Mark Lanegan:'Covid-19 almost killed me'
Here is part from the memoir "The Devil in a Coma", by alternative rocker Mark Lanegan, who recalls how Covid-19 put him in hospital for months this year.
Mark Lanegan is an American singer, songwriter, author and musician. First becoming prominent as the lead singer for Screaming Trees, he has also been a member of Queens of the Stone Age and The Gutter Twins.
Here we have an excerpt from the memoir "The Devil in a Coma", by alternative rocker Mark Lanegan, who recalls how Covid-19 put him in hospital for months this year and gave him a series of hallucinogenic visions. How did he feel, and what was in his head we can read now from the memoir.
"I felt weak and sick for a few days, and then one morning I woke up completely deaf. My balance was shaken, and my mind in a surreal, psychedelic state of sleep, I lost support at the top of the stairs. I hit with my head on the window sill as I fell down the narrow staircase. Beng. My wife was on horse riding during the day, and when she arrived hours later and I still couldn’t hear anything, unable to move, two large open wounds on my head and a knee that couldn’t withstand any weight.
For two days I tried to walk from the stairs to the couch, but to no avail. I couldn't move, nor could my wife help me with my 90 kg, so I lay suffering on some blankets on the hard floor. My ribs were cracked, my spine bruised and painful, and my already chronically confused knee disappeared again as if some tendons had been torn or my ligament has torn. My leg was useless. Every attempt to breathe was a battle, no matter how hard I tried to breathe air naturally. Although I refused to go to the hospital, my wife finally called an ambulance behind my back and I was taken out of my yard in a wheelchair. In the end, I ended up in intensive care, I couldn't breathe, and I was diagnosed with an exotic new strain of coronavirus for which, of course, there was no cure. I was put in a medically induced coma.
Now, a month later, after I was visited not only by bizarre dreams, strange visions, dark darkness, distrustful memories and recurring hallucinations, all signs of close death experiences, I was conscious again. Still, in intensive care, a catheter was pushed into my penis, every attempt to take a deep breath - even a yawn - encountered an undesirable feeling of being hit in the chest with a mallet. Apparently, my light went out almost permanently several times, according to doctors and nurses.
They asked me three times a day if I knew where I was and I rarely gave the correct answer. Sometimes I would drive miles to deliver drugs to someone in another city or disassemble a stolen car after midnight to sell parts. Sometimes I would box potatoes and stack them on pallets in a spud factory, or use metal hooks to hitch hay bales to a tractor under the intense summer sun of East Washington, or drunkenly make breakfast of pancakes and eggs at a busy restaurant after a busy night of drinking and hanging out; several activities among many in which I participated in my youth. Sometimes I felt like I was on a tour bus in the United States or the UK, and I remember thinking I was on a train, traveling through Australia for a while."
This is only a part of Mark's experience. Thankfully everything is behind him now.
