This Is What It’s Like to Eat Your Last Meal and Think About Never Waking Up Again
By: Tim Denning
Tags: Health, Self Improvement, Psychology, Life Lessons, Writing

This annual trip to the hospital started in 2015 when I felt a little off. I saw my doctor and he told me it was nothing and to take vitamin pills. My girlfriend at the time told me to get a second opinion. I refused for six months until, finally, she forced me to see her family doctor.

The new doc’s advice was similar: “it’s probably nothing. But…”

Whenever you see a doctor be careful of the “but.” They always have something else to say and their goal is to keep you calm. The but in my case was that the doctor wanted to send me to hospital for a guided tour around my insides.

Most people wouldn’t care too much. For me, I’m petrified of hospitals and medical procedures. Going to hospital is like standing on the edge of a cliff face with no harness, while a tornado twirls around a few feet away. This means I have to prepare my mind.

Here is a list of things I do to face one of the scariest moments of my life:

No phones or social media

Phones and social media create stress. I can’t deal with my hospital reality and serve my phone master. So, phones go off and social media goes unanswered. At best, social media posts get scheduled.

But content creation stops before hospital out of respect to what might happen if anything goes wrong. You won’t be looking at your twitter account on the last day of your life; you’ll be thinking about those you love.

Christmas movies for joy reminders

The thought of santa and presents under a tree equals joy. It takes me back to childhood. It helps remind me of the pleasure of giving rather than receiving. It’s a pure time of year. Everything makes sense.

You sit with family, be grateful for what you have, and eat a meal. Each year the table of relatives gets smaller as people pass away. One year you have grandma, and next year you don’t. Christmas used to be for religious folks.

Now the universal language of Christmas is joy. You can be an atheist and use Christmas as an excuse to be grateful and feel joy.

It turns out gratitude and joy are excellent right before hospital, too. So, I watch Christmas movies leading up to hospital to put me in state.

Injecting calm into the mind

Hospital equals fear. The opposite of fear is calmness.

The good news is you can manufacture calmness in your life when you need it most. I manufacture calm like this:

Deep breathing

Getting sunshine

Audio in my ears that tells me everything is going to be okay. (I choose Tony Robbins’ voice.)

The superpower of overpreparation

Two days before hospital I go into lockdown. I start to overprepare so that on the day of hospital I don’t have to do anything or stress about a single thing. Overpreparation helps alleviate stress.

I pack my backpack with everything I might need while in the hospital. I take lots of water, comfortable clothes, headphones for calming audio, and tissues.

One thing I don’t take is time. Time in the hospital moves differently. When you’re fearful time either slows down or speeds up. For me, my thoughts speed up, but an hour feels like 12 hours. Looking at the time makes me more nervous.

I start mapping out in my mind what time I get dressed into my scrubs, then what time I meet the nurse to undergo a health check, then the scary moment when the anesthetist comes into the room and tries to explain to me what is going to happen, even though I’d do anything not to know.

You have a lot of time to live. But time in the hospital feels different and it should. Hospital is where you go to repair your body from all the damage you and the world throw at it.

Absolutely no 9–5 work whatsoever

9–5 work stresses me out the most. Already, my work colleagues are trying to schedule meetings right after I get out of hospital. It’s for this reason that I refuse to engage in any traditional work leading up to the hospital.

Thinking about customers while I contemplate the beauty of consciousness destroys my happiness.

The work phone gets left far, far away in a distant galaxy. The work laptop’s battery is run down to empty so that it can’t dare boot up on my hospital day. It sounds drastic. But in a world that is always switched on, it is increasingly hard to switch off — even for a hospital moment.