His eyes were wide and black with fear..

Altered States of Agoraphobia. 

Page's 26, 38, 56. 

 

 

Bob died in Feb 2020 of congestive heart failure. I personally think he was an early U.S. Covid case too, although his girlfriend will argue with me about this. He’s gone now and it is an episode in my life I have found difficult to process and fully move on from. When I first visited Bob in the hospital, which turned out not to be the hospital at all, but instead some sort of independently run budget pulmonary unit located within the actual hospital but not in any way connected to it. A bit like a pretzel stand in a shopping mall. I found him there with his hands and feet tied to the bed frame with grubby bandages that were stretched so thin and tight that they looked like they were cutting off his circulation. The staff told us he had been restrained because the medications they had administered to sedate him were causing him to be confused and he had become combative and belligerent with them. 

Bob did look like he was having terrible visions too and when he was awake his eyes were wide and black with fear as he tried to rip the tubes and hoses out of his body so he could escape. The staff had decided Bob was not going anywhere, not in this life anyway and their solution was to tie him down and pump him full of more of the same drugs which had triggered this response in the first place. They wanted to go ahead and prepare him for a hospice I am not sure he was ready for. I could see on their faces that they were sick of the sight of him and they were counting down the hours until his bed would become free again. He was laying there unwashed with his bedding unchanged and he was soaked in his own urine. This shocking neglect went on for several days until one day we arrived and found him unconscious and breathing on a ventilator and everything in the room was suddenly clean and quiet with the curtains drawn against the day. We were told he caught a high fever and his breathing had stopped and it was possible he had now sustained some brain damage, but we would not know to what extent until he woke up. When his girlfriend of 20 years started to really lose it over this, the staff threatened to call security and have her removed from the facility and then they debated whether she should be allowed to visit him again, seeing as they weren't married and therefore legally she was not his next of kin. Bob had no-one in the world but her and when he passed away a couple of days later, I was relieved to hear she was with him at his bedside.

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