Maintenance Robot

I stayed awake for more than 150 hours straight.

My wife was having a hysterectomy, I was on prednisone and having severe asthma attacks every few hours. My wife's care at the hospital was atrocious, and I had to stay awake and monitor what was going on. I am not a doctor, but I know a lot about medicine from research. She was panicking, and she needed me there.

When she got back from the hospital, I must have decided at some unconscious level that she was going to be fine, and I collapsed, having almost 4 hours of the most vivid hallucinations of my life, in the complete absence of any exogenous psychedelics.

After that, I must have simply lost the conscious part of my mind, because I was out for three days. During those three days, I was apparently fully functional, if a bit cranky and whiney. I drove my family a hundred miles, I cleaned the entire apartment, had phone conversations, cooked, bathed, walked the dog, everything. Apparently if you take away the part of me that has the ego, the rest can still function pretty well.

I call him my Maintenance Robot.

Over the next year or so, both the asthma and the cluster headaches got worse, and the two drugs that I was taking as treatment (prednisone and fentanyl) caused Maintenance Robot to come out a lot. He displayed interesting behaviors (putting pizza in the silverware drawer, repotting plants). As soon as I could drop the prednisone, he went away.

I sleep better knowing he is inside me, and will keep me going if I am gone, for whatever reason.