I didn't just have a brush with death; I died.

I was two and a half, or somewhere around there. It was just after my second easter, and I was born in the summer. I was two summers, two falls, two winters and three springs old.

My brother was born a nightmare. He was born trying to walk, but without the strength in his legs to do anything about it. He pushed his legs against the bassinet in the nursery, prone and running. He wouldn't sleep. My parents walked with him, sang to him, spent alternate nights pushing him around the house, around the neighborhood, around the city, trying to get him to close his eyes. He did not cry, but he would not sleep. 

I was born a dream. I was less a baby and more a child development textbook. No early milestones, no late ones. Up every three hours for feedings, then sleeping through the night at longer intervals. If my brother and I hadn't been born with the same straight, shiny, black hair, we wouldn't have belonged in the same family. 

My blonde, blue-eyed, laughing, climbing, cuddlng sister was a foreigner, when she came along two years after me.

Family myth is that I was pottytrained by accident, by being present when my brother was trained. I was that good. 

I also looked like a monkey. Bowl cut. Straight hair. Round cheeks. Pressed in nose. Flat brown eyes that turned green later. Head too huge and gobby to fit age-appropriate easter bonnets. 

I got sick, with something that isn't entirely clear. It may have been strep. It may have been something else. It came on fast. I was fine at lunchtime, feverish by afternoon. I ran a fever, first 101, then 102. My mother was scared; my father was away on business. Saudi Arabia. Water purification. She called the pediatrician. He said that sometimes, kids just run high fevers.

She put me in her bedroom, to keep me away from my brother and baby sister. By dinnertime, I was running a fever of 103. She called the pediatrician again; he said that if the fever was rising so fast, she must be measuring wrong. He told her to have a glass of wine and calm down. She did not. She called her brothers, trying to find a sitter so she could take me to the emergency room. 

When her brother got there, my fever was 104.5. He let himself in and came upstairs, just as I started seizing. They called an ambulance. The paramedics got there.

My heart raced; my faver rose; my seizures continued. My heart stopped. Twice. Twice I was injected with adrenalin, I believe. I'm not sure. 

The pediatrician said "Don't worry; children almost never get brain damage from things like this." 

My mother didn't tell my father that my heart had stopped, until fifteen years later. My father and mother never told me about the stopped heart, and the suspected brain damage, until I was twenty-two. 

I never knew why I spent afternoons working with an occupational therapist, needing green clay, manipulating blocks in space, endlessly working on handwriting and tying knots in cards. I never knew why testing was as much a part of my life as back-to-school shopping, or that my mother had an annual fight to keep me in regular classes, then, an annual fight to get me allowed into, and to stay in, honors and advanced classes. 

The metes and bounds of the damage are either unknown to me or unknown completely. When I learned, I was about to re-enter college. I'd known of my learning disability label as early as middle school, but never been told what it was or why it was there. I've known that it meant that I was able to get some services I needed in elementary school - extra time to learn to print, special dispensation from scissors, understanding from teachers that my reluctance to give long written answers was because of my difficulty forming letters, not words. I have terrible spatial skills, shitty bodily-kinesthetic skills...but amazing verbal skills, a remarkable memory, and sundry other little talents. Are these a result of the incredible plasticity of the human brain, an increase in some abilities corresponding to a decrease in others - or a sign that, if not for a fever, I would be ask good as I am at some things, at nearly everything?

What I would like to know, more than anything, is - how much of me is me? If I hadn't had that fever, would I be any different than I am now? Would I be more organized? Would I know how to unlock a door on the first try, every time? Would I be able to make a knot in my shoelaces that stays tied? Would I stop getting into fender-benders all the time? Could I remember a face with a name? Could I land a punch without leaning in and giving myself away?

If I hadn't died, would I still be me?