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First Post-Crash Day Fully Conscious
The first group I encountered on my first day of full consciousness post-crash was a team of various medical professionals. A nurse recorded my vital signs while a doctor assessed my cognitive health through a series of questions which I answered by nodding or shaking my head.
A couple of people from the surgical team focused on the extent of my spinal cord injuries, asking if I was able to feel or move various parts of my arms and legs. I was able to feel everywhere, though in a tingly and imprecise way, similar to how one’s arms or legs feel “asleep” from lack of circulation. I could definitely feel a sense of touch, but it seemed to emanate not from the surface of the skin but from a layer beneath. As expected, I couldn’t move anywhere below the shoulders while areas touched on my arms were felt on corresponding areas of phantom limbs above my chest.
Lastly, a specialist investigated my emotional state through another round of questions including if I felt depressed or had suicidal thoughts. This line of questioning seemed absurd at the time for how self-apparent the answers should be. It’s inconceivable that anyone newly quadriplegic would not be depressed. Likewise, any sane person who loses movement of all limbs as well as loss or impairment of numerous internal bodily functions would be lying if they denied having suicidal ideation even fleetingly.
That being said, I nodded in agreement about being depressed but shook my head to signal “no” to the question about suicide. I didn’t want or need suicide counseling and even if I were seriously suicidal, what could I do about it? But my main motive for lying was the possibility that my family would find out. I imagined how they may have experienced trauma from witnessing the trauma I went through, and how much they’d want me to survive. It would hurt them to know they wanted me alive more than I did at the time. There are moments when I still have such thoughts, particularly when my wife and I experience economic setbacks related to my injury, but the emotional impact suicide would have on loved ones is enough to keep the thoughts ephemeral and in the realm of speculation.
As if conjured by thoughts and memories, my wife Danielle and mother Florence arrived soon after, looking just as worried as I expected.
Surrendering to Reality
When I woke up with the full realization that I was paralyzed, my mind was deluged with questions, speculations, fears and regrets. Judging from the faint light though window blinds, it was still early dawn. I was relieved no one else was in the room because I needed time alone to think.
One of the earliest and most reoccurring thoughts was simply why? I felt the more literal and simplistic answers such as bad luck or bad choices the least satisfying and hardest to accept, and turned my attention towards religion. I wasn’t a deeply religious person before the crash but did hold some hope for the existence of karma. But it’s easier to understand in the abstract how one’s circumstances could be the result of actions in a past life or how current actions affect future incarnations. When one suddenly becomes quadriplegic, such knowledge is of little comfort though it did provide an explanation.
Were I Christian I’d probably want to believe god works in mysterious ways or that my catastrophic injury was part of a master plan. Conversely, I could imagine becoming so disillusioned that I rejected my faith and now characterized god as cruel or indifferent. But if by some miracle I was completely healed, then god would once again be loving and merciful. Recognizing the futility of such magical thinking, I found it comforting nevertheless. I visualized being back home as if my life had never been disrupted. Perhaps that was my reality in an alternate timeline or parallel universe? As much as I wanted to escape into fantasy, I knew I had to focus on the present.
No matter how I felt about my situation, the reality is that it happened and there might not be a satisfying explanation. I could relate to existentialists who, after confronting the incomprehensible nature of existence, sought to create their own meaning. I was also more inclined to believe in the Gnostic concept of a malicious demiurge as creator of a corrupted material world. As hard as it might be to accept, the universe is chaotic and owes us nothing.
From Dream to Nightmare
Upon waking up at the Neuro ICU, I rested for some time with my eyes closed. I noticed an odd sensation of movement despite not hearing or feeling wind and vibrations which would indicate movement. What I did feel was my arms hugging my chest tightly as if in a straight jacket, though the material felt more like a rubbery mesh than cloth. Meanwhile a nearby machine produced a steady hiss similar to an air pump roughly synchronized with my breathing patterns.
Disturbed by everything I was sensing, I reluctantly opened my eyes to a dark room bathed in a dim green and purple glow from various monitoring devices. As my vision adjusted, I craned my neck and realized my arms were both flat on each side of my torso and I was wearing a standard hospital gown. I also glimpsed various tubes all over my body. An IV in my right arm, some type of nose tube, and a breathing tube connected to a ventilator.
My first instinct was to attempt to go back to sleep, hoping what I was experiencing was sleep paralysis or a false awakening within a nightmare. This proved to be futile, as my mind struggled to reconcile the disconnect with my body. One likely factor was medication, as the initial feeling of movement while awakening was similar to the feeling of heavy drunkenness. As for the illusory straight jacket, the only theory I could come up with was that it was some form of phantom limb syndrome. I struggled to move phantom limbs and “actual” limbs to no avail. At that moment I wasn’t experiencing phantom leg limbs but nevertheless could not move my legs or any part of my body below the shoulders nor could I talk.
With that realization I felt like crying but was perhaps too much in shock to do so. I also may have held out hope that I was still in a bad dream and that when I actually woke I would be back to my normal self. I was definitely in a nightmare, but not the type one can wake up from, though I did grant myself a brief respite by eventually falling back to sleep.
Half-Awake In the Dream
After losing consciousness during transport, my memories became increasingly fragmented and “impressionistic”, most likely a side effect of strong medication. This roughly coincided with my stay in the Harborview Trauma ICU which was about a week after being admitted to ER, though subjectively it felt more like a month.
Since talking to my wife about my hospitalization, I realize there were times when I was conscious enough to answer questions, yet had no recollection despite remembering things earlier in the chronology. Odder still, some of what I did recall was in a liminal state between dream and waking life.
As if my mind was attempting to reset to the morning of the crash, it placed me in an “alternate reality” version in which I arrived at work like usual and promptly started the daily routine at my workspace. Suddenly I was back on the gurney and being wheeled out of the work area and through a sub-basement corridor I had never seen before. Through dream logic architecture I ended up at the UW Medical Center ER. I recognized one of the nurses as a former co-worker and realized even within the dream that it made no sense since she was a senior lab tech at the UWMC clinical lab. I speculated that one of the “actual” nurses had a voice similar to my co-worker’s, causing my mind to actually see her as that person.
I was next transported to the Harborview Trauma ICU (partly via light rail!), which I must have realized was where I “actually” was either consciously or subconsciously. At that point my experience took a paranoid turn as I began to suspect nurses and assistants were skimming my medications for personal use. Within the dream state I passed out and reawakened in a fantastical ICU bathed in a hazy white glow. I somehow got the notion this was at a sprawling new hospital connecting the Northgate light rail station to the nearby library.
It was at this imaginary location where I realized I was being visited by my wife as well as parents and brother from Hawaii. Somehow I knew this aspect of the pseudo-dream was “real” and not in the spirit realm and was glad they were alive and well, though I could tell they were shaken to see the state I was in. It seemed I wasn’t conscious for long, and had several other interactions with family before waking in a more lucid state at Harborview’s Neuro ICU.
A New Beginning
On April 5 2024 I was in a bicycle crash while commuting to work. I sustained catastrophic injuries causing paralysis below my shoulders. I was only able to survive due to spinal cord surgery. Given the sudden and extreme disruption to every facet of my life, there have been times when I wished the surgery never happened. However, over time I’ve accepted my fate and have become more driven to survive by those I love.
After months of healing and rehabilitation (and with the help of adaptive technology) I feel ready to blog again. My intention is to use this platform to process my thoughts on the trauma I’ve lived through and still-unreal situation I continue to experience. Though my personal struggles are of little significance compared to geopolitical developments such as the Gaza genocide, Ukraine proxy war, multiple nations on the verge of economic collapse, and the most demoralizing and dysfunctional US presidential campaign season (so far), there are connections which I plan to elaborate on in future posts. In the meantime, you can read more details about what I went through on my fundraising site here: https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24110/
In Gaza genocide, US defends Israel’s ‘aura of power’
As South Africa accuses Israel of genocide, the Biden administration endorses Israel’s bid to sow “fear” in Gaza’s defenseless civilians.
By Aaron Maté
Source: Aaron Maté Substack
Days after South Africa filed a motion to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration responded with indignation. The allegation, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared, is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”
South Africa’s 84-page submission is in fact exhaustive in its documentation of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza and Israeli leaders’ open intention to carry it out. By contrast to this detailed intervention, Israel’s chief sponsor in Washington openly admits that it still refuses even minimal scrutiny of the extermination campaign that it is funding and arming.
Nearly three months into an Israeli assault that has relied on billions of dollars in US weaponry, the Biden administration has still “conducted no formal assessment of whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law,” Politico reports. While going out of its way to avoid this assessment, the Biden administration has gone around Congressional review to transfer $147.5 million in artillery shells and other gear to Israel – the second time it has invoked emergency powers to do so.
A senior administration official insists to Politico that there is nothing to worry about: “If you just look at what Israel is doing, they aren’t systematically targeting civilians.” Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, what is indisputable is that Israel is systematically killing civilians. As even President Biden blurted out last month, Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing,” an unambiguous war crime. For this reason, the New York Times reports, when Biden offered that “not… scripted comment,” his blunder “sent aides scrambling to explain.”
How the White House is now scrambling to explain its view that Israel is not committing genocide or even violations of humanitarian law is even more revealing. According to Politico: “The U.S. came to that conclusion in part after looking at press reports and conversations with Israeli officials about their military operations.” Absent from the Biden administration’s list of source material is its own intelligence, which recently found that almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that have predictably murdered countless civilians in their homes and shelters.
Instead, the US is only relying on “press reports” – but clearly not those documented in South Africa’s ICJ submission, which collects Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric in nine pages of chilling detail (p. 59-67). That leaves “conversations with Israeli officials” – who, unsurprisingly, are not keen to admit that they are the 21st century’s worst war criminals.
Israel’s bombing campaign is accompanied by an unprecedented blockade that deprives Gaza of vital aid. According to Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, “80% of the people [globally], or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now.”
At the White House podium, Kirby said that he is “not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel.” And given that Kirby has previously stated that the White House has “no red lines” when it comes to Israel’s conduct, that will remain the case. “We have not seen anything that would convince us that we need to take a different approach in terms of trying to help Israel defend itself,” he said.
But just as the US is fully aware that its partner Israel is committing genocide, the US is also aware that Israel’s professed “right to self-defense” against occupied territory has nothing to do with self-defense. Biden administration officials have admitted as much to one of their most reliable media mouthpiece since Oct. 7th, the New York Times. “The Americans say Israel’s forceful response… reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region,” the Times reported in November. “The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the Oct. 7 attack, the officials say.”
To restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power,” therefore, the empathetic Americans have given Israel a free pass to slaughter more than 22,000 defenseless civilians, all while pushing the two million survivors into famine and desperation.
This imperative of “deterrence” – establishing a monopoly on violence against occupied Palestinians and regional neighbors – has guided Israeli strategy since its inception.
As a divisional military commander in 1967, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon voiced concern that Israel was losing its “deterrence capability,” which he defined as “our main weapon – the fear of us.”
In 1988, one month into the first Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted that his policy of brutalizing demonstrating Palestinians was successfully employing Israel’s main weapon of fear. “The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces,” Rabin said.
When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, a three-week long assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in the Gaza Strip, Israel wielded the same weapon. According the New York Times, Israeli officials were guided by a “larger concern”: that their “enemies are less afraid of it than they once were or should be.” Therefore, the Times reported, “Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that,” using slain Palestinians civilians to “re-establish Israeli deterrence.”
The same imperative applies to Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza. In calling for “a war of unprecedented magnitude” on Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained in October that “Israel’s future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.”
In a new account of the Biden administration’s dealings with Israel, the New York Times again confirms that Israel seeks to preserve its monopoly on state terror. In Gaza, the Times explains, “strategically, Israel does not mind too much if the rest of the world thinks it is willing to go overboard with overwhelming force.” After all, Israel has spent more than a “half century… fostering the image of invincibility, an image shattered on Oct. 7. Israeli leaders want to reestablish the deterrence that was lost.”
Israel indeed need not mind that the world opposes its genocidal campaign when the world’s top superpower gives it free rein to “go overboard with overwhelming force” – the Times’ artful euphemism for state terror.
The White House continues to make this endorsement clear, even as it occasionally feigns concern about the civilian toll. According to the Times, “there is no serious discussion within the Biden administration about cutting Israel off or putting conditions on security aid.” The only “real debate” concerns “the language to use and how hard to push,” on marginal tactical issues. But no matter how many more civilians die, “no one inside is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so.”
Israel undoubtedly appreciates Biden’s unwillingness to stop the genocide. As Israel’s former US ambassador Michael Oren explains, Israel was “dependent on the United States,” after Oct. 7th. “And that meant they have a say in things.” The White House’s main contribution, Oren adds, is that “Biden has not used the two most obvious tools available to him to force Israel’s hand, namely the flow of U.S. arms to Israel and the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council that protects Israel from international sanctions.” According to White House insiders, while Biden and Netanyahu “are not truly friends,” both “understand each other’s politics and their mutual dependence at this point.”
Biden and Netanyahu’s mutual dependence only means that Israel must occasionally temper its savagery to meet US public relations needs. According to Times, Netanyahu “agreed to let humanitarian aid into Gaza as a condition for Mr. Biden visiting” Israel after Oct. 7th. In other words, Netanyahu let a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza death camp solely for the political benefit that a Biden visit could offer him. The Times offers this revelation in passing without further comment. In the view of the Times and its Biden administration sources, it is perfectly reasonable for Israel to block vital supplies to Gaza just to extract a gesture of US political support for its extermination campaign there.
In a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu described his “three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza” as follows: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”
But Netanyahu’s vision of “peace” is predicated on exterminating his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Along with its bombing campaign and starvation siege, Israeli officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has informed cabinet members that: “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”
Any serious “prerequisite for peace” therefore requires the inverse of Netanyahu’s strategy: the Israeli government must be demilitarized and Israeli society must be deradicalized. The same applies for the Biden administration, which is so radicalized that it openly flaunts its support for what South Africa calls “the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” all to help defend Israel’s “aura of power.”
After the Crash 