My Sudden Trip to Hell

Stoics would encourage all of us to internalize our own mortality, not for morbidity’s sake, but because it helps live in the moment. The wake up call stories like this should be simulated by everyone. Imagine if this were you? Live with a fraction of that pain in your heart and try to internalize it. How does it impact our choices? Things like fingers and walking become amazing. I am always happy people share their stories, it helps us all remember our mortality and make good choices every day. Also, I wish the author a speedy and continued recovery in their journey.

Author acquires necrotizing fasciitis.

>I didn't do anything to get it, it just happened - like being struck by lightning.

While there is certainly an element of chance involved, the Wikipedia article on necrotizing fasciitis seems to disagree somewhat with this blanket statement.

From Wikipedia:

> For reasons that are unclear, it occasionally occurs in people with an apparently normal general condition.

for some reason I assumed that he would write about how this trauma would give him a new perspective on what was really important in life, but at the end it sounded like the experience didn’t really change his perspective on desiring to work all the time on his startup and that he was only stepping down because he couldn’t perform 100% and not because this experience changed anything about how he prioritized work/career?

I was going to say “I recall when I had sepsis in my teens”, but the truth of it is that I don’t - there’s a six week hole in my memory, that skips straight from lying in a pool of blood and puss on the floor of the kitchen at school, having a mop thrust in my face, to lying in a bed in hospital with tubes snaking out of me.

The weird thing is, despite being unconscious for over a month, I woke up feeling like I hadn’t missed anything, and even now I look back at this with slight disbelief - surely you’re thinking of someone else, surely it wasn’t that long. I felt like I’d been out longer after a general for surgery a few years ago.

They did run a whole battery of neurological tests on me once I was conscious and eating - they were pretty surprised I had no obvious brain damage - I had maintained a fever over 108 for several days, despite ice baths and the, what, 20g of daily antibiotics? I do wonder if there was some, but rather more subtle than what was being looked for.

Re-integrating was weird. For everyone else I’d been as good as dead - they’d seen me carted off in an ambulance, and then a few weeks later term had ended. I on the other hand basically went straight from the end of one school term to the beginning of the next with zero intervening time, and nobody could figure out why I was pissed off. They kept asking me about what had happened - and I answered honestly that they probably knew more than I did.

It also sucked that I had no soft landing back into classes, and in the time I’d been unconscious they’d started calculus - I came back and had to differentiate and integrate and had no frigging idea what I was actually doing - I remember sitting in an A-level maths exam a year later and finally having the revelation that it was about curves and rates of change.

All this because I had what looked like a zit on my knee. It grew until I couldn’t fit trousers over my leg, school offered me a sticking plaster, and said I wasn’t getting out of sport that easily. Then my leg opened up one night fetching water in the kitchen, and I lost consciousness. I’ll never forget the sight of custard in crude oil swirling over the linoleum - perhaps that’s one side effect of the coma - my last conscious moment is vivid in the extreme.

Anyway, that brush with death didn’t change my outlook one bit, but then again I was an invincible 16 year old. The ones since then have definitely left their mark.