things went wrong at once. So many processes simply stopped behaving as they should. This story will be about the Breathing.

My lungs stopped working on their own. They weren’t filling with air automatically. I had to stay in full, conscious control. Manually moving my diaphragm up and down, in and out. I wasn’t trying to breathe in the typical sense. I was intentionally manipulating my diaphragm to regulate the pressure inside my ribcage. Thankfully, my muscles still responded. Luckily I had muscular control. And singing help a lot. Though I feel sorry for the nurses and fellow patients in the rehab center.
But there were nights,too many, when I knew that if I let myself drift off, my diaphragm might simply stop. I was terrified that I would fall asleep and never wake up. The fear was constant and exhausting, and the lack of real rest only made the fatigue even greater.

Keep in mind, this was also during a period when I couldn’t swallow. All my food and water went through a tube in my stomach. My throat was dry, my lungs dry, my esophagus dry. Everything felt raw.

I would lie in bed repeating a rhythm: four breaths in, eight breaths out. Sometimes I’d hold my breath deliberately training both my mind and body to tolerate the deprivation, and to jolt myself into conscious breathing when the air finally ran out. I was, in a way, scaring myself awake on purpose.

Months passed, Seven, eight, nine. Eventually I pushed myself to try swimming again. I almost drowned the first time. My breathing rhythm wasn’t synchronized with my arms movements. But I kept going. Lap by lap. Breath by breath. Gagging on water the I could not yet swallow. I worked my way up to twelve laps of freestyle.Now, sixteen months later, I can do twelve freestyle, twelve breaststroke, and even finish with a sprint.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing to consciously manage every breath at night. I still remember the first morning I woke up and realized I had slept, while my body breathed on its own again. I believe it happened because there was another warm body beside me. There is something about laying next to another human that bring peace and comfort to a body. Or a dog. Many people prefer the latter.
I still don’t get a perfect night’s sleep—but for different reasons now.

There was a stretch of time when every night felt like a question mark, when I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would still be alive in the morning. But I made it through that chapter.

Now, on to the next.