I left you last with my having been rushed from my room in the famous and historic orthopedic hospital on the East Side of Manhattan, by a team of men and women in pale blue scrubs, who had been visibly alarmed when I could not identify the word "bird", or even put together the parts of a coherent sentence.

I was wheeled with startling speed through the hallways, and into an elevator; and from the elevator, in the bowels of the building, through what seemed like back-of-the-house white-painted utilitarian hallways studded with rapidly swinging doors.

These hallways had mysterious dark rooms branching off of them, that seemed to me like the rear hallways and storage areas of hotels or restaurants, where the public does not go.

We turned abruptly into one small, dark room. A new set of people in scrubs asked me what day it was, what year, and where we were.

I felt like this: as if my soul and my consciousness — which I experienced as being the same thing; but separate from my physical brain at that moment — were lost in a thick, dense primeval swamp; and though I understood the questions posed to me by the new people in scrubs perfectly well, the answers were located somewhere I could not reach, though my spirit/consciousness, united with my will, slogged painfully slowly through what felt like waist-deep mud or silt, toward where I knew the answers might be.

"What year is it?" Their voices were urgent, firm, like air traffic controllers trying to avoid a midair collision.

"Two thousand….nineteen?" The new faces around me looked as startled and upset as the previous group of faces had done.

I saw this reaction; and I also heard myself. I bowed my head in shame, and shook my head.

I could not find the actual year. It was gone, or it was in another part of the swamp altogether that I could not reach, or even imagine.

I could not do it.

"We are giving you an MRI!" I believe they said.

Then I was wheeled, faster than I have ever been wheeled before in any hospital, into an MRI room, and rolled carefully onto the belt that drew me into the machine. I was there for what felt like 45 minutes, trying to remain still, as banging and buzzing took place around my helpless mind and body.