… I would have died.

When search-and -rescue teams found me on October 6, 2013, I had been in the Chihuahuan Desert for five days and four nights.

I was just a few hours from death, according to the doctors who eventually treated me in El Paso.

Try to imagine being so thirsty, so very desperate for water, that you would try to suck the pee from your shorts.

Try to imagine being so thirsty, so very desperate for water, that you would take a knife and slice open your arm six times… just so that you could “drink” your own blood.

On October 6, 2013, I was airlifted out of the Chihuahuan Desert to a hospital in El Paso.

I was in the ER for six hours, because doctors couldn’t decide where to put me.

“I’m worried about your heart, lungs, kidneys and liver,” an ER doctor told me flatly.

At the time, I wasn’t worried. I had been FOUND. I had been RESCUED. Everything would be FINE.

By the time I was admitted to the hospital, I hadn’t eaten for four days.

According to one of my friends, who had been dispatched to cover the story of the missing reporter-hiker, I spent my first night at the hospital begging for food.

“The little doctor said I could have chocolate pudding!” I insisted to medical staff. (Bear in mind, by that point, I was hooked up to a morphine drip. The doctor in question was maybe 5 feet tall.)

I still remember my first meal after all of those days in the desert … a watery cereal, green Jello and a carton of sweet milk that was supposedly loaded with vitamins. Best stuff I’ve ever ingested.

For lunch, I got a plate of spaghetti. Heaven.

This is what I want you to know. Unless you have ever been truly desperate for water, food or shelter, you do NOT know what our fellow Americans AND immigrants suffer through.

When I was found, I was hypothermic. The temperature the night before had fallen to 37 degrees. It was two days before I stopped shivering.

I spent my time in the hospital requesting every type of drink imaginable: water, milk, apple juice, grape juice, orange juice. I wanted all of it.

Why am I reliving this? Because I want you to know that to almost die from lack of water, shelter and food is an excruciating way to go.

Because I want you to know that, even now, I am so glad that 2013 wasn’t the year that Rick and I decided to take our children hiking and camping with us.

I cannot imagine what it would have been like to watch our children suffer from dehydration, starvation and exposure to the elements.

I made Rick leave me for two reasons. One – I believed he still had a shot at making it out of the desert. Two – dying truly is a solitary process. I didn’t want him to watch me die.

I can’t imagine having to watch Rick or my children die due to a lack of water, shelter or food.

And yet.

Americans … or at the very least .. our new administration … are more than willing to let refugees (mothers and children) die rather than let them into our country.

No. Unacceptable.

God bless the ACLU. God bless those who know that this is NOT right.

And if you’re one of the few who is OK with this. … well, I question your humanity.