the ventilator – the house
I was on a ventilator for 12 days, and had numerous dreams and hallucinations during my time under, I have no idea if what went on in my mind was spread across those two weeks, if they occurred during the days that I was apparently awake, or if they even happened in a single day. All I know is the helplessness and hopelessness that I felt were very real to me, and that while I’ve so far been spared of most of the emotional and mental trauma that accompanies those memories, they’ll stay with me forever.
After Bill had taken me from the shack I was in (see the previous hallucination), I woke up in a house which was essentially an open air colonial style mansion that had around four floors. I was in a large four poster bed with a canopy. After I woke up I continued to be unable to move; even though I was awake, and not restrained, because of everything that I had gone through, or was still going through with covid (this hallucination is the third one in a chain, which started with being airlifted onto an aircraft carrier), I was so weak that I was unable to move or talk (in reality, I had the ventilator in my mouth and was restrained).
A woman (in my mind, she was African, and I was still in South Africa), was in the room with me. After I had woken up, she told me that my wife, Eunice, found out that I was kidnapped and went to South Africa to find me. Eunice had picked up everything when I disappeared from the aircraft carrier to look for me. She told me that Eunice almost found me – she was at the street where the shack was, but she was murdered before she found me in a mugging (the picture of this in my mind, is of Eunice being at the end of the block, with a white, cloth, backpack).
Grief, guilt, and anger flooded over me – she wouldn’t have been in a place where she would have been murdered if it wasn’t for me. If I never had covid, if I never needed the specialized treatment that brought me to an aircraft carrier, and if I had never gotten kidnapped, she would still be alive. I was filled with anger at the person that murdered her. The woman then told me that they found the person that murdered Eunice, and that they were bringing them to me.
A little bit later a young man was brought to the room that I was in. Two people were holding him by his arm, and through brought him through a white door that was near a staircase that was at the end of the room. After he was brought into the room, I wanted nothing more than to make him feel what I was feeling, and to make him understand the gravity of what he had done – however, I wasn’t able to do anything. I was completely unable to move and unable to speak – I couldn’t communicate, and all I could do was look at the person that had killed my wife until the world faded away once again.
