Is a near death experience always enough to stimulate a new found love of life? Or, would a brush with death make you more reluctant and scared to get on with living? Zoe shares her story.

Death was an abstract concept for me for years. I have no recollection of when this sinister entity and I became so well acquainted; I can’t pinpoint the exact moment in time the concept of death started transforming from a theoretical notion into a being that crept into my life. The joke of it is that when I was actually dying, the thought of death somehow vanished from the room. All I could think about was the pain. They told me I was the youngest patient to have been in the ICU for months. That, coupled with the cataclysmic presentation of my disease, had doctors constantly running in and out of my room. There is a fast pace to any ICU and yet strangely it almost seems motionless: like a little bubble outside of normal time and space.

I had a central line placed in me in a manner so urgent, without anaesthetic, time to prepare, or time to lose, that the muscles around my lungs went into spasm and I started choking and gasping for breath. People around me started panicking, desperately trying to figure out if my lung had collapsed or if an artery had been mistakenly punctured. Incredibly I wasn’t interested in what was said. Two nurses were holding my hands, my neurologist touching my leg and my rheumatologist gently holding the tops of my feet in his hands. The only thing that mattered to me was the feeling of their skin on mine. There seemed to be some kind of value in being in that room, being connected to these others in any way.

For me death was a certainty when I walked through those doors. How I died and when were the only unknowns. Would it be the same day? Would the central line clot immediately, or would I go kicking and screaming a couple of days down the line? Would I die with dignity or would I cower?

I didn’t cower. Nor did I start kicking and screaming. The central line did not clot. After a week I was moved to a private room and doctors started talking about a long term management plan. Like nothing had happened. Like everything would go back to how it was. Like I had been given a second chance and would, at some point, walk out grateful and unscathed.

People are naked in the ICU. The first thing they do to you when you walk, or are wheeled through the ICU doors of any hospital, is to take your clothes off. They need access to every orifice, every piece of skin, every vein and artery and every organ – clothes are nothing but a hindrance. Patients are also naked in the ICU in a different, more significant way. Every single one of us is rendered defenceless and vulnerable at the mercy of these professionals. It was in this doubly naked state and in the coldness and the harshness of the reality of that room that something changed. The metaphorical nakedness of that room and of what follows strips away everything unimportant about life, leaving a clear picture of what is valuable and what could so easily be lost.

It seems to me that the person who walked into that room died there and someone else emerged. This new person was someone small and petrified; someone who knew in their very core that the ghouls and monsters of horror stories weren’t only real but that they were a part of them – these ghouls would be forever engrained in their DNA and psyche.

That day I was awed by every single breath I took – however painful it was (and it was!). I would have done anything, said anything, made any deal, cut off any one of my limbs just to have a little more time to be in pain and on this earth. Yet, I did not cower in the face of death. I know in my very soul that I fought with all I had and held on to life by my teeth – I didn’t cower.

People hear courageous stories of fighters of all kinds: of people who never yield, who subsist in the face of unimaginable adversities. What I’ve rarely heard is how people carry on. You’ve stared death in the eyes and won. Now what? I think in an abstract sort of way people imagine that survivors re-enter the world of the living in the same animated manner in which they fought to stay away from the world of the dead.

The truth of the situation, for me at least, is a little different. Years later I still tremble in terror. Evidently, second and third chances don’t come with a manual. And people, however strong and dynamic they may be, are weary from the battles they fought and horror-struck after feeling the end, and the brittleness and true uncertainty inherent to life.

I lay naked in that ICU bed. And I never cowered in the face of death. But years later I find myself realising that in becoming familiar in a real way with death, I have cowered in the face of life. The cure for the fear of dying is living. But what is the cure for the fear of living?

"Would the central line clot immediately, or would I go kicking and screaming a couple of days down the line?"

"the person who walked into that room died there and someone else emerged. This new person was someone small and petrified"