What Life Is Like After Being Taken Off a Ventilator
Even after Kyle Mullicane came home from the ICU, he would have nightmares about being back in the hospital, struggling to breathe. He had been on a ventilator, but his body fought so hard against the breathing tube in his throat that his arms and legs had to be restrained. Immobilized, he tried to chew through the plastic. In his post-ICU dreams, he would succeed at doing so, only to suffocate as the broken pieces fell into his lungs.
It has been eight months since Mullicane, 35, survived multiple organ failure from a bad reaction to heart medications. Physically, he feels well enough to have hiked a national park in January. But mentally, he’s still recovering. “My memory is shot,” he says. Loud noises startle him. And while the nightmares have gotten better, he remembers vivid hallucinations from the ICU, when doctors and nurses appeared to him as witches with shimmering faces. Even at
