Five Minutes

Before you read this, wait five minutes. Set a timer, check your watch, whatever. Just let five minutes pass before you read any more into this post.

I'll wait.






















Did you wait?

I hope so. It'll provide some perspective.

Anyway, most of you who know me know I have allergies. Most of my allergies are the "sniff sniff, achoo achoo, snrrrrrkkk, I hate my life" style of allergies that plague most. Dogs, cats, dust, etc. It happens to me so often and unpredictably that I've grown accustomed to not being able to breathe through one nostril or the other. I just deal with it.

But, er, I have other allergies. To horses, chiefly, although I'm more or less certain that there's something else out there, I have no idea what, that affects me in the same way. These are more the sort of "break out in hives, stomach twists into a tight knot of pain, throat closes up and breathing restricts" sort of allergies that plague somewhat less people. These are a pain in the ass, because they always mean the same thing: I start to feel it, and if I didn't get away from whatever the hell it was that was causing me this grief fast enough, I have to suffer for half an hour or more, depending on if I pop Benadryl fast enough. And even then, I fall asleep for eight hours and am drained for several more, missing whatever it was I was going to be doing the next half-day or so. This is also fairly well-known by people around me.

This...I haven't told many people.

About a year ago, or so, I don't remember when exactly, I woke up in the middle of the night with an attack, and a bad one. I mean, it's always miserable, but I was in a great deal of distress.

3:00 in the morning, I'm balled up on the ground, my intestines are in searing agony, I'm bleeding from many places due to the fact that I've torn my skin from the incessant scratching of the terrible hives that are popping up everywhere, and I can't even weep in agony because my breathing is restricted to a slow hiss.

I have taken Benadryl. It has not helped.

Then...there was a short period. Couldn't have been more than five, six seconds, but to me, it was an eternity. In which...I could not breathe. At all. My throat sealed up. My lungs or diaphragm or whatever worked vainly, but I could not draw breath. My vision darkened - probably due to the herculean effort I was putting into trying to breathe - and I felt dizzy, in addition to everything else.

In those five seconds...God, it's not even easy to write this. In those five seconds, I was absolutely stone-cold certain that I was going to die, right then, right there. And that is a disquieting feeling, to say the very least. But, honestly, that isn't what affected me the most. Immediately afterwards, I was able to breathe again, a little. The worst had passed. About, oh, I don't know, ten or fifteen minutes later, the medicine finally kicked in and I was in good enough shape to go to sleep. I woke up nine hours later, with a terrible headache and the memory of what happened.

What really affected me the most, is that during those five seconds...I wanted to die. I wanted...to die.

I wanted to die.

I wanted an escape, any escape, from the pain I was in. I literally welcomed death.

I spent most of the next day doing nothing. I sat around. I didn't eat. I stared at the computer without actually doing anything. Mostly, I was just trying to convince myself that I hadn't really wanted that, that it was just the pain talking, that I was in a feverish state, that my everpresent joie de vivre hadn't taken a sudden holiday, and trying not to look at the bloodstains on my sheets.

I love life. I never want to die, ever. I want to be immortal. I want to last to the end of the universe. And yet.

I talked about it to the doctor at the university a few days later. He said that it sounded serious, but I had taken care of it and there should be no permanent side-effects. (No physical ones, anyway.) It was just a particularly bad flare-up, he said. I should have used my Epi-Pen (a shot of epinephrine I carry with me for just such an emergency), but it sounded like I had handled it well.

I talked to him for a while. I asked him why it hit me in the middle of the night, and he said that in some cases, an allergic attack can be delayed as much as six to eight hours from the exposure to the allergen. When I asked him how serious it could have gotten, after repeatedly stating that this was worst-case and almost impossible, that it would require circumstances uniting beyond all probability, he admitted that some attacks could kill a person in just five minutes.

From healthy, to dead. Five minutes.

Apparently, severe anaphylactic shock can stop one's heart, in addition to blocking airways and such.

Remember that five minutes that you waited? If you did? At any time, that could be my life expectancy. From the tick of every second, that could be exactly how long I have left to live. At any moment, I could be five minutes away from dying in agony, and never knowing why.

Heh. I've told some people that a phobia of mine would be to die in some bizarre and nonsensical way without knowing the reason? Like...melting into a puddle, or suddenly flying into space and suffocating/depressurizing, or whatever. To die without knowing why, it was an irrational fear of mine. This was present before this incident. The incident...did not help.

There's no cure. I took allergy shots for three years, and they helped with my minor allergies, but the doctor told me from the beginning that there's no way I can treat life-threatening allergies like I have to horses (and I'm fairly sure some other unknown thing). I'll live the rest of my life like this.

This is one of the reasons I am such an exuberant person. Particularly observant people who've watched the way I operate for the last few years may have noticed that recently, I've become even more...outgoing than usual. I talk louder, laugh longer, shout louder, and in general just do the hell out of whatever I'm doing even more than I used to.

These same people will observe that I'm always doing...something. I never just sit around and think. I go for a walk, I watch TV, I go on the Internet, I write, I play WoW, I play video games, I watch movies, I provoke arguments just for the sake of yelling back and forth. Yes, I've always been like this. But it's gone up. At least, I think it has.

The reason for this is to drown out the little voice in the back of my head that more or less constantly whispers "At any time, at any place, you could die and never know why. All your dreams and hopes and aspirations for the future could be destroyed in five minutes." And such. (I don't actually hear a voice. I'm not schizophrenic, or anything. But, y'know, the concept preys on my mind.)

So.

Uh...

Yeah.

I've been having trouble falling asleep lately.