Continuation of my Second Life Day saga.  Catch up to the previous post here, or start from the beginning.

After purging my body of all its contents, I rightly proceeded to call in sick to the office and promptly went back to bed.  As I was carpooling with my mother at the time, I let her know that I was ill and not going to work.  Having seen my state over the weekend, Mom offered to call the after-hours clinic to see if they could take me, which I gladly accepted.

By this time I had also become increasingly sensitive to light.  I had to stop watching TV on Sunday afternoon because it was blinding me and causing pain in my eyes and head.  Even looking at the screen on my handy-dandy flip phone was out of the question.  I now recognize that I was experiencing a migraine, but had never had one before, so I had no idea what was going on.  My mother called to tell me that I had an appointment at 5:30PM that evening.  She would come by and pick me up after driving my uncle home to Memramcook.  So back to bed I went.

Sometime mid-afternoon, I got up to make my regular pilgrimage to the bathroom, only this time, I hadn’t enough energy to stand.  I crumpled to the floor.  I still recall the moment vividly. I realized that I was lying in a heap on my bedroom floor and thought to myself, “I should probably get up now;” to which I replied, out loud, “Nah…not worth it,” and then started laughing.  I then blacked out for the next few hours.

As luck would have it, my uncle no longer needed the drive home after work, so my mother came straight home.  Knowing that I had been a bit more sluggish as of late, she came down to my apartment, knocked, opened the door and yelled in, “Chris, just letting you know I’m home.  I’ll come down in an hour to get you for appointment.”

A moment later, she yelled again.  “Chris, are you ready?  Time to go.”  Or rather, to me, it had been but a moment ago.  I recall replying, “I heard you a minute ago.  You said I had an hour.”  “That was 45 minutes ago,” came her response.  She walked into my bedroom and found me on the floor.  While I don’t recall all of the following details myself as I was going in and out of consciousness, I’ve been told the story by the participants.

My mother is all of 4’9” – a tiny little thing.  She tried to help me get up, but I didn’t have the force to help her which made this a very unlikely scenario to succeed.  Realizing this, she called my brother who happened to live across the street.  Despite Stephen being as big, or bigger, than me they were still not able to collect my dead weight from the floor.  This is when my mom decided to call 911.

I vaguely recall the two ambulance attendants being there.  They were asking me questions and I was responding to them.  Or more precisely, I was slurring noises their way.  They asked my mother if I usually sounded like that and when she indicated no, they said, “We need to go now!”  I can still recall being strapped down on the stretcher and jostled up the stairs.  Then…nothing.