Hi, I am Elizabeth McClung; and this where I am

I will try to explain first person what happened, and what the world looks like now.

Cheryl had come over and I had been on oxygen for much of the day becuase (blank part), but I convinced everyone to go play badminton and we did in some way (blank part) and then took a nap. After this I remember that I ‘had decided’ without telling anyone else that Cheryl was going to see the "real" version of Porco Rosso (in Japanese with correct subtitles), and Linda ordered in Pizza. Linda says that we talked about Porco Rosso afterward and other things. And then at 1:00, around 1:00, I don’t know. Linda said that I had fainted earlier that day but that is something I don’t remember, and I am finding it hard to narrate something which is pieced together from what people have said, from what can be inferred and what can be remembered.

Right now it feels like someone used my head for a fireworks arena and didn’t bother cleaning up afterward. Linda will ask me a question or I will ask myself a question and it will hurt. Typing is also difficult for me, but I must assume the touch typing and the years of typing I did (see, I remember THAT class – oh what a dull teacher!), will come back as a reactive response. That is why I thought it best to write now, before I have to stare into space as I did after waking up earlier after a while.

When I ‘woke up’ from passing out last night: it seemed as if I was in a strange place surrounded by people who were vaguely familiar. I could not talk, nor could I suck a straw in order to drink, mostly because part of my face had gone south. After I while I could talk a bit, and they could understand me. So we talked, and I remembered Linda and this other person, Erryol, my ex-lover (best guess). I also remembered that I needed to go jogging, that I was a runner. They wanted to know where I went jogging so I told them: around the Rose Bowl and the Waterfront. What kind of runner? I was a marathoner of course. Though clear to me, my speech was slurred, and they asked what my last trip was and I told them my last trip, Venice, Italy. All of these things are from several years ago but if you asked me to put them in the correct order I would have a problem. It is much easier when someone is asking me a question, because then I will see something, and I can start quoting everything the people around me said and what I said during that time. Which isn’t really an answer so much as them triggering a memory I suppose.

We tried many times to have me drink by straw but the sucking part wouldn’t work. I was on oxygen the whole time. And I was in a chair and they would come and go and the whole time there was a pain behind my eye, the same eye that wasn’t working as well as it could, as sometimes people got fuzzy and sometimes they only had one eye. But Erryol, kept shining a light in my eye and saying something. And then when I kept trying to tell them I wanted to go to sleep, which came out as book quotes. They did not put me to sleep, instead they decided to call someone, which I think was the ambulance. So I became much more imploring in my desire to go to the "blessed isle" and the "golden shore".

I tried one last time to drink but while I was able to suck some I could not swallow and it just ran out. Then there were two people, a man and a woman who had no name tags on and though I would talk, they would not talk back (Linda says that the woman was "short" and decided as she could not understand me, that she would not talk to me, which was sad because SHE was the one to ride in the back with me and I tried to ask her things all the time, like her NAME, but she used the time to fill out paperwork). They kept doing things and at one point put a needle in me to do a blood sugar count and it must tell you my reaction level that I did not respond even verbally or move at all until after they had the bandage on. They seemed to want to move me somewhere and did, strap me to a chair and then to a gurney downstairs. The woman said, "Blah, blah, blah Gord, make sure, blah, blah." So I kept saying "Gord!" every time he popped into view.

At the hospital, Gord and I spoke in Spanish, and I tried to fill in the gaps in french, because at least he seemed to understand me. I kept trying to remember the phrase from the Missions for Jesus’ "Burning Heart" which I must have remembered, "ardiente?" because he asked if my heart hurt. "Si! Mucho" Then a woman came up and said, "Elizabeth?"

At which I responded, "Do I know you?"

And she said she didn’t, that she was a nurse or someone else. Anyway, she went away quickly and people kept doing that, using my first name. All I had was what I could observe so if they used my first name I would ask them, "Do I know you?" Which apparently was the WRONG thing to ask. I noticed from the squeak in his shoes that Gord had very mild scoliosis and asked if he knew. He said he didn’t. And that was all I saw of him. Then Kyle, who had a rash on his neck because he shaves poorly, came and said my name but he didn’t know me either, neither did the girl in wine colored clothes who took of ALL my clothes?

Only Linda could come in, and she was explaining to the doctor what happened I think, but he asked if I was usually like this and she said no, they used some terms that meant "not so smart" and "addled" and Linda said I used to be very smart and then I got the condition and now I am less so but not like this. And this doctor wacked me with HIS hammer, and when my knees did not move he wacked them harder and harder until they did. But no matter how much I watched him wack my ankles he couldn’t get them to move. And my arm, which was close to him, I could not squeeze, but he could make it jump with his hammer. And it was explained later that these are two different parts of nerves, one is in the brain and one in the arm and compared to the woman neurologist, this one carried a mighty hammer, and like to use it.

At some point I went away again and then someone was pushing me or slapping me and telling me to open my eyes. And I did, to see Kyle filling up a syringe from a bottle and I could not speak so I was making a noise and trying to move what bits could move away from Kyle. And quite honestly, if they wanted to put some stuff in me with a needle, could they not have done that BEFORE making me wake up again? So my speech was gone and my arm by the doctor was trembling/spasming and he ordered something under my tongue instead of in an IV to reduce my agitation and for the "seizure." And he left then saying it was ‘bizarre, very bizarre" which I found out later was and okay thing to be, as it meant, "interesting to this Doctor." He had seen me briefly from when I came in some weeks ago about the heart with Dr. G. And now he, the neurologist was seeing me.

I waited and could not sleep but wanted to, so time passed and occasionally my oxygen meter beeped because of my reynaud’s and them not finding a pulse. I told Erryol, whose name in Cheryl that they couldn’t find a pulse in the hospital and she was happy as when they called my fingers were blue/purple and when the ambulance person said he got 100% she thought he or his machine was broken.

Eventually the doctor came back on rounds and kept calling me Nellie, which got me confused because I was pretty sure I was Elizabeth. I could speak understandably at this time. As he was gone a LONG time because room 212 was in decontamination due to some unknown bugs and there was another emergency on the floor and number 22 had died (I was across from the nurses station). He wanted to know if I knew who Nellie was and I told him she sterilized women in Alberta and was on the $50 and he seemed happy and then asked all the nurses if they knew and they didn’t and they started googling on the computer, so I think this doctor was very eccentric and required people on the floor know things and seemed far scarier to them than to me.

Anyway, he said that he saw something which he thought was a (something word) seizure. And he said he would write my doctor and my neurologist about it and that I was, as a patient, very bizarre. And I said, is that your word for "psychosomatic" and he said no, though he wasn’t supposed to use that word, he did all the time and that wasn’t me. And that he saw part of ‘something’ but he can’t say for sure what it was since I am so ‘bizarre!’ He said TIA’s do not occur in the same part of the brain twice. I asked, "And when will my memories return?" He did not know so I could go as there was nothing more he could do for me. And then he started humming and sort of danced out as the nurses were still googling Nellie McClung. So I got dressed and came home. It is my home. Though do not ask me to find anything for you.

Cheryl was worried because when I went to the hospital, the closest I could remember was a couple years ago. And now I remember many things, only remembering many things is actually not the same thing as having a memory. A MEMORY is a continious thing which helps people live each day because they know what happened before and what people are likely to do or say, and what is important and not. But a bunch of memories: of Venice, or running, or California, or even the hospital; they do not tell me who comes tomorrow and what I should do. They cannot help me make things out of new situations. So I cannot find things and I do not know things and I do not like to go outside or see people, because they will expect me to know and remember things and I don’t. Or not what they want me to.

Things are hard. I get headaches, but an aching head, not the pain behind my eye which went away after the treatment. These aching heads are from all the things I am supposed to remember. Which for normal people is thousands of things from passwords to people’s names to events and days. After Cheryl was gone, I read my emails and found that I was supposed to send something with her to be posted. That was frustrating. I should have remembered that. Except it was like there was nothing to remember. And I know that there are people out there who probably expect me to do things, or remember things, and will be calling or coming over or emailing because I was a person who was a person to get things stirred up, only now there is just me. And I don’t remember what this other me did. But Cheryl, not Erryol, nor my lover, and Linda say that more memory is coming back all the time. Yet, this morning, all I could remember was that I run and needed to go for a jog and yet I use a wheelchair, but was not sure why, and I remembered both.

I have found that I can only eat on the left side of my mouth and my hands go numb, particularly the left, which makes eating at all a chore.

I am rather scared of home care coming, as there is a schedule beside my desk here and these people know now far more about me than I know, or even of what they might know about me. And they will come and I am supposed to know what to do, to "Self direct" only right now, I am not very self directing at all, because I do not remember what is important to me, besides Linda.

I remember you, or to say the truth, many or some of you who read and comment but I will read my own blog and then I will know you again. I also can see, as I read that I am not the same writer I was a few days ago, or yesterday. I write like someone in 7th grade, and the person who wrote before was eloquent. I am not. But Linda says that will come back as well. Thank you for your well wishes and I will do things to try and hurry up so that who I am and who I was are not so far different.

I do not like feeling like a stranger in my own life. I do not like not remembering all the things from birthdays to things we might buy for ourselves on sale (I just remembered something Cheryl said about ebay and plates when I wrote that, it was like a light went on). Remembering these things are seen as trivial but take them all away and everything is merely what it is; a person without a name tag may know you, but you don’t know their name, and how they know you. I will try to go outside tomorrow, I think, I just hope that not too many remember me, or that those who do I remember (which at this point seems unlikely, as I cannot remember this last week).

Linda says that though my writing is not the same, that I am still there. I do not know. Please be a little patient, if you could and not all leave. Though I understand if you do. It is just, hard. And if the only people who know me online go away, then I won’t know anyone. Or rather no one will be there to know when the "I" from before and "I" that I am meet.