but in fairness, in real life I did not have much pain because I was completely paralyzed - well I could move my head a little except maybe at the worst? In this I see that I was just lucky. I doubt that I would be very calm if I were the caribou being eaten alive by a wolf. When my wife told that it didn't look good, I felt know fear at all. I just reminded her that most of our affairs were in order and there was plenty of money to survive and that death was like walking from one room into antoher. But then within myself I felt no fear at all and no will to fight I just let go and completely gave myself to death having the most amazingly realisitic dream wherein I was afloat in an acorn boat in the middle of the ocean with no way to steer even. I lay in the dream in the bottom of my little acorn boat looking up at the stars bobbing up and down on the ocean swells and thought calmly, "eventually I will end up upon a shore somewhere either in this world or the next"

when i woke up the nurses were talking trading shifts as they had to give a verbal hand off about how "Mr. Sky" had made it after all and might be turning the corner - going on to talk about so and so and so and so NOT making it and then as if to make a point, the curtain opened and their were two empty beds across from me. Each ICU nurse had three patients and I suddenly gathered that mine had had a very busy night with all three of us winking on and off and then two not winking back on.

I was on ICU for two weeks and thankfully was mentally okay through all but maybe 24 hours of the attack when I kind of wigged out and I knew what it was like around there when people started dying late at night because usually I was awake - my wife always sleeping in a straightback chair head on the pillow resting on my railing. I knew my nurse had help that night. He was an awesome nurse but he couldn't have handled all three of us crashing at once by himself. In generaly my medical care has been bad beyond words but those critical care nurses where like special forces troops or something. They really were dedicated and professional and competent. What I saw is that these nurses were more competent than the doctors but yet had to be like puppets on a doctors string instead of having what in the corporation that I worked for always called, Empowerment. God makes me laugh to think it - weird how horrible things become funny given enough time? Those "Empowerment" meetings were some of the worst of the worst. Like a cosmic vacuum cleaner sucking your soul dry.