I’ve studied a lot about human behavior, but mostly physical behavior. I can give you a good idea of why your knee or hip hurts based on the way you walk or the shoes you wear. I can tell you how the body works with almost disturbing precision. It’s what I’ve been training to do, it’s why I’m in school.

But the mind is a mystery to me.

Tomorrow, in my quest to continue to understand the human body, I have to fight with the human mind. My mind, to be precise.

Because tomorrow my class is taking a trip to visit the ICU nearby to observe our role in the acute inpatient setting. We have had lectures on what to expect, what each cord goes to, what each beep and number represents. I can tell you pretty easily what the normal heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure are.

But I am terrified of seeing it.

Almost 3 years ago, I spent a day and a night in the ICU. I woke up from brain surgery in an ICU room to a nurse standing next to me, calling my name and telling me to breathe. Because for whatever reason, I kept forgetting to. Things were beeping, I was groggy, tired and scared. My family was there one moment, then I’d fall back to sleep and they would be gone. My now husband, then fiance, was supposed to be able to stay there the whole time (I mean, there has to be some perk of being a medical student at the same hospital, right?), but the nurse wouldn’t let him stay.

I struggled to wake up, to figure out where I was. I couldn’t tell if I was in pain or if I was just expecting to be. And then came the vomit. Except that since I hadn’t eaten anything all day (because of that whole brain surgery thing), I just retched, over and over and over again. I got nausea drugs, then more nausea drugs, and they did nothing. My nurse rolled her eyes at me when I begged, groggily for help, for something else to stop this. In the end, she gave me every nausea drug they had, and it wouldn’t stop.

My father held me hand and cried because there was nothing he could do.

After what felt like an eternity, we got the nurse, who was painfully unconcerned, to call my neurosurgeon to give me something to help me relax. They decided that an incredibly strong anti-psychotic med was the right choice, and to their credit, It worked. But when I woke up, my family was gone. I was alone. I was scared, confused. I didn’t know what time it was, if I was okay, what had happened.

All night I drifted in and out of consciousness, alone, the nurse on the other side of a glass wall that seemed like a mile away.

Finally, it was light outside, and I was able to keep my eyes open, to assess what was going on around me. I had oxygen in my nose, a very painful arterial line in my wrist, two IVs, a catheter and a HUGE bandage on my head. I was in the intensive care unit, because I truly needed intensive care. I was in a pretty severe situation, which up until that moment, I hadn’t even considered or realized.

A few hours later, I was moved to a normal room, with fewer needles and tubes and medications and well, the rest is history. I’ve worked really hard to forget that first day after surgery and tomorrow I’ll have to face it.

Just thinking about it makes my heart race, makes me panic. It’s silly because I’m going to observe tomorrow, I’ll be walking around, not in bed. The tubes won’t be coming from my arms or my face. And yet, I’m still terrified. I feel so unsettled, nervous.

I want to be rational, but this fear is pretty irrational.

I want to be in control, but it is entirely uncontrollable inside my head.

Maybe it’s silly. It’s just a hospital ward. It’s just wires, it’s just tubes.

It’s just scary.

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