Full Blown God

“Give me life, give me pain, give me my Self again…”
-Tori Amos, “Little Earthquakes”.

by Billy Minshall

The Concorde had just crashed and Lance Armstrong had, once again, won the Tour de France. Though maybe not in that order, these are among the events I remember while the jury was out on whether I would live or die.

After two months of wasting from a parasite called cryptosporidium, I had 10 t-cells and a viral load that exceeded 750,000. Conventional wisdom: I was a dead man at 25. However, conventional wisdom and what we see can be deceiving. Whether this idea is popular or not, we do not get to say when we make our “big exit”.

I never truly thought that I believed in anything greater than myself. That is God, the Universe, or whatever pronoun humans have to put on it. But for me, it is God. For me, God exists, I know it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Even the big bang was the product of some kind of force, on a cellular or molecular level, I am clearly not a scientist. Whatever caused the bang is, in my mind, God.

I was hospitalized. I had wasted to 127 pounds and had a PIC line going to my heart. I had to have a blood transfusion after becoming anemic. I was started on HAART therapy after resisting treatment for years. One of the drugs I took is known to cause vivid dreams. In my state of illness, these dreams became very much reality, as I knew it. Before I continue, I would not discourage anyone from using this drug in combination therapy. It is actually quite tolerable and very effective. What I experienced was extremely rare and due to the severity of my illness.

I began to speak at the speed of sound. I couldn’t get my words out fast enough. I couldn’t divulge enough personal information, or confess, fast enough. I was fortunate to be surrounded by loyal friends and family. They had come and called to say goodbye.

I dreamt I was eating stuffed pizza out of a big rubber garbage can with Ernest Borgnine. We were in the dugout at Wrigley field during the World Series. I am not a baseball fan, and I don’t feel one way or the other about Ernest Borgnine. I was starving though and love good stuffed pizza. Whatever. I believe this occurred some time between the time when I thought “The Brady Bunch” was talking to me and when I was traveling toward the much discussed “light” with the victims of the Concorde crash. It seemed I was trying to cut in line, and they didn’t much care for that so I was held back. Maybe it was then that I opened my eyes and saw “The View” on TV and Star Jones telling me to wash my feet. Or when I heard the approaching sound of wings flapping, only to crescendo, crushing and crashing through my hospital window culminating in thousands of voices and the feeling that hands were all over me.

I am not currently on drugs, by the way.

At some point, a vision of celestial telephone operators hung above my head. Picture thousands of compassionate Ernestine’s, made famous by Lily Tomlin. I was eventually connected to someone I believed to be Jesus. He sounded very surfer lackadaisical and much less authoritative than I would have imagined. I don’t think he thought this was very funny because when I asked him about this, he said that he sounded however I needed him to. We were quickly cut off. I get it. He IS busy.

Around this time I became a born again evangelical preacher, literally bible banging in my hospital room. My frightened friends looked on with tears and they brought the psychiatrists in. I didn’t tell them about the hospital staff that I believed were trying to kill me, or that I was sure that the clouds were spaceships. I knew I’d be locked up for sure.

I was there for two weeks. In that time, I thought I saw angels, both light and dark, and a cracked sky. I observed another sick man whom I believed had painted the roses in my room long before I had received them. I knew that time travel was real.

It would be two months before these effects would completely subside. I was sent home and put on disability. I wrote poetry and read. I took my smorgasbord of new medications and, after several months, even became undetectable with 300+ t-cells. A couple of months later I was cast in a play. As a Baptist Preacher.

This story is my truth. It happened eight years ago. I am now a Prevention Specialist at Test Positive Aware Network, an organization that helped me at that time, and continues to do so. I am healthy. I am not manic. I believe in God, but God as love. It was a gift/curse to experience what I did. A curse because some of these things should not be remembered. Some things I will probably never tell anyone. Had I taken meds as directed, I would have never got to that point. I don’t regret it. However, I would never wish that experience on anyone else.