My eyes popped open, and I found a large man with his face in my face and his hands on my chest. Reflexively, I threw a left hook, making a weak connection with the side of his head.
“She’s awake!” the man cried out, overjoyed at being punched.
My eyes struggled to focus on the room behind his shoulders as several figures shrouded in white came into view. Disembodied voices spoke garbled words about an irregular heartbeat, but my mind lost its connection, slipping away with the breath leaving my body. Rising with a puff of air, I drifted to the ceiling where I looked down at the chaotic scene.
Down below, my body looked more like a “what” than a “who,” drowning in a sea of white sheets. The realization that my flesh would not live long without my spirit spurred me into action. Diving at my body from above, I tried repeatedly to get inside, but I could not gain entrance despite my attempts. Defibrillator paddles blistered my skin, and my flesh sucked me back into the body which previously refused to admit me.
The man’s eyes met mine, and he smiled as he stopped compressions. “We got her back!”
Those words barely left his lips before I felt the sensation of falling away from my body. A trap door opened in my spine, I tumbled out then rose, wafting toward the ceiling as a wisp of smoke.
From this vantage point, I watched the big man pump vigorously on my chest while the female doctor I met when I first arrived in the ICU readied the paddles for another round of high voltage to jumpstart my heart. Electricity scorched my skin, and I threw my arms across my chest, hugging my body to keep my spirit from breaking free. My self-embrace only lasted a few seconds before my eyes closed and the air left my lungs, propelling me back to my perch on the ceiling.
Another round of electricity fired. This time, I stayed awake a little longer, watching as he worked to keep a steady rhythm. The bedside monitor displayed a flat line, signifying no perceptible heartbeat.
“I’m getting tired,” he gasped. “I’m going to have to stop soon.”
His efforts perfused enough oxygen into my brain for me to understand such an interruption would be a very bad thing. I raised my left hand and placed it on his shoulder, meeting his eyes with a pleading look. His expression registered shock and he resumed pumping with vigor.
“She’s here! She’s still with us!”
Doctors placed external pacers on my chest and connected wires and tubes crisscrossing my body, injecting enough drugs into the IV to cause the rest of the episode to fade from my memory.
The cardiac episode caused some sort of intrinsic damage to my body. My oxygen saturation remained low if I tried to breathe without supplementation. Fatigue forced me to doze off at random moments, even during conversations with visitors. My appetite abandoned me, and I could only eat tiny amounts of food without experiencing nausea. A week after weaning from the ventilator, I remained in the ICU.
On Saturday evening, following my untouched dinner tray, two of my friends, Kim and Bernie, came to visit. Feeling short of breath after speaking briefly, I asked them to continue the conversation and tell me about their adventures in the outside world. As they spoke, my shortness of breath worsened despite supplemental oxygen, and I broke out in a cold sweat.
“I don’t feel well,” I whispered.
Bernie sprinted toward the door to summon help, but a team of nurses were already racing toward the room. Over my head, the heart monitor wailed one long, shrill, monotone note. Kim kept a white-knuckled grip on my hand as I rolled my head to the side to look up at the monitor, but I never saw it. Instead, blackness engulfed me.
This time, I did not witness the medical personnel trying to resuscitate me. Instead, I left the scene far behind, my body lying heavy as a sack of wet cement, an anchor to this world.
When I opened my eyes, my inner eye, I found myself miles away from the hospital room on a familiar road running along a river in my hometown. On the glistening shore, a palpable silence dampened all sound. Although I perceived no visible source of light, darkness did not prevail. The sky revealed no stars, no moon, but a preternatural glow, like a perpetual twilight, illuminated the landscape.
Suddenly, I realized I was not alone. The form of a boy, not quite a man, joined me along the road. We were without faces, shadows on the shore. He told me his story without speaking. The dead have no words. Hit by a car while riding his bicycle along this road. I saw the swerving headlights, followed along with him behind the ambulance until it reached the hospital, watched his family weep.
With a shadowed hand, he gestured at a roadside shrine—a cross and stuffed animals—erected by his mourning family. Bound to this shrine, he could not cross over, tethered here with me among those who remained.
Across the river, a light shimmered on the horizon. A myriad of small, glowing orbs drifted gently toward the light, dust motes suspended in a sunbeam, crossing over to become one with eternity. The light pulled at me, urging me to let go and glide softly into oblivion, a moth into the flame. Warm waves of peace surged over me as I considered drifting across, losing myself, my identity, dissolving into the eternal energy of the universe. The temptation to end all my years of struggle dangled before me like a jewel on a thread.
Instead, I refused. I rushed to find my body and return to it before it withered without me. Travel was the same as thought. As soon as a place came to mind, I arrived. Although I dwelled in the twilight realm for only a short while, I felt the memory of my time among the living slipping away. I searched for my body, but I could not remember where I left it.
As quick as thought, I traveled to the house where I lived when my illness first began. Darting from room to room, I only found unoccupied space. Another thought and I appeared at the house I previously shared with my ex-husband. Remembering I left my body in a bed, I flew to the bedroom. There I found the bed empty, except for our two large dogs sprawled across the mattress. They looked up at me and cocked their heads, tails wagging slowly as they tried to make sense of my appearance.
Racing against time to find where my body rested, I recalled lying in a hospital bed. Instantly, I traveled to the hospital where I stayed prior to the transfer to the cardiovascular center. An elderly woman occupied the bed in my old hospital room, and she raised her head from the pillow to stare at my apparition in disbelief. Instantly, I knew where my body was waiting for me. Spirit and flesh were reunited, and my memories went blank until I awakened on the ventilator several days later.
While my spirit wandered, the cardiac team worked on my flesh. After many chest compressions and defibrillator shocks, the doctors determined I could not be revived and called my time of death. The nurses began to clean up the medical supplies, leaving my body hooked up to the monitor.
One nurse later told me how the sudden beeping from the machine startled her when my heart resumed beating of its own volition, floundering in a disorganized rhythm, gamely trying to do its job. Medical personnel flooded back into the room, and they used external pacing to return my heart to its work of perfusing blood throughout my body. I believe that the moment when my heart began to beat again marked the moment I returned from my frantic search and became reunited with my flesh.
Dawn Levitt (she/her) is a two-time heart transplant recipient, poet, essayist, and disability rights advocate who writes at the intersection of storytelling and healing, combining her personal experiences with Complex PTSD, domestic violence, and medical trauma with thoughts of love and resilience to turn tough experiences into art.
Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Insider Magazine, Remington Review, Breath and Shadow, Pink Panther Magazine, and many other journals and anthologies.
Website: www.dawnlevittauthor.com
Twitter: @2HeartCore4U
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