Contributed by Billy Ethridge
Actions / Surprises / Insights
Yesterday morning, just before I awoke, I found myself lucidly dreaming, aware of seeing myself lying on my back on the bed, horizontally just lower than my chest, with the focus of my awareness being the underside of my jaw. It appeared to be under strain. The tanned neck skin was stretched taut with my chin tilted slightly up, so I had a perfectly clear view of the wide underside of the skin on my neck.
I became aware of milky-colored veins, like surficial chalky streams of skin, running from my mouth and wrapping around my jawline. Cancer? I momentarily feared. The precise moment the fear struck me, I saw -- in meticulous detail -- my jaw start to soundlessly crumble, like a building powerfully and quietly imploding. Visceral fragments, almost instantaneously crumbled, in unbelievably quick stages, into powder, dust, smoke, then nothing.
I awoke.
Immediately upon waking, as if saging a haunted house, I meditated and momentarily wondered if cancer was attacking me. Do I have a simple toothache? Something else I do not see? Or am I disappearing?
I re-entered the meditation. A sliver of fear, like a flicker of fire, briefly and almost delicately ran around the perimeter of my life, then disappeared.
Contributed by Billy Ethridge
September 6, 2008, about 1:50am, I had a massive hemorrhagic stroke at home. Like millions of other stroke "survivors", my life has changed irreversibly.
I am not a physician or rehabilitation therapist or other medical professional, though I have greatly benefited from kindness of some very skilled ones.
A number of years ago, I did PhD work -- but no dissertation, so no PhD -- in Philosophy (Logic and Linguistic Analysis) at UCSD, with a strong mathematical background. At age five I started judo, and subsequently studied Aikido and Tang Soo Do, and other martial arts. I am also a musician -- singer and instrumentalist (primarily a guitarist and harmonica player). Over the years (I was born in 1948), I have created music & lyrics, poetry, and other writings.
I summarize these elements of my life because everything in me, and what I have learned from my rehabilitation, conversations with patients and medical professionals, and extensive reading, tells me that: (1) the stroke I have had has been THE single most transformative event in my life; and (2) this transformation has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me even in the midst of dramatic neurophysiological demands.
Stroke Revelations is intended to provide personal reflections about what is possible to those of us who have entered the "event" of a stroke and came out alive. This blog is dedicated to all people whose consciousness has been overwhelmed, from whatever avalanche of neurophysiological reasons, and did not make it to the "other side".
"Every human being is the author of his own health or disease." ~Buddha
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