LewRockwell By Dr Naomi Wolf
Home from the Hospital, Independence Day 2023
Dearest Readers (I feel by now as if I am addressing beloved friends out there, like a letter-writer in an Austen novel) —
I am home at last from the second hospital — the “vortex hospital,” the hospital of near-no-return — and, per the title of this update, I am:
Not Dead Yet.
I can’t yet describe fully what I experienced at the Vortex Hospital — since I am not yet entirely out of medical danger, and I still need their staff’s help in the near future in order to remove a device, the details of which I will spare you. But suffice to say that my stay there involved the final three of what had been five days with no food or water, as I had lain, hooked up to an IV, with an acute abdominal infection, post-appendectomy.
I watched my “vitals” being taken again and again and saw that over time my blood oxygen levels had started sinking into the 80s; I could not get them back up into the safe 90s range, no matter how hard I inhaled and exhaled. I knew that when blood oxygen levels drop too low, people are intubated, and I knew that meant that the lungs can get damaged irrevocably. The internal infection raged on.
The morning of what was supposed to have been the day on which my procedure was to have taken place, we sustained a four-and-a-half-hour power outage (“Unprecedented”, as the staff said wonderingly), leaving the massive brand-new hospital facility in unnerving darkness, even as the small, cozy, 1970s-era original right next door, trundled along with all its lights on.
By the end of my Day Five with no food or water, the staff at the Vortex Hospital told me that, due to the power outage, the procedure for which I had been transferred to that facility — one to treat the severe abdominal infection — -was being delayed further and further into the future.
Maybe tomorrow, said the RN vaguely…. maybe the day after…
