OCR Text |
Show CHRYSALIS pAGE 184 her apartment I discovered her bedridden - I thought she might rather rest, but she asked me in. "Take me as I am," she said. Half of her bed was littered with manuscripts and books and papers. She was down flat with an attack of thrombo-phlebitis, something she gets regularly since the birth of her daughter in 1946. "I developed a pulmonary embolism," she said. "Very few people recover from a pulmonary embolism. I did. And if I stay down I get over this - at least temporarily, until next time." She told me of a peculiar experience she had once. "I wasn't really very sick at the time. I had an appendectomy and went into shock - I looked down upon my body, head and all. I had never seen it before except in a mirror, and I felt that I was floating above it somehow. I could see the nurses working, and the doctor running in and working. I couldn't feel a thing, but I saw it all. Then I felt nauseous and everything came back together again. The doctor said, 'She's here, she's come around.' I don't tell this to many people," she said. "The important part is that I experienced a feeling of apartness from my physical self that can only be described as a kind of translation. I felt independent, weightless, unhampered. Yet I was totally objective, and knowledgable. It was not an unpleasant feeling, |