Suddenly, I started having diarrhea. It was like water. The stoma bag just filled up with water. Because I had an additional colostomy, I was defecating from the left side of my abdomen. I thought a colostomy meant there would be some kind of device attached to my stomach. In reality, it was just my intestine cut and brought outside the body. From there, liquid flowed out as if it were just water.

Even after taking medication, the diarrhea wouldn’t stop. It continued relentlessly. The doctor told me to stop eating and drinking. I had just started to get fewer IVs, but now I was hooked up to IVs all over my body again. A total of seven IVs were inserted simultaneously. I couldn’t eat or even drink water. I was moved back from the shared room to a private room.

“What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. It’s just an upset stomach,” I shouted.

The doctor’s voice echoed, responding to my cries:
“There’s no way it’s fine to have such watery diarrhea like this!”

My mother was called, and I could hear their conversation outside the room. The word “death” came through the door. Am I going to die? …Death… I see, death. But strangely, I wasn’t afraid.

“Death” was not something I usually thought about. It was a word I had often heard, and something everyone experiences at least once. Yet, I never paid much attention to it. But now, I was intensely aware of that word. I wasn’t scared, but I felt frustrated for some reason.

“Maybe I’m really going to die…”

What does it mean to die?

When I was in the emergency room and my consciousness was fading, I thought that dying was simply closing my eyes, falling asleep, and never waking up again.

Dying isn’t scary. It’s just losing consciousness and then nothing else. No world, no anything. Just a deep sleep without a morning. I see… No, it’s different. If I close my eyes here and now, there might not be a morning. “Death” is right beside me, a real presence.

My consciousness started to drift away…

I was told over a year later that if the diarrhea hadn’t stopped here, I would have definitely died, just like the voices I heard outside the room suggested. If E. coli had gotten into my muscles due to a rectal rupture, I could have experienced sudden diarrhea and died suddenly after a few months, once my condition had improved and I had recovered from the accident.

When I regained consciousness, I had returned from the brink of life and death. This was the second time I had come back from the boundary between life and death.

The persistent diarrhea stopped, and my condition began to stabilize. In the end, I survived. For some time after, I continued to live on the edge between ‘life’ and ‘death.’ From what I was told, the probability of my survival was much lower than the chance that E. coli would enter the muscles around my lower back and hips, turning them sponge-like and leading me down the path to ‘death.’

**

Around this time, I began having more conversations with the nurses and rehab instructors about the future. How was I going to live? What was going to happen to me? Without finding clear answers, I tried to keep living in the moment.

I wonder if it was around the time I returned from the brink of death, after the prolonged diarrhea, that I noticed a change in my consciousness. Although I still wasn’t afraid of death, I started to feel a desire to live. Not that it was such a simple matter—there were moments of self-destruction due to drug addiction from painkillers, and crazy experiences as I struggled to crawl back up from that. In the midst of all this, did I start to feel a desire to live? I don’t really know.

After I began to vaguely feel that I wanted to live, I started to research my injuries. Of course, I couldn’t look at books myself, so I had my mother and acquaintances look things up for me.

Spinal cord injury—damage to the spinal cord that extends from the brain. Spinal injuries caused by compression fractures and dislocation fractures. The degree of paralysis differs depending on the site of the injury, and which functions are affected depends on the nerves controlled by the damaged area.

Even if I wanted to live, being faced with the fact that I would never walk again was disheartening. The emotional ups and downs were intense. Facing reality was painful. I tried to create a place to escape, but there was nowhere to escape to.

Living—yet the awareness that I was being kept alive couldn’t be erased.

The only comfort for my heart was my mother’s smile, my girlfriend’s smile, and the cheerfulness of the nurses.

**

My right arm still hung limp from the elbow to the wrist. It was decided that I would have surgery on both my right elbow and wrist. How many surgeries had I undergone by now?

After the surgery, I woke up from the anesthesia and regained consciousness. A sharp pain shot through my neck. Because of what happened after the last surgery, I wasn’t given strong painkillers. The weak ones didn’t relieve the pain. Once again, I fought the pain.

However, there was some good news. It was officially decided that I would be transferred to a hospital specializing in rehabilitation, and since my neck bones had almost healed, I would be able to have the halo vest removed.

I will never forget the day the halo vest was removed. The sense of freedom around my neck and chest. But I was afraid to move my neck left and right. Slowly, I tried to move it, even though I was scared. But even without the brace, my neck only moved slightly up, down, left, and right. The doctor said it was because my neck muscles were weak. But still, I was happy to be able to move it even a centimeter to the left or right, up or down. My field of vision had expanded considerably.

With this, I could endure the pain in my wrists and elbows. It was just a matter of having a broken bone. It wasn’t a big deal.

In the end, about four months after being hospitalized, I was able to have the metal fixings in my pelvis and the halo vest removed. I would soon be transferred. I would be admitted to a hospital specializing in rehabilitation.

The PT instructor said,
“I couldn’t get you into a wheelchair while you were in this hospital.”

It seems that was the PT instructor’s goal. To get me out of bed and into a wheelchair, and to take me around the hospital, even just a little bit.

On a cold day with light snowflakes falling, I was transferred to the new hospital, lying on a stretcher, watched over by the many smiles of the nurses.