I had been feeling weak and sick for a few days and then woke up one morning completely deaf. My equilibrium shaky, and my mind in a surreal, psychedelic dream state, I lost my footing at the top of the stairs. Head over heels over head, I knocked myself out on the windowsill as I crashed down the narrow staircase at my house. Bang. My wife was out horseback riding for the day, and I came to hours later still unable to hear a thing, unable to move, two huge opened welts on my head and my knee not supporting any weight.
For two days I tried to get from stairwell to couch, with no success. I could not move, nor could my wife support my 200lb body, so I lay suffering on some blankets on the hard floor. My ribs were cracked, my spine bruised, battered and sore, and my already chronically messed-up knee gone again, as if some tendons were ripped or a ligament severed. My leg was useless. Every attempted breath was a battle, no matter how hard I tried to take a natural one. Though I refused to go to hospital my wife finally called an ambulance behind my back and I was wheeled out of my yard on a gurney. I eventually ended up in intensive care, unable to draw oxygen, and was diagnosed with some exotic new strain of the coronavirus for which there was no cure, of course. I was put into a medically induced coma, none of which I remembered.
Now, a month later, having been visited by nothing but bizarre dreams, strange visions, shadowy darkness, untrustworthy memories and recurring hallucinations, all hallmarks of near-death experiences, I was conscious again. Still in intensive care, catheter shoved up my dick, every attempt at taking a deep breath – even a yawn – met with the unwelcome sensation of being slammed in the chest with a 20lb sledgehammer. Apparently my light had almost gone out permanently more than once, according to the doctors and nurses.
I was asked three times a day if I knew where I was and rarely gave a correct answer. Sometimes I’d be driving miles to deliver drugs to someone in another city, or dismantling a stolen car after midnight for parts to sell or trade. Sometimes I’d be boxing potatoes and stacking them on pallets in the spud factory or using metal hooks to buck hay bales on to a tractor under the intense eastern Washington summer sun, or I’d be drunkenly cooking pancake and egg breakfasts in a busy restaurant after drinking and carousing all night; a few of the activities among many I had participated in my youth. At times I felt I were on a tour bus in the states or the UK, and I remember thinking I was on a train, travelling through Australia for a while. China, the Middle East, the plains of Canada, and where I had grown up in the Pacific Northwest were all places I imagined I was holding court amongst the damned. I had no idea where these delusions came from but they were ever-present.
I was slightly aware as I came to that I was hooked up to medical equipment, but it felt as though the rooms where I lay were always radically different, always changing. A house, a backstage somewhere, and while the rooms were forever different, the view out the window was always the same. In reality I was in hospital 20 minutes from my home in County Kerry, Ireland, and I didn’t realise the view in my dream was the sight out of the window in the hospital room.
One night I dreamt I was living in a large, windowless basement apartment off a rain-wet main drag in Seattle with several of my ex-girlfriends and ex-wives, many of whom detested me in real life, all in harmony with each other, and I felt a peace come over me. Another night I dreamt I was back at my former home in California, a place I always swore I’d never leave, magically flying above the fruit trees with my beloved little dog in my arms, pulling fragrant apples off the treetops and feeding them to him as he licked my face, just as he had the day he died and broke my heart. I woke up from that one crying, with my shirt soaked in tears of despair.
From the moment I was brought out of my chemically induced sleep and was told what had happened and where I had been, I was determined to survive this nightmare, even though I had very little say, actually, no say in the matter, and had zero ammo to fight with.
Six weeks later and still in the ICU, 3.30am, wide-ass awake now, raw as fuck, still fighting for air. Wiped out from severe insomnia and the twin kicks to the nuts that were the virus and my injuries, I started wishing I were still in my medical blackout. It was beyond evident that as much as I craved some temporary oblivion, the woefully inadequate amounts of Seroquel, Xanax and OxyContin I was being given were not going to put me down for more than a few minutes at a time – probably since I’d been self-administering elephant-sized doses of the same shit on and off for years. To me it was second nature to eat tablets like candy and I’d been doing it so long I’d forgotten what they actually felt like unless I was caught without for a time and then started again. And, of course, it never occurred to me that there might come a time when I would legitimately need some.
As I started to slowly regain my shattered wits, the deal I’d made with a night-time doctor for extra pharmaceuticals was predictably fucked, and I neither received the meds I’d been promised nor was I given the freedom to have a smoke at the window before lights out. Everything felt like something that was happening again, an unwelcome deja vu, with the end result preordained. The hillbilly Nostradamus in me had often been mythically correct as to a handful of likely outcomes in any given situation, but what my self-destructive mind was telling me here was nothing I wanted to entertain. Still, I found it impossible to keep these unwanted thoughts from invading my head 50 times a day. I was so angry at being deprived of the cigarette I’d been promised, I stopped interacting with staff for a good week or so. This was unnecessary torture.
More and more this was reminiscent of an unending stretch in county jail that I couldn’t shake, with my trial date being intentionally undetermined, constantly moved around just to keep me inside. Whatever was in this shitwagon I’d caught a ride on, it was no fucking joke. I’d taken my share of well-deserved ass-kickings over the years but this thing was trying to dismantle me, body and mind, and I could see no end to it in sight.
Five thirty am, lights flashing on and off, nurses already laughing and starting to work across the hallway; I couldn’t have slept five minutes if I wanted to, and I wanted to very fucking much, thank you. I had to get out of here, that was paramount. One of the charming side effects of the Covid was the loss of smell and taste, rendering everything I tried to eat seem like it had been cooked up in a cat box. The more the doctors kept stressing the importance of eating and endlessly pushing the food on me, the less likely I was to put any of it in my mouth, and after another tortuous attempted blood-taking session, I flat out refused to be a human pincushion anymore, causing a stand-off I wasn’t going to lose as long as I was conscious. My kidneys reportedly were blown out, and while I was in the coma I had been on dialysis, with the doctors daily predicting doom and gloom, prepping my wife and immediate circle of friends for my imminent undoing, lifetime dialysis or transplant. They told my wife I held the record for the longest stay in this condition to survive at this institution.
I knew where my remaining veins were hiding and could have accessed them if allowed, but the last thing a doctor wants is for a patient to do something they can’t. They tried to make a deal with me: let them try to extract from an artery once or try five times to find a conventional vein. I immediately vetoed this plan. I’d be goddamned before I let an actual doctor or anyone else stick me in an artery, a painful mess of an affair. I had accidentally shot heroin into one before and the memory of that wretched experience I had never forgotten. And five more tries at hitting a normal vein was not going to work for me, either.
I asked them to please hit my jugular and be done with it but the young physician expressed trepidation at that, never having taken blood from someone’s neck before. In the back of my mind I had always known those remaining veins were gonna prove valuable at some point.
Extracted from Devil in a Coma by Mark Lanegan, published by White Rabbit, priced £12 in hardback. Also available in ebook and audiobook. Text copyright © Mark Lanegan, 2021.
