My testimony here is biased from external factors which may not be universal and I have no idea if real death from lack of oxygen results in faster unconsciousness.
When I was drugged and put on a respirator, I had a nightmare where I was a little squid in one of those fresh ice displays where the squids and crabs and other aquatic lifeforms are occasionally sprayed with water, to keep them ‘alive’ as long as possible and maximise freshness. Because the respirator was breathing for me, my own attempts to breathe resulted in no oxygen or relief, which really reinforced the nightmare of being an aquatic lifeform in air, so attempts to breathe were fruitless, with the occasional relief of the machine bringing some oxygen feeling like those water sprinklers. In what I estImate to have taken roughly ten minutes. I gasped for breath, felt like I was dying, gasped some more, felt insufficient relief with every ‘sprinkling’ of the respirator (because it’s not designed to handle hyperventilation from panic) and then I felt death.
After ‘dying’, I woke up as a different aquatic creature, a fish this time (I think cod), in a different place, but still on dry land, still desperately trying to draw water through my gills, always getting too little, too late, and eventually, the struggle against death ended. The third time I woke up again in the body of an aquatic creature on land, I contemplated my predicament. The experience was too vivid and painful for me to believe it was a hallucination or nightmare. I figured the only rational explanation was that contrary to my expectations, a God existed, not just as a Prime Mover, but anthropomorphized enough to be a person.
That He was a sadistic monster, and an afterlife did exist, but only in the form of endlessly experiencing painful death, honestly did not surprise me. The world wouldn’t be the way it is with any kind of competent and benevolent God. I’d kind of hoped for an amiable craftsman who’d made something far too complex to manage, making all the horrors of life on Earth just malfunctions. But honestly, no matter what horror is happening, war, famine or anything else bad, the way children and other innocents suffer disproportionately points squarely to suffering being a design feature and not a bug.
I went through numerous lives, all of which ended in gasping for air or water, feeling like I was drowning or suffocating. I estimated each death took about ten minutes and while I had a sliver of hope the torture would end after three, five or seven deaths, I resigned myself to the afterlife being an endless loop of gasping deaths. With that knowledge, I tried not to panic each time, but the body, feeling desperate attempts to breathe bring no relief, responded with physiological symptoms of panic anyway. I was not always an aquatic lifeform. I was a person, sometimes, walking on two legs, but whether I was human or alien, I was without my space suit in an atmosphere where I could not survive.
When a nurse came in, dressed in blue, with hallway lights behind her, I saw a figure come out of a Close Encounters of the Third Kind spaceship, wearing a blue space suit. I didn’t know who I was or what this creature was, but my speculation was limited to scattered thoughts as my senses all told me I was in a space suit where the oxygen tank was disconnected or empty.
When the blue being took off my helmet, I could breathe again. All in all, I think it was ten or eleven deaths, each about ten minutes, which fits with the nurses’ testimony that I was on the respirator for not quite two hours. It took them nearly half an hour to convince me that they were human and so was I, and that this reality wouldn’t dissolve into another where I would die of lack of oxygen.
Not that it was the the worst death I could imagine, but an endless loop of deaths where I was completely helpless did seem close enough to Hell as not to be readily distinguishable, and without even the slight satisfaction of telling whatever God or flawed Demiurge who created intelligent life, as far as I could tell, in order to enjoy the misery thus squared, what I thought of them and their Creation.
Once the nurses finally brought me back to reality, aided by the sedatives and sleeping pills I’d been given wearing off, I refused any further contact with respirators or any kind of breathing aid, even just a small oxygen device for the nose. I didn’t really believe in an anthropomorphic Creator, so I figured that if I really died from lack of oxygen, it wouldn’t be that bad. That would be that. An end. No more pain or physiological symptoms of panic and despair.
One death was nothing, really, in comparison to experiencing death after death while a machine breathes for you. So, while I did not blame the nurses for trying to keep me alive, as that was their job, I made sure they were all aware that any further attempts to do so would have to be done without respirators.
They really wanted me to try to sleep with a Darth Vader -esque mask for sleep apnea, and/or because my blood oxygen levels plummeted when I laid down. We came to a fair compromise where I simply would not lie down and thus not need any aid to breathe. For the rest of my time in the hospital and for the first few nights at home, I just didn’t go any further than sitting. Mostly, I ambled around, reading, my legs barely carrying my weight.
In my, quite possibly false, experience, death from suffocation is bad. However, it doesn’t take that long. It frightens me, but not as much as the idea of ‘life’ after death, where we would die again and again and again. And I’ve suffered numerous illnesses or injury that were much more painful than what I thought was death from oxygen deprivation.
I would like to die of a massive stroke or heart attack in my sleep. I honestly did not even notice my heart attack (suffered shortly before or during my experiences on the respirator) and it only became apparent that I’d had one once I was improved enough for CT scans and MRIs to be allowed. So, death in my sleep, if possible, and total systemic failure, no clinging to life on a machine. If that’s not on offer, death from oxygen deprivation seems to belong nearer the benign causes of death than the truly bad.
But maybe I am wrong and actually dying from oxygen deprivation is much worse than just thinking you are. Still, I’d be very surprised if it is as painful as the things you can unfortunately survive.
