Revelation: The Second Time that I Nearly Died like Heath Ledger

Being a dialysis patient with nothing much to pay to my medical needs leaves me with a mediocre treatment that just allows me to survive and not get the best result for my health. So in turn I always felt bad as I would suffer from high creatinine, high blood urea nitrogen which makes my breath smells like urea and is coupled with nausea.

I am also waterlogged all the time as not all sodium or salt are taken from my body so I would feel thirsty and I would eventually drink to satiate it and I will get heavy on body water and during dialysis, about 5.5 kilos of water are taken out from me. It gives me terrible cramps. I had also experienced not being dialyzed for seven days, at that point my body is just stiff but my will power is just strong enough to make myself walk.

Anemia is one of the worst complication of being a dialysis patient. I told myself before that if anemia wasn't a problem, it will be just okay but now it turns out to be not. Anyway, anemia makes things hard because I have to get blood transfusions and it is not easy to get blood as I have to buy it if I can't get them for free and it is expensive to buy one bag and often I would be needing two monthly.

If I would be transfused with blood, the effect which is increased in energy and appetite doesn't live long and for me it last only more than a week and for the rest of the month I would feel tired, no energy, and with poor appetite until I would get another round of blood transfusion again.

Insomnia was the one that never left me even before I got my first dialysis session and during the first years I am just plagued with it. Sometimes I would never leave my bed until I got a few minutes of what I consider a nap. Then I tried to find ways to make me sleep like asking my doctor for sleeping pills which sometimes just makes me dizzy and not sleepy and if I would get some sleep from it, it was never a quality sleep.

Then at one instance when my nurse gave me the keys to let myself in because he was doing something. The dialysis room was just a two patient per session room and I was in the first set that morning. After I entered I saw the prescription pad and took one leaf from it.

After sometime I written myself a prescription, a medicine that I am familiar with. One that has a long-lasting sleeping pill effect as opposed to the short-acting ones that I got before. I wrote myself Phenobarbital as it is cheaper and I have not much money at that time. I believed in those times will solve my insomnia and that I can finally get a better sleep because I really am desperate for a chronically insomniac like me.

Then I took some of the 90mg tablet, six at a time. It made me sleepy as hell then after dialysis, the effect washes off as the drug is water soluble. Then another round at bed time, I took some again, then I took additional tablets I said why not. Some even spilled on my bed because it was dark, I picked the ones I could feel with my hand and unto my mouth they go. The plan really was to take some between dialysis so I won't get trouble sleeping but the plan didn't happen as I overdosed.

Then I slept as I felt sleepy having taken some as well that afternoon. I took a fatal dose already that evening. I went into a comatose state that morning and my mother found me unconscious foaming in the mouth. In the hospital they took crebrospinal fluid from me to test if I have an infection from my brain, then some CT scans, EEG and I don't know what other tests they did. I was also seen by a Neurologist as I have a history of epilepsy.

I slept in my room but I had awoke in the hospital room, it was weird really. What saved me was the dialysis which washed away the effects but I still have the overdosage effect like slurred speech and I meant slurred like you never heard before and that nystagmus where you look at a thing then your eyeball just drops and won't keep focused at that object.

So my consciousness went back from being comatosed. One dialysis more before being discharged improved my slurred speech but not my nystagmus which at home I observed at a mirror until it went away.

At home I learned that my brother had seen some tablets on my bed as I was carried away from it and asked my mother what was it. My mother searched at my drawer and found the bottle of phenobarbital but she wasn't sure about what was it because I removed the label clean. Then she threw away its remaining contents.

All of that trouble because of my desperation to sleep, a plague that gripped me for so many years. The thing nearly cost me my life and I have learned from it. Now I do not have that sleeping problem anymore but some more heavier problems are now making me lose sleep and that I have to solve with hope in my heart and help from my dear steemian friends.