My primary focus these days is on sharing information about the ongoing SARS2 pandemic and the current danger it poses to everyone. I want to use whatever power I have to combat the overwhelming and casual eugenics that has superseded all public health. I try to post stuff about this regularly on main account, @edania.

There is no immunity to COVID. You can get infected again and again and again. The damage from each infection is cumulative, and lasts far longer than the symptoms. The best thing to do right now is avoid catching the virus as much as possible.

I worked in COVID testing + biohazard safety and successfully made a local space safer and more accessible for about a year up until my employer got tired of me and the "burden" of caring about accessibility.

Before that, I juggled various technical roles related to live performance: lighting design, electrical systems, scenery construction, props maintenance, and others. I also used to dabble in TTRPG game experiments, having fallen in love with the collaborative story game scene at a Big Bad Con. Unfortunately, the abandonment of people to the plague has altered my capacity to dream and to wonder, and I just can't engage with the space like I used to.

These days I'm unemployed and watching out for a good remote opportunity. I enjoy exploring interesting video games and shows, and reading happy lesbian stories. I'm in a kickass open t4t relationship with my bf, @bog-pokes , who makes really good tattoo art. I feel both proud & lucky to have some of it on my body!

CW: hospitals, medical trauma, malpractice, drugs, opioids, brain injury, amnesia, dysphoria, death

U N D E A D ? ? ?

It's kind of a long story.

The earliest memories of my life begin in a medical transport vehicle, disoriented and confused. Lying down on a gurney, I catch blurry glimpses of a city passing by. I ask the staff where I am and where we're going, and I receive a gentle and patient reply. As if these questions had been answered a few times already.

They tell me that I've been discharged from the ICU and now will be transferred to a rehabilitation facility for the next few months. I am told that I will see family soon, and they can tell me more about what happened.

I feel tired and sore and foggy and medicated and restrained, but I try to piece together any scattered fragments of memories I can conjure up. It all feels so distant. It's like trying to remember what happened in an old dream.

Something had happened.
I was working multiple jobs and trying to eat less and not sleeping enough.
And then I got a super bad migraine, or I got really sick, or both?
And so my friend took me the hospital.
And then I was taken to a back room and given injections of some sort.
And so I fell asleep, and kept on falling down further and further.
And then... I found myself here.
I didn't seem to have any memories of whatever had happened in between.

We arrived at the new facility, and I was rolled up to a simple treatment room with a large window, high above the city. There, I was moved into a large medical bed and told about the buttons I should press for help.

A bit later, some friendly folk found their way to my new room. While they all felt familiar to me, I could only tell who some of them were. So I asked, delicately, about the names and relationships of these other probable family members. After a few slow re-introductions and sweet anecdotes, I finally get to have my story told to me.

Meningitis is what took me to the emergency room, but it wasn't the reason why I had been in the ICU.

One reason why meningitis is scary is that it can cause swelling in the brain. This is very bad because the rigid skull around it can't expand to compensate, resulting in the brain getting smashed up against the inside of the skull. This is called encephalitis, and it is extremely, extraordinarily painful.

Treatment involves administering powerful painkillers such that a patient can get some rest and recover. Morphine was given first, but this seemingly had no effect and went completely unnoticed. So next up was dilaudid, a synthetic opioid that is roughly fourteen times stronger than morphine. This was was enough to lay at rest, finally, in a stable condition.

Until, well.

Late one night, when the nurses were changing shifts, there was an accident. Something got miscommunicated or misunderstood. Thus was that dilaudid mistakenly given twice in a row.

This extra serving caused an opioid overdose, leading to cardiac arrest and respiratory failure. Even worse, the proper monitors to alert staff of these issues weren't actually in use.

This body was dying, and there was nothing to hear, and no one to notice.

It was only by chance that another nurse happened to pass by, moments later, and suspected something amiss. Immediately administered was narcan, to block the effects of the opioids. Unfortunately, the sudden shock of returning pain & nausea made the body reflexively vomit, while it was already gasping for air. So the bile was inhaled into the lungs, causing respiratory failure once again.

By the time they got the body up into the ICU and hooked up with full life support, blood oxygen levels were already well below lethal levels. This body had settled deep into a coma with no signs of life.

A family member who was nearby at the time vividly recalls a doctor storming down a hallway and yelling, "those stupid assholes over-dosed" me, and that "they fucking killed" me. My father tells of a call he received as he was on his way to the hospital, and a conversation about how long he wished to keep the body on life support, as there was no guarantee it would ever rise again.

18 hours passed in this precarious non-responsive condition. 18 hours of routine pokes, prods, and questions unanswered. 18 hours of death.

Yet this body did still cling to life. The week following the return of consciousness was spent in celebratory gratitude, alongside determining the extent of the resulting brain damages. My right eye had permanently lost a quarter of its vision. Additionally, its gaze was stuck pointing outwards, and I could not bring it back in alignment with the left eye's vision. Any other fine motor control such as writing letters was now uncoordinated and erratic. The limbs on my left side were paralyzed and unfeeling. And finally, the assorted memories & other information once in my mind were all a scrambled mush.

That muddled mind should, hopefully, resolve naturally as the regular opioid dosages were gradually reduced over the following days. And the physical challenges could be confronted with training & rehab in another facility, which is where I found myself now.

This story explained a lot of my current predicament, and I thanked these kind people for helping me make sense of what was going on. Those older memories weren't coming back, though. Trying to remember things from before the transport felt like I was reading crumpled pages torn from a dream diary belonging to someone else.

The most vivid thing I could recall was some vague time after falling asleep in the Emergency Room. It was like this gentle sensation of sinking down, deeper and deeper, far away from the waking lights of the surface, all the way to the very bottom of the abyss. Down there was a peaceful rest amongst skeletal shipwrecks.

This visceral memory of the experience of Death, however, was not very helpful when trying to share a conversation with a nice gentleman who I suspected could be my grandfather, maybe.

So I would spend the next couple weeks asking the friendly folks very many questions about who I was & who I had been. Even though I was working with memories that resembled a torn box of broken puzzle parts, I managed to piece together a lot about my supposed self.

Over time, I got pretty good at acting like this self, too! Which provided much comfort and relief to the assorted family & friends supporting my recovery. I was very happy to repay some of their kindness.

There was this one little problem, though.

The more I read through the old e-mails and notes and reflections and journal writings, the less I understood. I disagreed with what were considered to be my most recent conclusions.

As I kept uncovering more of my apparent identity, I kept discovering discrepancies between what I felt about myself and this person that I was supposed to be. I had some things in common, sure, and I could sympathize with the hardships, mostly. But the perspectives perceived as the closest to mine own instead felt distant, and alien.

The first time I mentioned this feeling to loved ones, it was laughed off as a funny little quirk. And I had joined in with that laughter, assuming these sensations would be nothing more than an amusing, temporary anomaly.

But then there were those other moments when I was alone, at night. Where it felt like I was trapped in a body that belonged to someone else. Like a beloved relative I'd never met had passed away, leaving me to inherit a damaged vessel with a messy box of redacted information. When others would tell me stories of shared experiences, there was this unshakable feeling of dissonance that they weren't really talking about me.

The disparity only grew stronger in the following weeks, reinforced further by the unbearable discomforts of opiate withdrawal. I wrote a bit about it at the time, but it's pretty unpleasant to read. So I won't be describing that experience here.

It was only after a lot of hard work and exploration and therapy and healing and growth and discovery over the next two years that I learned to listen to the emotional truths inside of me, and started looking for tangible language to describe these truths:

My life began in the Summer of 2018, after the previous operator of this body passed on. This body would then be risen from the dead, and a new spirit (me) awoke to become its new animating force. I would have access to some information and muscle memory from this body's history, but no lived experiences prior to awakening.

I was welcomed into this world under the assumption that I would assume the identity of my predecessor. And I did my best to play that part, for a little while. But eventually, I realized that this ongoing act was making me uncomfortable & unhappy. I didn't want to reclaim the identity of some dead guy, I wanted to have my own!

Also I figured out that I'm actually a woman, which fucking RULES.

I then found a name for my true self, and have since been discovering who I really want to be. 💖✨