My déjà vu

Wednesday, November 8, 1989 was a beautiful day in Tempe, AZ, with the sky a cloudless blue. I was up early, waiting at the front desk of Palo Verde East dorm at ASU for my friend Marian's step-father who was coming for all the boxes of Marian's things. He never showed. Around 8 a.m. Deb came instead to tell me personally that Marian was dead.

Deb looked good. Relieved. Over three years before, as the roommate before me, she'd promised to be at Marian's bedside if/when she died, and she'd been tirelessly attendant in the ICU for three weeks. She told me how it ended -- the gradual failure of organs and the mid-night final, peaceful slowing of her heart until it simply stopped. Deb smiled and said it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

Marian had been comatose for about ten days with a temperature of over 104 degrees. We'd known it was over. I'd spent that Halloween watching the macabre college partying all around me as I tried to absorb the fact that she would not be recovering. Before that, we'd known she would miss the rest of the school semester and a friend and I used nervous energy to pack up her belongings in the dorm.

I'd last seen Marian before the coma came. I'd ridden two buses with a friend, and we arrived as they called a Code Blue for her. A nurse found us shortly and asked for someone strong enough to calm and comfort her after the pain and fear of resuscitation. Nevermind strong, it was now or never, literally. We'd arrived during a rare break for her family and they weren't anywhere to be seen.

Marian's lips were blue around the intubation tube and her neck was not at the angle that juvenile rhumatoid arthritis had stiffened it to in her childhood. They'd probably had to break something in her neck to tilt her head back and insert the breathing tube. She was swollen from massive doses of predisone, and there was fear in her beautiful bloodshot blue eyes.

I held her hand, having no idea then what an incredible physical comfort that can be when frightened and unable to speak. And she was frantic to speak. There was an alphabet board -- another thing I was to learn about eventually too -- for communicating and she trembled as she pointed out the letters successively.

C. O. I. N.

She gestured to me and I ran through obvious possibilities, none of which satisfied her. Yes, C. O. I. N. but not "coin." She meant something more. She was insistent, emphatic. This was important to her to say. We couldn't communicate and I didn't know if her eloquent, brilliant mind was working clearly. She kept spelling out COIN and waving her arms at me while I tried to be calm and reassuring. I quizzed her. She didn't need anything. She wasn't trying to talk about money. This was something she wanted to tell me.

This continued until Deb and her family arrived, rushing in with alarm after hearing she'd stopped breathing. Nurses asked for someone in the crowd to clear the room and I reluctantly volunteered, not knowing then how slow her leaving us would be.

Now, I can imagine exactly how frustrated she must have been with me. I didn't let her "speak." I failed to solve this mystery. The very last thing she tried to say to me I didn't understand. And I left the room with it unresolved. She wasn't conscious after that day.

That was 17 years ago. One year ago I was hospitalized with desperate digestive problems and pneumonia from endless vomiting. Exhaustion on top of disease-weakened abdominal muscles made it difficult to breathe. Locally, they intubated me and sent a camera down my esophagus to see what was up, then I was flown by helicopter to St. Paul and expected surgery.

Heavily drugged, I only remember the helicopter lifting off, then no clarity of memory for about two days. But during that lack of clarity, I had a vivid, unforgettable experience. Through the blur of sedation, I was aware of medical people working over me. As they did various procedures on me, including installing a feeding tube to my stomach and jejunum, I experienced total, extended déjà vu. I anticipated and then experienced -- over and over again -- what was happening.

I don't have any clear memory of what specifically occurred, but I remember being shocked and even alarmed by this mystical déjà vu as it repeated itself relentlessly. It seemed to go on and on, and though I have no doubt the sedatives caused the experience it was still a mystical, even spiritual, event.

I woke up from the drug haze in a private ICU room that, ironically, had a thermostat problem causing a periodic hissing noise that truly sounded like Marian's trusty but dilapidated power wheelchair from long ago. The cycle of hissing-silence-hissing of the thermostat by the door sounded as though Marian was doggedly circling the ICU hallway outside my room.

I spent the next month lying in that bed spelling or writing out messages as Marian had tried to do. And it was then that it occurred to me with a certainty: Coincidence. Déjà vu.