The room lost definition - no ceiling or walls, just a space where I felt suspended.  To my left, I saw the doctor, maybe another person, but they were back in the mist that had closed in around me.  My two children were in the room, also enveloped in the mist, but my wife was in plain view just to my right.  She looked distraught, very frightened.  I mumbled words of support, said something about me being a tough old bird who'd weathered bad storms before.  I even tried to joke about the predicament I was in at the moment, but nobody laughed.  ICU is not a good enviroment for jokes, and my problem was a major heart attack . . . and I knew for sure that I was not just in a mist, but in the midst of a big time shitstorm.

I had gone in the hospital the day before with bad chest pains, had gone through all the tests where the go into your heart and look around (I'd been scoped), and was told I needed quadruple bypass surgery.  A heart surgeon came in and briefed me on the surgery, said they'd do it the next day.  But I didn't make it that long, had a heart attack about midnight and nothing they could do could get in under control.  That's when the mist came . . . and it's when I found myself in the midst of something outside the regular world I lived in.  And I was sliding deeper into it.  My doctor moved close at one point, said he was taking me back to surgery right then.  He talked about risks involved, said there was no other way to stop the heart attack.

And so . . . at two in the morning I went in to have stents put in.  I needed five, got four that night.  And they did  that with me awake, and it wasn't an experience I'd like to do again.  After that, they knocked me out.  The mist was gone now, replaced by just blackness and no awareness of any kind - at least not at first.  I was out of the mist by then but a long way from being out of the midst.  I heard a man's voice calling my name, my full name.  I turned to my right and found a man in a suit standing at the end of a long hallway.  He called my name again.  I couldn't see him well, but I stared at him for a long time, then said I wasn't ready.  He went away.

Later, I found myself in an underground tunnel, feeling my way along slippery walls and walking in ankle deep water - no light, just blackness and the sounds of my feet sloshing through the water as I groped along.  I realized that my tunnel was part of a maze, a labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels, and I remember being apprehensive . . . but not afraid.  In fact, I was filled with anticipation and even eagerness to discover what I could, thinking I'd surely find my way out.  And then I was aware of light as the darkness gave way to a greyness . . . and up above me I could see light trickling through an opening.  I struggled upward, aware that my tunnel had given way to a large opening in the earth, and then I saw blue sky.  I moved closer and heard the sound of waves rushing onto a beach, and I saw and heard seabirds, gulls perhaps . . . and then I woke up to a brightly lit ICU room.

I spent eight days in ICU before going home.  Not one night was spent in a regular hospital room, and recovery from a heart attack takes time.  My worst period of recovery was coming home and getting the sounds of ICU out of your head.  I'd been in a situation for eight days where people around me suffered and many of them died.  Getting rid of the ICU experience is difficult, even though you're grateful to still be alive.  I'd been in the midst of it, and in the mist of my own close call with death.  A month later I had to go back there and get a final stent put in . . . hated that encounter even more than the first, but there was no mist that time . . . and no dream either.

What we all remember from our experiences may or may not be what really happened.  Too much of experience get strained through our sense of values, our ethics, our knowledge base, and we don't know exactly how much of memory is what really happened.  Perhpas our minds take over where I brains fail us, lead us through difficult situations by giving us visions and dreams to preoccupy us.  Death is something no one likes to contemplate, but somewhere along the line we come to realize that it is by no means the worst thing that can happen to us.  Maybe that's why I wasn't afraid.  So what was it that pulled me back, allowed me to send away the guy in the suit at the end of the hall?  That one's easy.  In the mist, while I dangled somewhere between here and there and realized that I was indeed in the midst of something, an overwhelming sadness came over me.  Wanting to shed that is what pulled me back.

So what's to be sad about?  I asked myself that often over the next weeks and months.  Is there more for me to do here?  Is my work not yet finished?  Maybe, but I'm not a believer in predestination.  What then?  What made me so sad?  I had to think about that for quite some time before answers started coming.  For one thing, no one had given me permission to leave, and I think that's important.  The people here who love me weren't ready to turn loose, let me go.  But maybe the biggest thing was the realization that I loved them a lot more than I ever realized.  No matter how willing you are to turn loose of life here, any other existence without them seemed unbearable at the moment.

My wife says I've changed, that I'm not the same man I was before the heart attacks, before my experiences with the mist . . . and the midst.  And she's had some trouble adjusting to the new me, who's a person a lot more intent on changing some things around me.  I work harder, think deeper, and brood over and ponder things more these days.  I've seen the mist, been in the midst of an experience that changed me . . . and I'm grateful for it. 

PMC, 11/27/07