Does anyone else still vividly remember their ICU delirium hallucinations years later?
I was 13 when I had a major medical crisis after spinal fusion surgery for severe scoliosis. A few days after coming home from surgery, I became extremely sick. I developed severe respiratory failure from aspiration pneumonia/ARDS, went into cardiac arrest in the ER, was resuscitated in two minutes, and ended up spending about five days on life support in the PICU.
I don’t remember those five days because I was sedated, but after I woke up, my brain apparently decided five days of unconsciousness wasn’t enough and gave me an entire alternate reality to deal with.
For roughly the first couple of days after waking up, I had incredibly vivid hallucinations. I was only 13 and had no idea that ICU delirium was even a thing. What gets me now is that it has been almost 13 years, and I can STILL remember these hallucinations so clearly.
The most vivid one was this little Asian girl in a yellow dress named Jazanay. In my mind, she had basically moved into my hospital room. There was suddenly a bunk bed and toys for her, and I was completely convinced she was actually there. I remember getting genuinely upset and yelling at my family because I wanted them to make her leave. They kept telling me there was no little girl there, but I could SEE her. To me, everyone else was being ridiculous because obviously there was a child standing in my room.
There were also several little girls wearing Christmas dresses and giggling. Again, they looked completely real to me. They weren’t vague shadows or something I could recognize as my imagination. They were actual people as far as my brain was concerned.
Then there were what I called the “elevator buses.” I remember elevators somehow turning into and functioning like school buses, constantly coming and going and loading and unloading children. That was the longest, continuous hallucination.
I saw a dog jump up on me. I kicked it away because I was scared or startled, and then the dog suddenly turned into a little boy. I remember immediately crying because I thought I had just kicked a child. The guilt I felt was completely real even though the entire situation existed only in my delirium.
There was also an old man who kept making kissy lips at me. I remember his face and how bizarre and uncomfortable the whole interaction felt. I cried and begged my family to make him go away.
Probably the strangest one was feeling like I was literally stuck on the ceiling of my hospital room.
I could see my mom and my aunt several feet below me while I was up near the ceiling. I remember looking down at them and begging them to get me down. From my perspective, I wasn’t lying safely in a hospital bed. I was actually trapped up there, looking down at the people I loved, terrified because they weren’t helping me.
That’s the part of ICU delirium that is so difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. These weren’t like dreams where you wake up and immediately think, “Wow, that was weird.”
I was awake.
I could see my actual family and my actual hospital room, but my brain was adding and changing things around me. The hallucinations existed alongside reality, and I had absolutely no ability to tell which parts were real.
Eventually they stopped as I recovered, and I went home. Physically, my body healed. I relearned how to move around normally, rebuilt my strength, went back to being a teenager, and eventually continued on with my life.
But those memories never completely disappeared.
I’m 25 now. I’ve lived almost another entire lifetime since that 13-year-old girl was lying in the PICU, and I can still picture Jazanay in her yellow dress. I can still remember the dog becoming a little boy. I can still picture those girls in their Christmas dresses, the old man’s face, the elevator buses, and what it felt like to look down from the ceiling at my mom and aunt.
I’ve been processing the whole experience much more as an adult lately. At 13, I understood that I had almost died, but I don’t think I had the emotional capacity to fully comprehend everything my body and brain had just been through. Now that I’m older, I’ve found myself going back through my memories and medical records and realizing just how traumatic and bizarre that period of my life actually was.
The delirium is especially fascinating to me because those things objectively never happened, yet my memories of them feel like memories of things that DID happen. I know Jazanay wasn’t real. I know I never kicked a dog that turned into a child. I know there weren’t buses running through the hospital. I know I wasn’t actually stuck on the ceiling.
But I remember all of it.
For anyone else who experienced ICU delirium, especially after being sedated or mechanically ventilated, do you still remember your hallucinations years later? Did they feel more like dreams in retrospect, or do they still feel strangely similar to actual memories?