Chapter 1

Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. -- Jonah 1:17

15 December 2020 was like a few thousand days that had preceded it. Weekdays I rose early and did a hundred pushups, on the floor beside my bed. I had long ago worked up from just a few to a hundred, and stopped at that point due to time constraints. Most days I repeated the process later in the day. I had a simple breakfast of whole oats with no additives, a cup of black coffee and a glass of orange juice. I was, I believed, being responsible with regard to my personal health.

I went to work, arriving early as I always did. Chatted with a couple of friends and went up to my office. The building has two floors and during the course of a typical day I would go up and down the stairs at least a dozen times.

That was the last thing I remember about that day. I am told that sometime that morning I went down to the office of a friend and told her I didn't feel good and might need to see a doctor. Within a few minutes I was in sufficient distress that an ambulance was called.

The small city where I lived and worked had a reasonably good hospital, perhaps above average for a population of that size. During the examination a cardiac catheterization was performed and I was subsequently sent to a larger hospital in a nearby city for heart surgery.

How different things might have been had it not been for an error during the process - puncturing one of my kidneys with the contrast dye needle - can not be known. I don't see how I could be any worse off.

The dye is known to cause kidney failure in some people merely by being present in the body. I got it mainlined into a kidney. But things were about to get worse. But what Hospital A, as we'll call it, had done was just the beginning.

(Whether they were aware of the error I do not know. But given the nature of the Medical Industry, I have a pretty good idea.)

Hospital A is about fifteen miles from the nearest larger city. That city has two large hospitals. Allegedly there are three, but that is part of our story.

Hospital A is located on the main drag, about a mile from the intersection with a new four-lane highway which has relatively light traffic most of the day. As the hospital operates an ambulance service my transportation to Hospital B, my next destination, was expeditiously initiated. Before long I was on my way.

In normal traffic the trip to the nearest hospital would be about fifteen minutes. Less for an ambulance with no need to observe the speed limit and with other traffic giving way. But we weren't going to the nearest hospital.

I'll call it Hospital X as it won't be further involved in the narrative. Unfortunately for me, because it's the better of the two hospitals. It's newer, bigger, more of everything the other hospital has in terms of facilities and doctors. And after a fifteen minute drive the ambulance could have made a right turn off the highway and arrived at the emergency room entrance in another two minutes or so.

But that didn't happen. Instead it continued for another ten to fifteen minutes, at a minimum, negotiating the narrow and congested streets to the other hospital. And the process of unloading the patient was minutes longer.

Why did Hospital A choose the inferior hospital, and the one that required more travel time? I know, rhetorical question.

I did arrive in sufficient time to preserve my life for the time being. After a diagnosis of coronary artery disease a bypass graft was performed two days later. Successfully. Two days later I experienced an event of bradycardia and PEA cardiac arrest and after twelve minutes of CPR I was revived, but not before my next of kin (who had left the hospital to go to church, believing I was in no danger) were called and advised that I had expired.

Actually the message was "we've lost him", which may have meant something else but in any case was rather unprofessional to say the least. They were forty-five minutes away and by the time they returned I was in fact very much alive.

Well, not very much. More like barely. During the next twenty or so days my family members were told more than once that I was unlikely to recover, i.e. that I would likely be a vegetable.

To be fair, on one occasion a doctor was advised of this and said that those who said that should not have done so. But the consensus was that my prospects were somewhere south of bleak. Nevertheless I was, a month after being admitted, Hospital B sent me - the tracheostomy tube still in place, to Hospital C.

At that time I had been for a month completely incognizant due to the drugs administered. I would remain in that condition, with the exception of several brief periods when the effects were wearing off, for another two months.

Would Hospital X have acted so irresponsibly? I'd like to think not, but will probably never know.

In any case I was about to learn that what I already knew was worse than I could have envisioned.

Hospital C is a case of, if not the worst aspects of the Medical Industry, certainly somewhere close.

It had only been in operation for four years. By comparison Hospital B was over a century old and while Hospital X was only a few years old it was, as I observed, part of a large network of hospitals that was itself over a hundred years old.

Hospital C is located in a facility that was occupied by a legitimate hospital since the 1970s. That hospital was closed after the company that acquired it encountered legal and financial problems. It had been unused for many years. It was acquired by investors who put it into operation as a long-term acute care hospital, usually referred to in the industry as LTCH.

This particular hospital grandiosely referred to itself as a Long Term Acute Care Hospital. Acute care is something special, more important that just long term care don't you know? Only there is no such thing and anyone with half a brain knows that if you are acutely ill or injured for very long you won't be alive or at least better off dead.

LTCHs in this form did not exist prior to 1999. The federal budget of 1999 had, as all do, what are known as carve-outs, special laws or parts of laws that serve special interests. In this case the politicians bought by the Medical Industry lobbyists did their job and created yet another profit center.

This has little to do with my situation, except that corruption breeds more corruption. Multiplying and mutating until it infects the entire organism. It will eventually kill its host, but the individual cancer cells do not care. They do not have minds.

Medical errors, incompetence or negligence can happen anywhere. It happened at the first two hospitals, but what the beast did to me once I was settled into its belly, bathed in digestive fluids, was far worse. It was, one might say, a combination of avarice and incompetence.

And perhaps something else. Something I don't have a word for just now. Whatever it is, there was plenty of it there.

Maybe it is a way that some people have of not seeing other people as people. Not exactly solipsism, in the philosophical sense anyway, but in the use of the word to describe extremely self-centered people.

The first time I was awake and cognizant long enough to assess my situation was in early March. I had been effectively comatose since 15 December of the previous year. About 120 days. For the moment I was blissfully unaware of everything, even as I deduced from my environment that I was in a hospital bed. Later I noticed the wires with which my wrists and ankles were tied to the bed frame, but for a few minutes I thought about nothing.

Later I would learn that I had about two dozen drugs in me. I would eventually learn that on most days five or six of them were psychotropic medications, used for treating mentally ill people. But that was later. I lay there awaiting the inevitable arrival or a nurse or other hospital staff member.

Eventually that occurred and some conversation ensued, I don't remember much about it. I was pretty fuzzy and would remain so for some time. I had a feeding tube in the place where feeding tubes go, and some sort of box, about the size of a phone but somewhat thicker, with lights on it and wires attaching it to various parts of my body.

I later learned that it was a telemetry unit. Used on patients who require monitoring after a heart attack. It was almost always turned off or unplugged from the power supply, I don't know which. None of the personnel seemed to know or care much about it. I believe a time or two someone did something with it or some of the wires. All I knew was that I had a box hanging on a cord around my neck, along with another cord holding the feeding tube in place. I could only sleep on my back, something I have never liked.

The next week or two were pretty much the same. In the morning a nurse would come in, check my temperature, possibly my blood pressure but I don't seem to remember that happening very often, and put something in the feeding tube.

The next couple of weeks were hazy. I was in a dirty hospital gown in a dirty hospital bed and nurses were coming in occasionally and putting things in the feeding tube and leaving. My hands were sometimes freed in order to allow me to sit up, usually at feeding time, and then I was again tied.

Let me take a moment to describe the manner of my restraint. Around my wrists and ankles were loops of wire, a grey wire of two strands, each perhaps two millimeters thick. This wire was connected to a strip of cloth (resembling strips torn from bed sheets) connected the wire to the bed frame. I could not move my feet or arms more than a foot, if that.

I don't know if you can understand that feeling, bound hand and foot, completely at the mercy of your captors. It is of complete helplessness. It is not a good feeling.

After a couple of days I asked them not to tie me again, or at least to leave my hands free. They refused, doctor's orders I was told. I asked to see the doctor. (Should a patient in a hospital need to request a visit from the doctor? Day after day.) As the days went by I asked each day. Each time I was told that the doctor would see me on his morning rounds, around 0800. Each day I lay in the bed, watching the door, hoping that each approaching person would be the doctor. So he could see that there was no need to tie me down like a dangerous animal. The doctor never came. To this day I have never seen him.

I later learned that that was precisely how he regarded me.

The personnel varied from day to day. I believe during time I was there only one nurse visited me often enough that I remembered her and recognized her each time she came to my room. I did see another one often enough to remember him. He was quite large, and he may not have been a nurse but an orderly or something similar.

I remember hearing him talking with the other nurses outside the room. They must have known I could hear them, I suppose they didn't care. They didn't seem to care about anything else. On one occasion he was discussing his nursing education and it seemed he had not completed the necessary education to be licensed. The impression I got was of the guy at the water cooler pontificating about whatever the current subject was, no matter what it happened to be.

I suspected he was hired because of his physical size and strength. When repositioning of my person was required, instead gently pushing the patient's body or its parts into the desired position he simply picked me up and dropped me where he wanted me. On one occasion he berated me for something, telling me that I wanted to pull the feeding tube out and have to go back to the other hospital and have it put back it was fine with him.

He seemed to be mentally unstable to some degree. Which made him a good fit in that madhouse.

And no, they could not reinstall a feeding tube. Apparently I dislodged it at some point and was sent back to Hospital B to have it replaced. What kind of hospital can't put in a feeding tube? A long-term 'acute care' hospital no less.

During this phase of my imprisonment I was desperate to escape. Two of my siblings visited daily, a 45 mile drive each way. Actually one at a time, as the hospital would now allow more than one visitor. So they came on alternate days. The Plandemic was used as an excuse. As it was used for so many deaths at the time.

I was asking them to get me out, and they said they were trying. But under the influence of the drugs the memory of their brief quickly faded, and I despaired of being freed. I had numerous dreams about contacting a lawyer and having going to court to make them let me go. But I had no phone, no access to a computer. And I was tied to a hospital bed.

I managed on at least two occasions to free myself (some restraints those were) but it was probably the desperation to preserve my sanity that enabled me to do it. Each time, as soon as my feat had been discovered I was promptly secured once again. (The floor had sensors which detected the presence of a body, and when it was triggered a loud alarm would sound, and invariably it would be some time before the staff was able to deactivate it.) But I never got out of the bed when I had freed myself, I simply lay there enjoying the brief respite.

I could hear them talking, out in the hall, joking about my escapes, and even doing it in my presence.

We call him Houdini," one nurse said to another, both laughing.

During this time, I later learned, my family was trying to get me out. They contacted several rehabilitation facilities, and on a few occasions I was aware of a representative coming to my room and observing me. I now know that each one refused me because of 'behavioral problems'. Not that they observed any, they were told by the doctor that I was uncontrollable unless restrained. In fact those observations, for what they are worth, were made when I was completely dissociated.

Once I was moderately lucid I never once resisted when I was being restrained, because I knew they would sedate me and tie me down anyway.

Finally they gave up and told the hospital they were taking me out. With the usual warnings of dire consequences and signing of legal documents they began to prepare me for departure.

That was when I began to believe that whether or not I was freed I still might not survive. After several days of what passed for physical therapy I told a visiting family member that I didn't believe I would ever be able to walk again.

According to my visitors the staff attempted a few times to perform the physical therapy required for patients who are unable to move, and stopped trying after a while because I was uncooperative.

The fact that I had been completely incognizant seemed not to matter. So they left me tied to the bed. It was after months of immobility that an alleged physical therapist attempted to make me functional again, sufficiently at least to leave the hospital.

Thus a young man, I seem to remember he was one of the few that had a name tag and clean scrubs, and it identified him as a physical therapist. He may have been a contract employee, as he seemed rather out of place - clean, professional appearance, courteous.

He had an assistant, a large fellow, a wide strap around his chest with enough additional length to wrap around me and keep me in a vertical position while they attempted to restore my ability to stand.

For the first two days that was all they accomplished, getting me out of the bed standing me between them, only inches away, the strap around me. A few minutes of that and I was back in the bed.

On the third day they were able to move slightly away for a few seconds before my legs gave way. Later, when the one visitor for the day arrived, I told her that I thought my life was over even if they did manage to get me out.

My despair was deeper than it had been when I was tied to the bed, and my fear greater. A fear of living as an invalid, a burden to my family, and a fear of not being able to endure it. I have never had thoughts of suicide, I have never even been depressed to any significant degree, certainly not for very long. But I was afraid of what would happen to my mind.

During the last week or so I managed to stand and walk short distances using a walker. Two or three times I was able to leave the room and walk a short distance down the hall, the therapist and his assistant close and steadying me and the walker as necessary. As I walked past each room I looked in and saw in most an old person lying on the bed, face up, as if in a coffin. If the eyes were open they were looking at the ceiling.

They all looked the same. I had lain that way for months, and I wondered how many of them might be in my situation, and didn't have anyone to rescue them. They had almost killed me, I knew, and given my condition might yet succeed.

But I would rather go home and die with people who cared for me than alone in a hospital bed. All I wanted was to get out of there, whatever the consequences.

I was still considerably reality-impaired (I would later learn that they were continuing to administer the psychotropic drugs until the day I left) and so relied on my family to get me through the final days.

The hospital would only agree to release me to their custody after their warnings of dire consequences if I were removed and requiring them to sign waivers and releases, but finally that was done.

Still unable to walk safely, my two siblings walked beside me, and conducted me safely to the exit and into the waiting vehicle. I was so weak and neurologically impaired that they just managed to get me into the vehicle, at which point I collapsed completely. The thought that I was finally free and safe barely registered.

However unwillingly, the beast had finally disgorged me.

"So the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land." -- Jonah 2:10