I
imagined when my heart stopped for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds last
year, I had died. But then I came back thanks to a strong cocktail of electric
shocks and adrenaline injections and a rather loud litany of, “Live, live,
live, live, live!”
That
had been the surgeon, by the way, who was an emotional creature. Perhaps he
said that to every patient that died on his operating table as part of his
gimmick, but it had done the trick in my case. I had returned, my heart was
pumping blood again and my brain began reversing its shut down process.
When
I came to a couple of weeks later, I realized I had lost few things (mainly the
sight and hearing on my left eye and ear) and gained a couple of other things
as compensation. The old folks might now call me ‘touched’. Or ‘cursed’. My mom
still called me lazy and I was forever ‘Delusional Wombat’ to my dad.
Losing
the sight in my left eye was hard to take and the loss put unnecessary strain
on my right eye, so I wasn’t allowed to look at computers or LED screens for
too long. That meant no smartphones that could entice me into partaking in the
forbidden activity and my time in front of the computer was regulated by an egg
timer.
While
everybody else talked with their thumbs and other digits, I had to rely on
old-fashioned face-to-face speech and passing notes in the class to
communicate. My parents also had the initiative of informing the school that I
needed to sit at the very front of the class due to this newfound impediment. The
school happily obliged.
When
I died during those precious minutes, I did not see anything. No tunnel and no
light at the end of that tunnel. No horned devils or a scene from hell. No
people who had passed away coming back and giving me advice. No angels, not a
feather. Not a thing.
But
I heard music.
