Month: March 2011

My current strange bed at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue.
No, I do not sleep with my accordion.

So far, 2011 has been a roving year for me, what with me spending half my days in beds that aren’t my own (it’s like Crazy Go Nuts University all over again!). Not all of these strange beds have involved travel, as the schedule below shows:

• January 2011
  • One week in St. Joseph’s Health Centre, in three different beds (the whole story is covered in My Hospital Week):
    • One night in the ER
    • Four nights in the ICU
    • One night in a regular hospital room
  • One week at Mom’s, recuperating
• February 2011
  • 11 days at the Crown Plaza in Seattle for Microsoft’s internal employees-only TechReady conference
  • 5 days at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue for Microsoft’s Global MVP Summit
• March 2011 (planned)
  • One week at the Fairfield Inn North in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive
• April 2011 (planned)
  • One week at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the MIX11 conference
• May 2011 (planned)
  • One week at the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver for Make Web Not War
• June 2011 and beyond
  • Portlandia?
  • New York City?
  • Baltimore?
  • San Francisco?
  • Manila?
  • Burning Man?

I’m enjoying the roving life thus far, but it means that my apartment – which already looks a little different owing to major changes in the domestic situation – is a place just as strange to me as the places where I’m crashing. That’s okay by me, though; I love travel and this is the sort of shake-up that’s called for at the moment.

“Has it changed you?” my friend asked.

“Has what changed me?” I asked in reply.

“Your near-death experience.”

“Has it changed me, huh? You know, I’ve been asking myself the same question.”

It turned out that last month’s week at the hospital was brought about by a nasty version of the flu. Nasty enough to damn near kill me by constricting my airway to the point that I was a hair’s breadth away from an emergency tracheotomy, but not nasty enough to warrant its own letters and numbers or name it after me. I think my sister and Mom (doctors both) didn’t want to scare me while I was in the ICU, but a couple of weeks after I recovered, my sister said that “it was touch and go for a moment there,” amd Mom just yesterday said she’d never seen me so ill. I do remember, at a couple of the worst moments, thinking “Is this what dying feels like?”

I’m glad to still be here. Although I’m grateful for having what I like to think has been a pretty full life, I’m not ready to do an early check-out from Hotel Mortal Coil. But sooner or later, the hotel management eventually, and often forcibly, evicts each one of us.

“I don’t think I’ve changed in the way that you sometimes hear about in the news, or see in the movies,” I said. “You know, like going crazy and taking up base jumping, or maybe running away and joining a commune or any other freak-out that you’re supposed to have after a near-death experience. It’s not so dramatic. It’s a little more subtle…

I’m still doing things that are me, just…more so.”

He gave me this look that appeared to be a mix of “Oh, I see,” and “Oh, shit.”