This is surreal… I am looking down on myself… I’m lying in a hospital isolation unit, connected to a drip, with a ventilation unit helping me breath
“Is that really me?” I think.. yes, that part of me floating in the room looking down from the ceiling is conscious and thinking.
“Am I dreaming?”
I think”Nope this isn’t a dream.. I can feel that thing in my throat, and I can see it at the same time.”
“What on EARTH is going on… SOMEONE GET ME OUT OF HERE!!”
“Oh!, I am out of here!!!! I’m not in my body!!”
Silence.. I stop thinking, I start to ‘see’ a different reality. I remember I used to do this when I was small. Oh, there’s Mateo.. HEY MATEO, its me! I’m back!…. ‘You never went’ he replies, ‘but you really do have things to do!’ He spins me around, and I am pushed quickly and hard back into my physical body.
I feel the jump, and open my eyes, coughing because of the ventilation pipe. Quickly the nurse comes and removes it. I open my eyes. I can’t speak, I’m still doing very poorly.
I have a quinsy, an abscess on my throat. I’m exhausted and my immune system is shot to bits, from alcohol, poor diet, stress, lack of sleep and pretending to be something I’m not.
5 days it took in hospital until I was ready to get up. 6 months longer, before I could go back to work. I lost 7lbs in weight in those 5 days in hospital, and became so weak that even bathing was an effort, the Doctor said I was ‘flat’. Its an expression they used to give me an idea that I was suffering with depression. I knew that.. I was 21 and I didn’t want to go anywhere, see anyone, talk, or think. I just laid there.
Thankfully, I didn’t lose my appetite, and slowly slowly as I began to nourish my body again. I began to come back.
As soon as I was feeling a bit better, I started to plan out my life again. I didn’t even acknowledge what had happened to me. I wanted to forget it, feel stronger, and get back to work. Not earning money was something I really didn’t like. It made me feel like a fraud, like a ‘sponger’ (a South London term used for those who allow others to pay for them). I was sponging from my parents and it felt really uncomfortable. I didn’t acknowledge that I needed to change my way of living, to slow down, to clean up my diet and stop drinking alcohol. Nothing really mattered other than me getting back out there and getting another job (I’d lost the one in the City because of long term sickness) and then getting married.
I’d decided it was really pretty hard to be alone, so one of the main things on my agenda was the ‘right’ relationship.
So, back in the job market, working locally now though, the one thing I had accepted was that London life was too much for me. I stayed in Croydon, found a job as a personal assistant to an Accountant and began the ‘right’ relationship.
My first conscious ‘out of body’ experience, forgotten about. My re-connection with my spirit guide ignored. My 6 months of isolation and depression brushed under the carpet never to be talked about.
I was blind to the messages that were coming through to me. Or I was to afraid to look in case I had to take responsibility for who I was and what I had to give?
Looking back it was the latter.
