The DNA Mafia: A Near Death Experience

By Michelee Elyse

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to survive a coma? In The DNA Mafia, Michelee gives a gripping, first-hand account of her journey in and out of dimensions on her quest to find the truth about reality - and her way back to it. Through her harrowing experiences,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643148571

Michelee Elyse

Michelee Elyse is the author of "Taming the Beast of Anxiety." She proudly calls this debut publication her opportunity to turn her pain into purpose. "If I had been through all of that for no reason at all - well, that would have been a travesty," she said. "I'm very fortunate that I am able to verbalize what it feels like to go through the experience of dealing with anxiety, then provide a practical roadmap for how to get out of the vicious cycle."Michelee is definitely very good and giving words to experiences and her latest book The DNA Mafia: A Near-Death Experience is no exception!You can find Michelee's book Taming the Beast of Anxiety: Get Over Anxiety and Get On With Your Life on Amazon in eBook, paperback and hardcover formats. She looks forward to expanding her horizons with the anxiety community by expanding the format of "Taming the Beast of Anxiety" into a workbook, audiobook, and children's Social Emotional Learning book!Michelee currently offers life coaching, showing her clients how to work through anxiety using the established7-phase method listed in her book to spiral out of an anxiety cycle. She has also done several speaking engagements on the importance of having an advance directive before tragedy strikes. One of her goals is to be a featured speaker on TedTalks.

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Copyright © 2023 by Michelée Elyse

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-64314-855-7 (Paperback)

978-1-64314-856-4 (Hardback)

978-1-64314-857-1 (E-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023909787

AuthorsPress

California, USA

www.authorspress.com

Lovingly and affectionately

dedicated to my deceased father,

Henry Denegal, Jr.

Who sat with me in spirit during my near-death experience

as I sit with him now that he has crossed over.

Love never dies…

I’ll Always Love You, Dad.

While this book is based on my own experiences, names

(other than my own) and some other elements have been

fictionalized and are not intended to reflect on any actual person or entity.

Contents

Introduction

Part One Blogged

Part Two The DNA Mafia

Part Three Bits and Pieces

Part Four The After Life

Gratitude and Dedications

Introduction

The telling of a

story can be the hardest part. Life can take so many twists and turns that it becomes difficult to distinguish the beginning from the end. Life itself can catch us; lock us in a trance-Atlantic flow of mediocrity tinged with nonchalance. It can take quite a startling blow to wake us from such a slumber.

That said, where shall I start?

At the beginning, of course! I hear you say.

Yet my question remains…where exactly is the beginning? I suppose to get there I will have to enamor you with a few of the important details about my life. You game?

Without conceit, I can tell you that God blessed me with many talents and writing is surely among them. I also always loved the arts. I crafted my life around dance and drama because I love being on stage. I thought that a career in the arts would be playing around with life and education and that I’d never be taken seriously. Someone once told me to think about teaching as something to fall back on. Yeah…I guess I fell back on it and never got back up. I’ve been a classroom teacher since 1995.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore working with children. After a short time on staff at any school, I always became the go-to person to choreograph routines for Christmas performances, cultural presentations and pretty much any other stage event you could think of. I love that side of my career, but teaching can be quite stressful.

Another factor of the stress I faced at work had to do with commuting, which I had been doing for years. I decided that if I was going to make the sacrifice to spend that many hours going back and forth to work, I’d do it for a job I loved rather than one I just put up with. I landed my dream job as a Visual and Performing Arts Specialist. Life was great. I still had a commute of about two hours round trip. But I felt it was worth it because I breathed a sigh of relief every single day I made it to work. The only part of my work that felt like a job was the commute. I felt like I was living the destiny I was born to live. I think living our destiny is the best thing for all of us and for all of humanity. Each of us are born to do what resonates with our inner being. I feel blessed to have an opportunity to do just that.

Then…Life. Life grabbed me by the throat and forced me to pay attention to it. At a time when things seemed to be smoothing out, Life reminded me of charges due. It was time to pay up for allowing stress to run amok. And pay, I did. With chunks of my very own life…

The Come to Jesus story I’ll be filling you in on took place during this pivotal time in my life. Following are excerpts from a blog that I wrote after an extremely harrowing experience that was only the beginning of what was to come.

Part One (Preliminary)–My Blog

I started writing the

day I returned home from the hospital. I used my online blog as a platform. I wanted my thoughts to be fresh, but considering what I’d been through, that also meant they were a little discombobulated.

My blog was read mostly by friends and family. That allowed me to be warm and open which made writing even more fun. I added emojis, images and graphics and wrote with lots of detail. I also shared in depth about what happened during my time in the hospital and my return home.

My story is presented from several viewpoints of those who told me what I’d done as they were at my bedside. The first consisted of the multiple perspectives of the people who supported me throughout this crisis like my kids, my parents, my family and friends—each gave me pieces of the puzzle.

Someone asked me why I changed people’s names in the book. I said I wanted to make it clear that many things in the book didn’t really happen—at least not in this dimension! I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable with the experiences I had with them while I was in a coma. Lord knows it made me uncomfortable enough.

I also don’t want anyone’s name associated with anything they might find unsavory. Creating fake names was an act of consideration. And in some ways it was fun. If you are one of the people whose name was changed, know that your pretend name came to me in my spirit. Some names literally came to my heart, soul and mind. For others, I did a search using the entry names similar to ______. One of my friends made a joke that names had been changed to protect the guilty. I found that funny, but honestly, I don’t find guilt in anyone or anything that happened. And a lot happened.

The second viewpoint that this story is told from centers around my life while I was existing in different dimensions. I spent time in worlds that were parallel to this one. My visits there left me confused, bewildered and questioning the very existence of life itself. Part of my objective in writing this book is for readers to question their journey too. This book also might serve as a wake-up call so that you won’t have to undergo an awakening as drastic as mine.

Without further delay, I invite you into my worlds…

Excavate, Intubate

4/26/17

I thought it would

take forever to tell my story so I decided to blog it. But I didn’t want it to come off like I was bragging nor was I seeking sympathy. My story is a testimony about what God has done for me in the name of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit. I guess it might be best to start with a few definitions. I love definitions.

ex·ca·vate- verb

pronounced: ˈekskəˌvāt/

remove earth carefully and systematically from an area in order to find buried remains.

in·tu·bate–verb

pronounced: ˈint(y)o͞oˌbāt/

insert a tube into a person or a body part, especially the trachea for ventilation.

Now that we’re clear on that, I’ll try my best to prepare you for how you will see me on the following page. Everyone dislikes the way they look in a picture or two. This is a bit different. In this picture my spirit is not present in my body. I am elsewhere. You might call me dead. You might say I’m comatose. Whatever the case may be, this is my story…

Looking at myself in this picture, I look just like a baby.

A tiny,

little,

helpless,

Baby.

Yet, I think that’s not only how God saw me then, but how He always has and always will. He loves all of us as parents do their little tiny, helpless babies. When I think of God’s love for me, I think of how I loved my babies when they were newborns. They would cry and I’d fling them gently over my shoulder like a sack o’ potatoes and bounce them up and down by the rump. It seems like such an uncomfortable position but it was such a reassurance to them that they would just drift right off to sleep.

As hard as it may seem, me lying there is pretty much a metaphor for God flinging me over his shoulder, too. This Come To Jesus moment; this state in which you see me lying, is a much deeper connection to God than to my very own skin.

As you will soon see, time is not as important a dilemma as we might want to believe it is. I wanted to share this simple caveat with you because as you read this book, time may seem to be a ride that lends itself to the theme of existence as a whole. Read that again…

Ok…so, on the 8th of April, 2017, I went to Urgent Care. I felt what medical professionals call general malaise. I had been dealing with a cough that did not seem to want to go away. I had been pretty stressed out with major financial woes. We were moving. My oldest brother, Steffon, had just passed away about a month and a half prior. There was a whole lot going on.

It’s still pretty frustrating when I think about it because in my mind, I don’t think I should have been that stressed out, even in spite of everything. But remember, life has its own ideology about those sorts of things. In my mind life was great. Even after my brother’s recent death, I felt extremely happy. I was about eight months into my dream job. In month four, I directed an amazingly successful Winter Performance that involved the entire school. My boss was incredible. She had given me the green light early in the school year to direct the performance. This sort of work is truly part of my soul mission. I feel complete when I am allowed to just be out-of-the-box, free and creative. I even told her one day that this was truly my dream job and my passion. I feel it was more than just that, though. It was my purpose, my higher calling and life mission. Putting on performances was directly in line with what my Creator created me to do. It is and was truly a lovely experience.

I got my love for the stage from my Mama. My mother had been an elementary school teacher too, but in many ways I think she missed her calling as a Broadway director. The types of performances I saw her create, develop and direct completely and totally shaped my perspective on how such things should be done.

I require kids to do more than just get on a stage and tap-a-two in a straight line. I’m talking about stage creations that pop. I like to see the kids involved in every facet of the performance. I take pride in training my students to a high level of excellence. Some of the stage-shy students had the opportunity to work as stage crew. I made it clear, however, that this role was as important as any. The students also had options to work as set designers or costume designers. I explained to them that these roles could turn into actual careers.

So the magnificent performance came and went. My spirits were riding high well into April. But life, remember? It kind of creeps up on us.

The chaos had amped up my anxiety. The loss of my brother that February had started becoming more and more of a palpable reality for me. The performance, though a wonderful feather in my cap, had been a nightmare to pull together. There had been so many moving parts and logistics. I didn’t recognize the toll it had all taken on me (and others) mentally and physically.

Then there were the Stills.

Still commuting.

Still mothering.

Still wife-ing.

Any section of that is enough stress to send the average Joe down to get checked out a time or two.

I almost ended up dead. I learned that our bodies can take the idea of us feeling anxious and turn that concept on its head. I thought I was going through normal stuff—things all adults go through. You know, a headache here, a cough there. It’s important to remember that our bodies translate stressed-out into manifestations that can leave us crippled or even dead.

I was probably most worried about money. I had been going through a load of financial difficulties. My family had already robbed Peter to pay Paul so much that it now felt like both of them were figuratively coming after us with reinforcements. It was a really rough time for us financially.

After ten years in our house, we decided to downsize. Truth be told, the house went into foreclosure. We traded our two-story, four-bedroom house for a two-bedroom apartment with a three-story walk-up. The decision was pretty heartbreaking.

However, there was one bright side. The light and airy feeling of having less space to clean was invigorating. I also liked the idea that my family was forced to be in closer proximity and spend more time together. It was so much easier to monitor overuse of electronics and internet usage by the kids. I know that’s something good parenting would require anyway. But you’d be surprised how many things slip through the cracks when you are commuting, working and juggling so many other aspects of your life.

Now that we were living in a smaller space, I even got to actually see my teenager. I would only see him passing by when we lived in the house. There was so much less clutter and so much more proximity. For me, that meant less anxiety. I was really starting to like it.

But if it was so great, why the downfall? We had only been in our apartment for about a month when the crisis happened. How had the title of my life story gone from Phoenix Rising to Crash and Burn?

I chalked it up to the fact that we are all human and we have limits. Body, mind and spirit try to remind us of such constraints but it’s up to us to listen. Needless to say, I did not. Anxiety, for me, always launches a quiet, stealth attack. It usually rears its ugly head in the form of some type of autoimmune condition. Stress seems to accumulate then take its toll on me. Two or three weeks later, I usually end up with some form of physical manifestation if I don’t get a handle on stress before that time. Yet, the interesting thing is that sometimes even if I think I’ve taken care of the problem, the stress still lurks.

For instance, when I first started teaching two decades before, I suddenly broke out in hives. It happened during my first Winter Vacation. Seems like that would have been a great time to revel in relaxation, right? There had been so much stress leading up to the holidays. As a new teacher, there were papers to grade, gifts for my students and assessments to record. Of course, there was also my first song-and-dance Christmas presentation to choreograph. Then there were the usual adult obligations and concerns, too, like bills and such. Adulting is hard. I wasn’t married or a parent at that time but I probably had more cumulative stress than I ever had.

I was battling a case of subdermal hives that were so itchy that I thought I was going to lose my mind. It seemed like even my hair and my fingernails themselves were itchy. It was all under the skin though, so no one else could even see what was going on. I wonder how much of a metaphor that could’ve been for other areas of my life. Perhaps for yours as well. What do we allow to bug us? What’s under your skin? What are you sweeping under the rug? Since going through these experiences, I have really gotten in touch with the metaphysical messages that our bodies try to send us. Do we listen? Mostly we don’t.

I carried my itchy self to the doctor. A shot of Benadryl cleared up my life for a while. I thought I’d learned the lesson. I still had learning to do.

Fast forward back to life in our new apartment. Stress began showing up in a different way for me. I was developing a phobia.

When we moved into our house a decade prior, we were the very first owners. No one else had ever lived there. We’d lived there for ten years and in that time, I’d never had to bathe in a tub that anyone else, other than my family, had bathed in. I didn’t realize how important that was to me until I no longer had the option to experience that luxury.

One evening I decided that I wanted to take a relaxing bath in the apartment. I had a little hitch in my giddyup and figured the hot water would get the kinks out. I found myself becoming increasingly grossed out by the thought of bathing in a foreign bathtub. As time passed, that grossed-out feeling became something uncontrollable. I don’t like feeling out of control, so I decided that I simply had to overcome it. I could not allow fear to overpower me.

I called on my husband, Brett, for support. I told him to sit with me while I tried to take a bath in this new environment. It was horrible. I tried my best but ended up having a full on panic attack. I couldn’t bear to think about myself submerged in that tub the way I had enjoyed in our old house. I also hated the germs or whatever else was in that tub. It felt like the germs were controlling me and dictating my decisions. I was allowing things that I couldn’t see to determine my reactions and outcomes. I could not allow that…

I got in the tub. I was determined to beat this thing. I wasn’t going to let it control me. Well, even recalling the situation both saddens me and grosses me out. I thought it might be easier if I got into the tub as the water was running. I kneeled in and as the water rose, I splashed it around me. I wanted to overcome whatever was happening in my mind but my mind was winning.

I kept hearing: "You don’t have to do this. You’ve been doing just fine with taking a shower. Just do that."

I couldn’t hear. I was stuck in some sort of feverish attempt to get the better of myself. In the end, I lost. I still haven’t been able to take a bath since then. The shower became my best friend.

One strange thing about the situation was that I had very little difficulty in our community spa. Think about how many germs there are in there. I realized there had to be a psychological scar involved. I thought it might have something to do with us having to leave our beautiful home so abruptly. Whatever the reason it’s amazing how the human mind can latch onto one possibility while completely rejecting another. The fact that I had a panic attack from trying to keep germs from getting out of control was significant. This would ultimately lead to my ending flat on my back in a hospital.

The test results from my visit to Urgent Care seemed to reveal nothing much out of the ordinary. My bloodwork indicated an iron-deficiency which made sense because I was having my menstrual cycle at the time. Actually, I was dealing with a severe iron-deficiency anemia due to years of ridiculously heavy menses which additional tests revealed later on. The Urgent Care doctors prescribed iron, a stool softener, antibiotics and cough syrup for the cough and I was sent on my way.

One of the greatest lessons of this experience is to trust my own instincts when it comes to medical care. I realize I should’ve demanded a chest x-ray to get to the bottom of why I was short of breath and had a lingering cough. Had the doctors found the underlying cause of my symptoms, it might’ve prevented the horrific ordeal I was about to go through.

In less than twenty-four hours, I had to be admitted to intensive care. That’s how quickly my health took a downturn. The new diagnosis? I was now also dealing with a viral infection.

Brett later told me that one minute I was there talking to him, then I was gone. I was admitted to the hospital so quickly that it seemed like I had disappeared.

Because of how fast I declined, the doctors sent in an infectious disease specialist from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). They inquired whether I had traveled outside of the United States. The answer was no. I’d never been out of the U.S. Then they thought maybe I had contracted HIV. Wrong again.

The CDC tried to put the pieces together to solve the puzzle of my health. I felt like I had celebrity status in the world of the CDC. I mean, they don’t come out and check on your average Joe right? A few days later things got worse not better. By April 14th, five days after I was admitted, my fever started spiking out of control. A day later, my x-ray showed signs of something called Leukocytosis which is a massive increase in white blood cells. Chest x-rays also showed a white soot covering my chest. The diagnosis in my medical chart now read:

Iron-deficiency Anemia

Viral Infection

Community Acquired Pneumonia

Acute Respiratory Failure

Leukocytosis

There was also another complication to my medical prognosis. Before being admitted to the hospital, I’d become combative in the emergency room. This was the result of cycling between being unable to breathe and having a panic attack. They had to sedate me. During this time my breathing had become so shallow that I also had to be intubated. There would be a long string of excavations by way of x-ray. Perhaps the title of this section of the book should’ve been:

Sedate. Intubate. Excavate.

I really hoped someone would take the time to read my blog. I wasn’t writing for my health. Well…okay…maybe I was writing for health reasons. Mine and yours. I did hope people shared, forwarded and pasted parts of it that resonated for them. I had never asked people to share my blog, but this is both a miracle story and a word to the wise. And maybe, just maybe, it will help someone make good decisions about their health and medical treatment. The next blog entry will take readers deeper into my world (or into the world that was created for me).

Sedate. Intubate. Excavate.

4/27/17

I guess I did

find that title rather catchy. It provides a great segue into the next blog entry where I’m going to flash-forward to when I was released from the hospital.

One of the first things I did when I got home was, of course, to get on Facebook. From there, the questions came and they didn’t stop coming.

What happened? Everyone kept asking me.

"How did your condition progress so quickly?’

Were you in a coma?

There was an endless stream of curiosities. I had posted a picture of me with all the tubes running in and out of my body. People thought I was still in a coma. I thought common sense would’ve told them that if I was writing and posting a blog, I wasn’t in a coma. But it was touching to see how concerned people were.

One thing this whole experiment taught me was how blessed I am to have such good friends and family. After going through an experience where you almost lose your life, it drives home the importance of family and friends. The things on earth are fleeting. Enjoying our connection with other people is truly what life is and should be all about.

In retrospect, I realize how sweet their concern was. I hope my responses didn’t come off as snarky. My friends were still trying to talk to me, even though they knew I was in a coma. How cool is that? I wanted to make sure my friends understood I was ok. I like to believe I accomplished that goal even though I didn’t have the energy for long conversations.

There is an energy to intent, prayer and love that literally makes things happen. It changes things. I believe their love brought me back to life. This made me believe that there probably is something to sending messages to dead people. Recently, I sent a text message to my eldest brother Steffon who, as I said, passed away. We weren’t raised together but we became pretty close throughout the years. Steffon died after struggling with an array of health issues including heart disease, gout, diabetes and the effects of dialysis. That’s the short list.

When my brother passed away, I was glad he no longer had to suffer but my heart still ached that I would never see him alive in this life again. I’m certain this sounds pretty weird but texting him made me feel a connection. It was a loving and warm energy that I could clearly sense. I felt his physical presence like he was there, just in another room or like the times when I hadn’t talked to him in a while.

I came to understand that he had not disappeared when he passed away. He embarked on a spiritual regeneration process. Of course he never responded to my message but the process of viscerally feeling that his spirit was still with me was life-changing.

As I said, I had just gotten out of the hospital and people had endless questions. Some questions seemed to come from a place of near-frantic concern, while others lent to a nosey curiosity. It would’ve been easy for me to respond with a pat, It’s nobody’s business! answer. I decided to use their questions as a chance to show everyone how good my Lord and Savior had been to me, my friends, family and all those I love.

How many times do you get to hear the story of a person who escaped the clutches of death? I was told that I almost died on at least three occasions during this process. I was seen convulsing on one occasion, which was probably pretty scary. In my soul I know I might’ve actually died at least one time. To keep from sounding overly dramatic or somewhere South of sane, I believe I did experience three levels of death. If you’ve decided to keep reading, I’ll tell you more about that.

Let’s go back to the title of this section. The term excavate might seem like a strange term to start with but medically speaking, that’s sort of what happens with an x-ray. The earth of your skin is visually and photographically moved out of the way so that what is really there can be seen. Looking back, a photographic, digital excavation was definitely required.

There seemed to be a long window of time between when I left Urgent Care and was actually admitted to the hospital. I communicated that I needed to go to the ER, yet Brett was dragging his feet about getting me there. It was like he was not taking it seriously. I think it was all exacerbated by the way my health condition made it seem like things were moving slowly. It felt like it took about a day to get to the hospital. For each minute that passed, my breathing became more and more labored.

By the time we got to the hospital, I just sort of collapsed over the counter and blubbered, I can’t breathe! I really hoped they understood me because that sentence alone had taken all the air my lungs could muster.

I was scared.

One of the nurses got a wheelchair and wheeled me towards triage. This nurse was so rude. She kept asking me questions then got upset because I couldn’t answer them. Yeah…of course it was hard for me to answer questions when I couldn’t breathe!

She told the other nurses that I refused to answer any of her questions. Yep. Lack of oxygen can do that to you.

I pushed out a few questions, Where are we going? Where are you taking me? What is going on?

My oxygen had gotten so low that I began to have what I call a paranoid panic attack. Brett and the nurse were trying to get me to keep still so that the nurse could get an IV in. In that low-oxygen state of paranoia, I thought that he and the nurse were trying to hurt me. When the nurse attempted to put the needle in my arm—that’s the point when my paranoia got the best of me. I totally lost it.

"I’m not gonna let you do this to me again! NOT AGAIN!!!" I started screaming.

I have no clue what the again part was all about, but I wasn’t having any of it. I tried to grab the nurse’s wrist with my left hand and Brett’s arm with my right. It was so hard trying to hold both of them down, especially while not being able to breathe. I thought of another tactic. I could dig my nails into their skin. I had to do something. That brain of mine had me convinced they were trying to hurt me, not help me. I thought I had to protect myself from them.

I apologized to the nurse for my reactions but stayed solid in my conclusions.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t want to hurt you but please just let me go. If you could please just let go of me, I can stop it. I’ll stop it if you please just let me go…

Her reply really pissed me off.

Oh, you’re fine. You’re not hurting me at all.

That "at all" part really got me. I got angrier, which of course got me worked up even more.

Really? I thought. This heffa has it twisted! The whole point of all of this apology stuff was to hurt her enough to make her realize that she is hurting me. At least I thought she was trying to. In any case, I desperately wanted both of them to let me go.

I heard: They’re just trying to get the IV in. You’re dehydrated. They’re trying to help. Just let them help. Just calm down. It’s gonna be ok.

Something about the calm tone of that voice hushed my spirit enough to allow my body to relax so that the nurses could start making progress on helping me get better.

You’re gonna be ok. Just relax. I’m trying to help. Let me help you. The nurse reassured me.

She seemed nicer to me now. Maybe she was trying to help me. I finally got myself to slow down enough to breathe and realize that the nurses needed to do a little needle prick to help me out.

By the grace of God, they got the IV in then tried to figure out what to do next. They started me on a breathing treatment.

They used a nebulizer, which is a device that diffuses a medicine called Albuterol to help open up the lungs. Turns out, I gave ’em a hard time with that too. I kept putting down the tube that I was supposed to hold to my mouth to breathe in the solution, which of course wasn’t doing me any good.

I was almost done with the treatment, but very little of it had gotten into my lungs where it was needed. My oxygen levels kept dropping so they had to make another decision fast. They started me on an oxygen mask to deliver the air my brain and lungs so desperately needed. I usually like to have a face mask for my treatments, but this time I wanted the hand-held tube back. Because my health was at a critical level, they were insistent that I use that stinkin’ mask.

The panic attack made the mask feel claustrophobic. Plus, I didn’t want anything touching my skin. It felt like everything that touched me magnified my irritation levels exponentially. I was a defiant little somebody when it came to that mask. I kept taking it off, trying to throw it across the room. The mask seemed ten times bigger than it really was and felt like it was consuming my entire being. I really felt like I was drowning every time they put the mask back on me.

A nurse explained to Brett what happens when the brain gets deprived of oxygen. She also said that if I didn’t settle down, they’d need to make another decision. I vaguely remember the nurse telling me that if I didn’t keep the mask on, she’d have to intubate me. And she made it very clear that I didn’t want that. I never heard her use the word coma but I understood that I couldn’t be awake for them to do that procedure…

I didn’t have a chance to process that or anything else. Things were moving way too fast. I was later told that I’d fall asleep, then, just as it seemed like my oxygen levels were improving, I’d wake up in a panic again, shouting:

I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!!!

I would start clawing that mask off again. Then I would drift back off to sleep and the cycle of sleeping, then waking up combative started all over again.

I became so combative that I had to be restrained before I was sedated. Yep! Lil’ four-foot-eleven me was strapped down to prevent me from succumbing to an extremely vicious cycle:

I couldn’t breathe.

I’d panic.

I’d have a panic attack.

The nurses restrained me.

I couldn’t breathe.

I’d panic.

I’d have another panic attack.

It was a merry-go-round that I was extremely anxious to jump off of. There was yet another outburst from me.

Get this thing off me now!

The next part is kind of sad. Brett said I got a really wild, animal-ish look in my eyes. He said that by this point I didn’t look anything at all like myself. I’d