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At the Dreamers of Tomorrow Café
“The Fourth and Fifth Dimensions of the Suffering Painting”
Hossam Badrawi
Presti
I wrote after having my first surgical intervention in Germany two months ago, and I did not know at the time that I would go through terrible complications, violent suffering, other operations, and intensive care for fifty-two days. I wrote to say that the aspects of life are similar, and we do not know what it is except by going through its experiences, enduring its hardship, and expressing it. …Medicine is one of the exceptional and unparalleled human professions through which the practitioner relieves pain, treats diseases, and eliminates symptoms. However, by repeating his action and its ease in relation to his skill, he may forget the other side of its image, the side of the fact that the doctor is the patient himself, that he forgets what fear is like. From the pain of the needle as it enters the skin into a vein or artery, and the pain from the surgical incision after the operation when movement begins. The difficulty of what every person simply does in his day, such as eating and urinating without a catheter or simply going to the bathroom, is a distant hope.
When we move to the other side of the picture, conditions change, and the doctor sees that what he sees as pampering on the part of the patient when he is afraid and in pain from repeating a mistake here and a mistake there, is perhaps greater at this moment than what the perpetrator imagines by repeating his action.
The feeling of dread, fear, and pain from losing consciousness has completely different colors depending on your position in the painting, between the painter and the drawn.
In a difficult experience, I found myself in a reverse experience, in which I was not the surgeon, but rather the patient, anxious, frightened, in pain, and the surgeon’s scalpel was cutting my skin and muscles, and with all the knowledge in my mind of the complications and the attribution of professional and circumstantial errors, and with my trust in those around me, except This aspect of the picture is for each of us, when we go through it, we must remember it, and even express it, so that we do not waste our humanity with the mechanics of our skill, so that we only see ourselves, our knowledge, and our sense of our ability as doctors, and we forget that this is only a way to show mercy and help in recovery, God willing.
The second cycle of complications made me see a third and fourth dimension to this painting. While I was between life and death, it seemed to me that Einstein was right about the relativity of time, which he linked in his theory to movement, explaining that time shrinks according to the speed of movement, which if it reaches the speed of light, time stops. But in my case, when I was between consciousness and unconsciousness, I did not need movement to discover The relativity of time. Events were passing around me, medical procedures were being taken, and I was moving from CT scans to sound waves to attempts to find a way to my circulatory system, install tubes, and turn over in the sick bed, and my mind imagined that a day had passed, until I discovered that it had been minutes and that an hour had passed. It disappeared at the beginning of the day… How can time not pass, and how can days not pass when I am in this state!!!
We realize the relativity of time when we say that the time of joy and happiness passes quickly and the time of sadness and suffering passes slowly.
As for the fourth aspect of the painting, it was revealed to me when I felt that the people around me were in intensive care. In my mind, they had only two dimensions, as if I were living inside a cartoon movie, and I did not return to the three-dimensionality except when my daughter, son, wife, or sister held my hand or touched one of them. My granddaughters are on my head or hugging my legs, as if physical contact brings me back from a two-dimensional world that my mind creates to a three-dimensional reality that the touch of a hand or a hug brings back to the reality of life.
The relativity of time in life, and my vision from the subconscious world to the two- and three-dimensional life around me was a strange and wondrous experience that I had never experienced before.
What is also strange is life when my eyes are closed, and I am not asleep. The people I meet and talk to in these moments disappear completely as soon as I open my eyes, and I find myself alone among the wires and pipes, and that all the events that take place in my mind are all fantasies created by the mind when consciousness is absent.
Awareness is a mental state through which we become aware of reality and the facts that are happening around us, through a person’s contact with the environment in which he lives and his contact with it, thus allowing him to perceive it.
Consciousness matures by realizing all the existences around a person through the outlets of awareness that are represented by his senses that transmit that to his mind, so he interprets them, synthesizes them, and perceives them. If illness and drugs interfere with a person’s ability to use the outlets of consciousness, awareness becomes distorted and becomes illusions, images, and movies in the mind with no connection to reality. Upon the return of consciousness, a person may be held accountable for a statement or action that occurred in his imagination while he was outside consciousness, without realizing that it has no relation to reality and that it did not happen.
The human mind, with its tremendous potential for creativity and innovation, is also a crucible that can be controlled by illusions
I return to what I would like to convey from my bitter experience to others. There is no value in life without love and affection, the presence of family and friends, and sincere feelings without pressure and without waiting for a response….
My phone, which I did not see, my office, and my family, received many wishes and prayers, and I believe that the collective effect of sincere prayers from loved ones had an impact on my passing through this crisis safely, which takes me to the fifth positive dimension of my experience.
I am a man of optimistic genes and I know that positive energy creates action, and in this ordeal I found myself resorting to faith and praying to God to save me from my ordeal and help me overcome my pain.
Our need for God is important, and it is a beautiful, comforting, emotional human need. I found myself praying to my Lord while I was on the verge of falling into the “black hole,” saying:
I pray to you, Lord of all universes, to relieve me of my pain and to strengthen my family and loved ones to bear my suffering. O Lord of beauty and perfection, help me and light my way through this ordeal with whatever end you choose for me with ease.
In people’s opinion, life is the opposite of death, so when I felt life leaking from my body, I found myself thinking about death, but I could not reveal it to my family so as not to frighten and terrify them.
“The Fourth and Fifth Dimensions of the Suffering Painting”
Hossam Badrawi
Presti
I wrote after having my first surgical intervention in Germany two months ago, and I did not know at the time that I would go through terrible complications, violent suffering, other operations, and intensive care for fifty-two days. I wrote to say that the aspects of life are similar, and we do not know what it is except by going through its experiences, enduring its hardship, and expressing it. …Medicine is one of the exceptional and unparalleled human professions through which the practitioner relieves pain, treats diseases, and eliminates symptoms. However, by repeating his action and its ease in relation to his skill, he may forget the other side of its image, the side of the fact that the doctor is the patient himself, that he forgets what fear is like. From the pain of the needle as it enters the skin into a vein or artery, and the pain from the surgical incision after the operation when movement begins. The difficulty of what every person simply does in his day, such as eating and urinating without a catheter or simply going to the bathroom, is a distant hope.
When we move to the other side of the picture, conditions change, and the doctor sees that what he sees as pampering on the part of the patient when he is afraid and in pain from repeating a mistake here and a mistake there, is perhaps greater at this moment than what the perpetrator imagines by repeating his action.
The feeling of dread, fear, and pain from losing consciousness has completely different colors depending on your position in the painting, between the painter and the drawn.
In a difficult experience, I found myself in a reverse experience, in which I was not the surgeon, but rather the patient, anxious, frightened, in pain, and the surgeon’s scalpel was cutting my skin and muscles, and with all the knowledge in my mind of the complications and the attribution of professional and circumstantial errors, and with my trust in those around me, except This aspect of the picture is for each of us, when we go through it, we must remember it, and even express it, so that we do not waste our humanity with the mechanics of our skill, so that we only see ourselves, our knowledge, and our sense of our ability as doctors, and we forget that this is only a way to show mercy and help in recovery, God willing.
The second cycle of complications made me see a third and fourth dimension to this painting. While I was between life and death, it seemed to me that Einstein was right about the relativity of time, which he linked in his theory to movement, explaining that time shrinks according to the speed of movement, which if it reaches the speed of light, time stops. But in my case, when I was between consciousness and unconsciousness, I did not need movement to discover The relativity of time. Events were passing around me, medical procedures were being taken, and I was moving from CT scans to sound waves to attempts to find a way to my circulatory system, install tubes, and turn over in the sick bed, and my mind imagined that a day had passed, until I discovered that it had been minutes and that an hour had passed. It disappeared at the beginning of the day… How can time not pass, and how can days not pass when I am in this state!!!
We realize the relativity of time when we say that the time of joy and happiness passes quickly and the time of sadness and suffering passes slowly.
As for the fourth aspect of the painting, it was revealed to me when I felt that the people around me were in intensive care. In my mind, they had only two dimensions, as if I were living inside a cartoon movie, and I did not return to the three-dimensionality except when my daughter, son, wife, or sister held my hand or touched one of them. My granddaughters are on my head or hugging my legs, as if physical contact brings me back from a two-dimensional world that my mind creates to a three-dimensional reality that the touch of a hand or a hug brings back to the reality of life.
The relativity of time in life, and my vision from the subconscious world to the two- and three-dimensional life around me was a strange and wondrous experience that I had never experienced before.
What is also strange is life when my eyes are closed, and I am not asleep. The people I meet and talk to in these moments disappear completely as soon as I open my eyes, and I find myself alone among the wires and pipes, and that all the events that take place in my mind are all fantasies created by the mind when consciousness is absent.
Awareness is a mental state through which we become aware of reality and the facts that are happening around us, through a person’s contact with the environment in which he lives and his contact with it, thus allowing him to perceive it.
Consciousness matures by realizing all the existences around a person through the outlets of awareness that are represented by his senses that transmit that to his mind, so he interprets them, synthesizes them, and perceives them. If illness and drugs interfere with a person’s ability to use the outlets of consciousness, awareness becomes distorted and becomes illusions, images, and movies in the mind with no connection to reality. Upon the return of consciousness, a person may be held accountable for a statement or action that occurred in his imagination while he was outside consciousness, without realizing that it has no relation to reality and that it did not happen.
The human mind, with its tremendous potential for creativity and innovation, is also a crucible that can be controlled by illusions
I return to what I would like to convey from my bitter experience to others. There is no value in life without love and affection, the presence of family and friends, and sincere feelings without pressure and without waiting for a response….
My phone, which I did not see, my office, and my family, received many wishes and prayers, and I believe that the collective effect of sincere prayers from loved ones had an impact on my passing through this crisis safely, which takes me to the fifth positive dimension of my experience.
I am a man of optimistic genes and I know that positive energy creates action, and in this ordeal I found myself resorting to faith and praying to God to save me from my ordeal and help me overcome my pain.
Our need for God is important, and it is a beautiful, comforting, emotional human need. I found myself praying to my Lord while I was on the verge of falling into the “black hole,” saying:
I pray to you, Lord of all universes, to relieve me of my pain and to strengthen my family and loved ones to bear my suffering. O Lord of beauty and perfection, help me and light my way through this ordeal with whatever end you choose for me with ease.
In people’s opinion, life is the opposite of death, so when I felt life leaking from my body, I found myself thinking about death, but I could not reveal it to my family so as not to frighten and terrify them.
Because life, for me, has a collective and cumulative concept, and although it concerns each human being himself, the totality of human beings affects each other, and human achievements accumulate and are transmitted from one generation to another, which makes every creature have an impact on those who come with it. Life is not a personal experience, but rather a collective experience that has a cumulative effect.
My mind, between consciousness and subconsciousness, kept thinking about the scientific, cultural and social legacy I left behind and the impact on my family, my students and my community!!
My mind fluttered, saying to me: Man has multiple lives, before his creation and formation, which end with his birth, so he emerges into a life in which his awareness and understanding are formed, and this is the life we live. In this life, which begins with the formation of his body and his soul, and their existence is linked to his soul, which ends with the departure of the soul and its return to its creator, so the body falls and the soul dies. That is, the component of the life we live is a soul, the nature of which we do not know. A soul lives and dies, and a body and mind absorb them.
Here I realized the genius of medicine, which kept the body intact and healthy for 52 days, receiving its nourishment through tubes and protected from deadly germs, awaiting divine will for the soul to return and the soul to awaken to it, to find the body alive and ready to live life again.
After life, nothing remains of a person except the results of his work and his memory in the consciousness of those who lived with him or were affected by his presence in action and thought.
All of this was going on in my mind, and the lesson here is that no matter how much we believe in reason, science, and knowledge, the comfort of believing in God and in the collective positive energy of the prayers of loved ones remains, so thanks and gratitude to everyone who prayed for me and wished for my recovery.
My mind, between consciousness and subconsciousness, kept thinking about the scientific, cultural and social legacy I left behind and the impact on my family, my students and my community!!
My mind fluttered, saying to me: Man has multiple lives, before his creation and formation, which end with his birth, so he emerges into a life in which his awareness and understanding are formed, and this is the life we live. In this life, which begins with the formation of his body and his soul, and their existence is linked to his soul, which ends with the departure of the soul and its return to its creator, so the body falls and the soul dies. That is, the component of the life we live is a soul, the nature of which we do not know. A soul lives and dies, and a body and mind absorb them.
Here I realized the genius of medicine, which kept the body intact and healthy for 52 days, receiving its nourishment through tubes and protected from deadly germs, awaiting divine will for the soul to return and the soul to awaken to it, to find the body alive and ready to live life again.
After life, nothing remains of a person except the results of his work and his memory in the consciousness of those who lived with him or were affected by his presence in action and thought.
All of this was going on in my mind, and the lesson here is that no matter how much we believe in reason, science, and knowledge, the comfort of believing in God and in the collective positive energy of the prayers of loved ones remains, so thanks and gratitude to everyone who prayed for me and wished for my recovery.
