take it all away 2005

What is it like to be almost on the verge of death for a long time?
Weeks after I was in the hospital, I found out little details about my being in the hospital; what the doctor did to me while I was in there and unconscious.
Whether or not they were helping me or hurting me I wouldn’t have known, I was oncunscious.
They put a piece of metal inside of me, in my torso I think, to stop future possible blood clots from travelling to my heart, or lungs, or brain.
Now, I understand that people who don’t move for years may have to worry about blood clots traveling through their body, and I don’t care how sick I was, but I wasn’t going to die, and I wasn’t going to sit still forever. And I know that the rest of the world is filled with people that don’t need a piece of metal in their body, they do just fine, and... I don’t know if I need one of these pieces of metal in my body for the rest of my life, I can’t have an MRI ever because it would kill me, but it would have been nice if someone informed me of this after it had already been done to me
There can be all sorts of things done to you when you are at a weak moment. These things being done to you could have an effect on you — good or bad.

X-rays were taken of me. A ventilator was on me for 6 days. All I knew at the time was that most of my rights were being taken away from me, and I didn’t have my car, and I couldn’t live at home. I really just otherwise wanted to be myself.

I mean, what if one day something went wrong in your body, and while you were laying in bed to take a nap, your heart just stopped beating? What would happen to you and your life if you heart just went out, like then something just happened and then almost suddenly... well, what if just then you were slipping away?
Okay, don’t use that example, but maybe it will help you think about what it must be like to vanish.
What if that happened to you?
If something shocking just sort of happened to you and you survived it, people would then be worrying about you. They thought you might not make it and they had to think that you may be gone and they had to come to terms with that.
Would you clean up your room? Would you stop making all of the frivolous purchases on things you don’t really need? Would you try to be nicer? It answers so many questions when you suddenly start to think of things that way.

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Chicago Poet Janet Kuypers
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