There is a type of experience in my life that I refer to as my quantum selves. It doesn’t happen terribly often, but it is consistently connected to physically traumatizing events. Especially medical events. As I sit in my trauma, but of me splits off into other past moments, reliving various related events simultaneously with the current event.
The latest occurence was this past Thursday:
I underwent a Mohs procedure to remove a basal cell carcinoma from my forehead. My first experience with skin cancer. I was at the main campus of KU Med for five hours. Most of that was waiting in between cycles of the procedure. As I was prepped and numbed for the first shaving of skin, tears rolled down my face.
As I calmed myself, my mind drifted outward, and I was three weeks earlier, sitting on the table for the initial biopsy, at a peripherial loaction. As I experienced the spreading numbness of the lidocaine for the Mohs, I also sat in the same spreading numbness as the dermotologists prepped to remove the sample that would confirm it was basal cell.
Laying on the table at the main campus, my mind roamed earlier into that day three weeks prior, to the call from my oldest sister informing me that our mother had died that morning. As tears flowed in both moments of skin removal, they also flowed as I once again journeyed home and relived the week long process of preparing our mother’s service and sorting through her memories to take with us and prep the house for sale.
I remembered to mention to the nurse that as much as people bleed heavily from the capillary network in their scalps, I bleed more than normal. Following the first slice of the Mohs, the caterization took some time to finish and the nurse confirmed my note: I do bleed more than most.
While still living in the present, I was also back at the biopsy appointment and back home reliving the experience of all of us started our mourning processes. But now, I had a new splinter as I skip back to my first childhood home and the night I fell out of bed (somewhere around three to five years of age). I had left blood everywhere and my mom was freaking out that her youngest was bleeding out on our way to the emergency room.
When the doctor informed her it closed up with one stitch, she was pissed. “One stitch? how could that be only one stitch?? My house is covered in blood!” Probably also the backseat of our family Scamp.
When I experience splits liek this, they play out over top of my current experience; like projected videos layered into a visual cacophony of color and movement and memory. It doesn’t feel like sitting in a memory in my mind. I feels like I have travelled back to that moment and I am overlapping it on top of the current now. All of them, all of the splitters at once.
After the first Mohs slice, I was taken to my waiting cubicle while they processed the sample to check for cancer cells. I was wrapped in sadness, mostly from griefing my mother’s death, sitting in the moment realizing that I couldn’t call her to let her know it was okay, that her baby boy would be fine. Because she was no longer fine.
I get the first round answer faster than expected and there is still a spot of lingering cancer, so they need to take another slice. Back onto the table, and now I split to the remaining memory of head trauma, with the doctor that dismissed my mention of heavier-than-normal scalp bleeding. As he worked to cut out the three sebaceous cysts, he had to pause and instruct his nurse to get more towels. Apparently, I was bleeding more than he expected.
Slice number two has been removed and I am only breifly back in my cubible before I get an “all clear” result from the second slice. As I walk to a different room for repair/stitches. One further splinter joins in and my mother is here in Kansas City taking care of me every third week for six months as I am home and getting sick from chemotherapy for a non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
I would like to point out that whenever these splinters show up for a visit, they all continue the visit as others join in, until I snap back wholly to the present. In moments like this past Thursday, they ar emore likely to be many and highly impactful, because I am actively removing myself for the conscious trauma of now.
I am aware that I am likely, grossly, misusing the word quantum here. It is more artistic license than scientific appropriateness, but it seems accurate enough of a fit and no other word has jumped out to replace it, so here it is:
My quantum self: the quantum man, living simultaneously throughout the timeline of my life.
quantum man 