... 11 Weeks Later

Here is the post you all have been waiting for. Many of you guys have been messaging me to try to find out what was happening with my mind during those eleven weeks. So, I cannot say that all of you have been very patient with this but for the most part you all have been really great about the cliff hanger. There is a lot running through my mind about this topic so if it is really messy please bear with me. Here goes nothing…

The adventure of my long nap began on May 23rdwhen I laid down because of my headache. Little did I know I would wake up about eleven weeks later. You are all probably thinking “I’d love to take a nap for eleven weeks” in reality, it is really not that enjoyable, I promise.

Some of you are probably hoping that I will share with you some amazing experience like meeting god or having an out of body experience or something while I was asleep, but in reality, I was not having a grand ol’ time. For those of you that are worrying, although I did not meet God while I was asleep, I still strongly believe in heaven and God himself. From the moment I fell asleep that day I began to dream and not like you would picture or have ever experienced dreaming before. I’m sorry if you got your hopes up and were expecting me to share with you some out of body experience. That is not even close to the things that were going on in my mind. I am here to share with you all what happened to me, so that if it happens to you, you won’t be scared.

At the time that I fell asleep, I had been carrying out a conversation with three main friends and the whole time I was asleep, I was completely stressed about what to say to them next. What I didn’t know was that I would wake up 3 months later and not even have a chance to complete that conversation. The next thing I knew my life was turned into a dream. It was like a big long dream that never ended. It was honestly really scary being stuck in your thoughts and not at all having a way out. The whole time I was asleep all I was thinking about is going back home and being with my family. It was like a big fantasy and to this day it is still hard to believe that it is even real.

Once I got into the dream, I knew something was wrong and that this was so not normal. There are small parts of when I was asleep that I remember such as moving certain rooms in the child’s center with my parents, aunt and my very entertaining uncle. Some other things I remember is the time I was in a room with all boys, the time that my legs started shaking uncontrollably due to an infection I had, and also the time when I got my makeup done for the first time by one of my therapists. Still to this day, I have no clue why I got to experience certain parts of the journey. I cannot even begin to tell you guys how alone this experience was and how scary it was. It was completely weird but let me tell you that the day I officially woke up was even more weird.

I woke up during the very last week of July but didn’t actually start being aware of my surroundings until August, although everything was fuzzy up until September. When I first woke up, I thought that my situation was just another part of the dream. I really thought that I was in another person’s life. It was weird, I had all the same family and friends but, in my mind, I thought I was living someone else’s life. Still to this day, it feels like I am trapped in a bad dream. When I woke up, I was staying at the Providence Child’s Center. At the time, I woke up, in my mind, I didn’t even think it was a place nearby, which made me think that I was in another body even more. In even the first week I was awake, my siblings would frequently come up to me after therapy. I was completely lost because they looked nothing like they did when I fell asleep. In my mind, there was no way that this situation was at all real.

There is one thing that I do remember from August right after I woke up. After over a week of actually being awake, I was told that I would be taken to the fourth floor of Randall’s once again, where I first started this journey. My dad was the one to take me to Randall’s. We were scheduled to take a wheel chair transportation van. I don’t know if this was the first one we had, but it was the very first one I remember. I remember loading up the van on a very hot summer day. I still didn’t think that it was real in my mind. I made up a plan to see if this was actually happening. My plan was to slap my dad to see if this experience was real. As we drove, the drive seemed to never end, and the mugginess and smell of cigarettes kept getting worse. (The smell of cigarettes was due to the man driving the van.) As we drove, my plan for my dad got further and further away from me. I began to get too nervous to even follow through with it. So, if you were hoping that I would share that story with you, you are wrong because I didn’t even have the nerve to follow through.

After what seemed like hours, we arrived back at Randall’s where my journey all began. We headed in and got all checked into my room for the next couple days. I was scheduled to have a surgery the next morning. This surgery was set to downsize the size of my trach. I woke up the next morning and they wheeled my bed down to where the surgery was taking place. As my parents, brothers and I waited in the waiting room, just like my family did the night I came to the hospital, we were eager to get this surgery started. Meanwhile, I was completely stressed out because in my mind I believed that this was all a dream. Since I had believed that this was not real, I was utterly scared that the sleeping medicine would not actually work before surgery, since it was not actually my real life. On a good note, the sleeping medicine did work, and I did not feel anything from the surgery.

The next day was Thursday, the day I was, in my mind, supposed to go back to my regular life. It was supposed to take place Thursday night when I was asleep. By saying my “regular life” I mean that I was supposed to go home after the surgery to what I thought was my reality. So, that night, before I went to sleep, I planned out exactly what I would do when I got home, and I also planned out the first thing I would eat when I got home. I planned on having a nice and rich strawberry milkshake. I was in absolute shock when I woke up at Randall’s the next morning. This is when I realized it was not a dream. I can’t even tell you guys how confused I was, everyone kept saying “AVM” and I could not figure out what that meant. The shock and fear that took over my mind when I realized that horrible truth was so hard.

From there, we headed back to Providence. Within the next couple of days, one of my recreational therapists introduced these cards that said yes or no on them, so that people were able to communicate with me. Not gonna lie, when I first started using these cards, everyone thought that I was crazy because the nurses were skeptical that I was actually moving my eyes rather than it being involuntary movement. After time people began to believe that it was actually happening, that I was communicating with them. After that, my trach was taken out because I was breathing on my own and it was taking up all of my energy or slowing down my progress. I quickly began to progress in my healing. I later began to start communicating by shaking my head yes or no, then I worked my way to multiple choice questions and finally I learned sign language, which is what I use to communicate currently. The whole time while I was asleep, I was going through constant therapy and have been doing that ever since.

I cannot say that I remember everything from when I was asleep because I honestly only remember bits and pieces. I was coming in and out of my dream constantly in the beginning while I was waking up. I cannot even begin to explain how scary it was to wake up in a random place and have no clue what happened to me. I was confused with the whole situation and was also wondering where the heck the month of June went. I didn’t hear the whole story of what happened to me until I was back at Randall’s where I had rehab, so I was very confused with the whole situation up until that point. I couldn’t figure out what AVM meant for the life of me. All I can say, is you may or may not believe in God but if something like this happens to you, please know that God does not make mistakes and that there is a very good purpose that he put you through this. There will be a very good end to this terrible situation, although at times you will feel like a burden to those who surround you. I want you to know that people’s lives would not be the same without you so just know that no matter how much you feel you are bothering people, you are very important to people’s lives.

xoxo

Syd