I have the attention span of a goldfish.
I'm listening to music 99% of the time. I plan to be on the radio some day. I love theatre. Boston Bruins. Nothing says love like a good set of concert tickets. I have a language of my own. My mistakes are who I am. Who I am is me. And me is here to stay whether society likes it or not.
![tastefullyoffensive:
[via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4k3thZ0bT1qewacoo1_250.jpg)
My Actual Near Death Experience and Why it Didn’t Matter
For some reason I feel like writing about this, even though I’ve only ever told a small hand full of people. For privacy I changed the name of a certain someone. Towards the end of my Junior year of High School I nearly died. It wasn’t an attempt to commit suicide and it wasn’t some horrible accident like a train ran me over. Trust me, I’m not that interesting. I was going to my physical with my grandmother who I call Nani. I remember exactly what I was wearing, how my hair was done, what make up I had on, What song was playing in the car on the way there. Light blue ripped jeans with an areosmith Tshirt and my black converse, hair was short and pulled back into a little pony nub, black eyeliner with a light pink eye shadow, The Beatles Here Comes The Sun. I walked into the doctors office, had to get the copay billed back to my house because I forgot my $20 at home. Sat down and waited for what seemed like forever counting the ceiling tiles while listening to badly composed jazz versions of popular 90’s music.
“Alyssa Steen” The nurse called from right beside the giant wooden door that as a child I was terrified to go behind. But I wasn’t a little girl anymore and so I went in on my own while Nani sat out in the lobby reading her book. Walking into room number 211 I noticed it was the room with the pictures from Africa that one of the doctors here had taken on a vacation. They were really good pictures and I envied his experiences there.
“height, 5’2”….weight 127lbs, good, perfect. Blood pressure, fine, reflexes are good. Now let me just check your heart rate and lunges.”
This is when everything went spiraling down hill. The nurse listened for all of 10 seconds and then left the room without saying anything to get the doctor. When my primary doctor came in and checked my heart rate, she asked me if it felt like my heart was pounding at all. It wasn’t, I felt completely fine if not a little freaked out.
“Alyssa, your heart is beating at around 180 beats per minute. Do you feel like you’re having trouble breathing?”
I shook my head no.
They decided to give me something that they normally give people when they have pneumonia to see if my lunges were closed up at all. Turns out taking those steroid makes your heart beat even faster if that’s not the problem. It went up to around 210.
I was brought to Children’s Hospital in Boston to be seen. I sat in the emergency room getting all different kinds of medicine to knock me out so my heart rate wouldn’t go up any higher. The human heart isn’t meant to beat that fast ever not to mention while you’re just sitting there doing nothing. Then entire time I was in the ER they kept hinting around the fact that if they couldn’t get my heart rate that I would die.
“We just want to keep and eye on you”
” The body can’t support itself with a heart going that fast”
“we should keep you over night…just in case”
They moved me across the building to the living space version of the ER where they kept people with terminal diseases that needed constant care. My room had another person when I got in there. She was a little girl named Emily. She had short curly sandy blonde hair and huge round hazel eyes. She looked really pale and I began to wonder how long she had been there.
I started looking through my phone. All the names of people that I used to be friends with but never talked to anymore. All the pictures of the beach that I lived so close to, of my dog rascal with the giant bone my boyfriend Josh and I had bought him, of Josh and I at concerts and just randomly around places, and of my family that I knew I took for granted.
Emily began to cry and I closed my phone as nurses came running in. They took some blood, hooked her up to another IV, and gave her more medicine. Emily had an Auto Immune Disease that was slowly killing her. She was 7 years old. She hadn’t been out of the hospital since she was 4. She had postcards from all the places she had wanted to go scattered across her wall. Her father told my mother and I how much she loved animals and the ocean even though the only animal she had ever actually had was a goldfish and the only time she saw the ocean was out of a window. They were actually from Pennsylvania and they came out here for better medical treatment.
I looked down at my phone again and realized how lucky I really was. I had been so many places and experiences so many things even if at the ti me I thought it wasn’t nearly enough. Over the course of the next hour I sat next to Emily’s bed showing her the pictures of all the stupid things I had done with my friends and showed her a little video of my dog running around. I felt guilty, as though she should have been able to experience the same things I had. When it got to the picture of Josh and I all dressed up for his prom she said I looked like a fairy princess.
She fell asleep a short while after that. Her father and my mother had been asleep for close to an hour at that point and I realized that I was alone with my thoughts. I curled up in my bed, making sure all the little sticky heart monitor pads didn’t fall off. I called Josh and told him not to freak out but that I was in the hospital. He freaked out of course. I told him everything and yet I didn’t tell him nearly enough. I love him so much and the two of us have been through a ridiculous amount of crazy together. But anyways, once I said good night to him I cried. I’ll fully admit that I cried for a solid 45 minutes. I was so scared, I didn’t want to close my eyes thinking that I wouldn’t wake up. I wanted to wake my Mom up and clutch to her as if she could save me and I know she would have if she could. I wanted to just leave and go home and pretend everything was normal, but I couldn’t.
When I had finally run out of tears, I put in my head phone and turned The Beatles back on. I remembered how as a little kid my Dad used to play them for me so I would go to sleep. I fell asleep thinking about how strong Emily was. She was completely okay with dying and me, something over double her age was absolutely terrified. She had lived her whole life through pictures on a wall, experienced all the things she ever wanted to within her head and her imagination. With music playing in my ears I eventually drifted off.
Waking up the next morning I saw my Mom texting someone off her phone while also checking mine to see if anyone had texted me. The doctors came in for about the 20th time to check my heart and my rate was down to around 90. Which was still a little high but livable. I looked across the room at Emily who was still sleeping even though her father wasn’t. He was holding her hand and just staring at her, silently praying to find some mystic cure. I asked him to tell her that she was the one that made me feel better when she woke up.
I left the hospital at around 11:30 that morning and began my half hour ride home back to my beach, my dog, my family, and Josh. I feel bad about never actually getting a chance to say goodbye to Emily and I feel bad that it has taken me this long to really tell her story and how much it affected mine. This is all true. All reality in its harshest form. To be honest I don’t know if Emily is still alive, I know I am, but for some reason, after having to accept death, being alive doesn’t matter as much.
I have a tattoo right by my right hip of a heart made out of a treble cleft and a bass cleft. This has come to represent not only a love a music for me, but a love for life. Between music calming me down and Emily inspiring me to go out and experience everything that I can, my heart was saved. I nearly died, but I feel like finally telling someone, even if no one reads this, will finally allow me to realize that it didn’t matter. I’m alive and coming close to death is just another experience.
~Alyssa Steen
