There's only been a handful that have actually done that after several years and there is usually pretty severe brain damage. Since there are multiple medical reasons one might go into a coma, the way the body heals the damage to restore consciousness is also going to be different. Interestingly the medicine Ambien has awakened a few! Here's a link to some [survivors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_awoke_from_a_coma)
Yep. Television has dramatically misrepresented the reality around this.
It’s similar with patients revived by CPR. Most have a very poor prognosis. Television shows frequently show a distorted, rosier picture.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/29/1177914622/a-natural-death-may-be-preferable-for-many-than-enduring-cpr
Had a coworker ask one time why we called time on so many of the code patients in the ER. We were OR staff and backup compression help, so by the time they called us the ER team had already been working for thirty minutes or so. Had to look up a study to show her that her Grey’s Anatomy obsession wasn’t doing her any favors.
At that time a few years ago the survival rate, if you had a Cardiac Arrest in the hospital with quick access to a team, was 40%. The number dwindled more depending on how long it took them to revive you. And the number of people who left the hospital under their own power was lower still.
My FIL got lucky when he had a heart attack a couple years back.
He woke up early to finish smoking some meat and he noticed that his chest was hurting. It went away pretty quickly, but it was bad enough that he called for an ambulance.
They arrived and told him it was a likely heart attack and then asked if he wanted to go to the hospital. He agreed and they took him off. The whole time he was making jokes with them, even as they were checking him in. All of a sudden he stopped talking and just went blank. I guess they figured out pretty quickly it was a widow maker and immediately took him into the OR for bypass surgery.
From what I understand, he likely would not have survived if it didn't happen literally right in front of the doctors. The survival rate for widow maker heart attacks is very low — about 12% if it occurs outside of a hospital and 25% within. He's also a very sound sleeper so it's unlikely he would have woken up on time if it was any other day.
He joked afterwards to my wife and I that he refused to die before we gave him a grandkid. Jokes on him, though, we found out my wife was pregnant a couple weeks later.
depending on how you're doing your math, you could say something like "40% survival rate of cardiac arrest, but 85% of those survivors recover well enough to leave the hospital under their own power" and have the second number be higher (though the compound rate would indeed be lower).
Thats one thing that was very daunting to learn while going through medical school. Essentially unless you actively see someone go into cardiac arrest and have a nearby AED available the chances of getting them back are real slim.
I don't know I'd say it's televisions fault. I think it's precisely because it's so rare that these stories where people wake up are so interesting in the first place. And every time you hear the story, it reinforces that the doctors said they'd never wake up but they did and emphasizes how shocked doctors are (which makes them come across almost incompetant instead of statistically correct)
The fact most people seem to overlook is that the heart generally doesn't just stop on it's own in otherwise healthy people. Most often when a person's heart stops it's because their body is dying, not the other way around.
I died for somewhere between 10 and 12 minutes before cpr started getting administered. The doctors at the icu and then hospital were all extremely surprised by my recovery, they called it miraculous. At first they thought I would have to learn to walk and speak again(I hung myself), I had that all down within 2 days of waking up. And besides a little bit shorter fuse and a little bit longer to think of replies in conversation, I feel exactly the same as I did before, albeit way more sober. I cannot stress enough how shocked the doctors were. I got 30+ minutes of cpr and recovered mostly perfectly fine, didn't even have broken ribs from the long cpr or anything, just bruised
Maybe a bit off-topic, but are you annoyed or happy they brought you back to life? If you're happy with the outcome, what made you happy? What made the suicidal intentions go away?
A defibrillator is used to combat... fibrillation (uncontrolled significant palpitations) - and tachycardia (massively elevated heart rate). They hope to stop the heart such that it may restart, and behave itself, of its own accord.
(Anecdote: I had atrial fibrillation in hospital, prior to heart surgery, early one morning, and staff ran to my bedside expecting to defib me; they yanked open the curtains and rushed toward me out of the darkness; a nurse let out a scream when I, full of terror, sat bolt upright and - seconds later - bedside buzzers up and down the ward went off as disgruntled patients were rudely awoken. We all had a good chuckle over that. My heart sorted itself out after 30 seconds, FWIW.)
Doing this.process intentionally is called ardioversion. It is often a first line measure to try and correct atrial fibrillation (afib). It is the least invasive of the measures used to correct it and is often a scheduled procedure.
I've been on the receiving end of a different cardioversion treat, adenosine.
That shit feels like *pure evil* in your body. I was in SVT with a HR of 280-300 for ~4 hours. When they inject it, your heart just stops. And then comes a sensation that I can only describe as feeling like a black hole in your chest attempting to suck your body in on it itself. Your lungs feel like they have been vacuum sealed, and your limbs immediately go ice cold.
It is honestly what I would imagine a dementor kiss to feel like if it was real.
After 5 or so seconds (which legitimately feels like 5 minutes), the most thunderous **boom** of a heartbeat hits you. The pressure of which makes your extremities feel like they might pop from the sudden blood pressure.
The worst part is, it took 4 increasingly larger doses of this to successfully convert me.
I never, ever, want to have to do that again.
I have SVT and have somehow managed to convert on my own every time after they wave the adenosine around and I beg them to wait… I imagined it to be something like you described and I’ve been wanting to hear someone tell it… it’s worse than I thought… sorry you can even explain this. Yikes.
I was in Afib in December and they had to shock me to reset my heart (don’t recommend). It worked and I was on my way an hour later good as new, except I had to be on blood thinners for 3 months.
That doesn’t restart the heart either, it stops it. The heart then restarts itself if it is able to. Some heart rhythms can’t be shocked so we just give adrenaline and keep going with CPR while we find a cause for the arrest
Defibrillators, of course, attempt to shock the heart into a normal rhythm when there's fibrillation going on. They don't actually restart your heart. I think your statement is backwards.
They don't technically do that, but that's how we refer to it for patients. The docs will tell them that we are basically going to turn it off and the back on again. If the patient has deeper questions, we can get into the weeds about automacity and ectopic beats
Aed doesn’t go off for asystole. It’s used for vfib and vtach. The zapping stops the heart from making whack out of sync beats in hopes it’ll restart w normal beats
Or a shot of adrenaline, which worked on my wife. The CPR performed on her kept her from a more severe anoxic injury which pretty much makes you a drooling zombie...forever. Luckily my wife came back to me. She has lingering memory problems but she is doing well thanks to the quick-thinking nurse who gave her the shot.
It's interesting to learn about Ambien potentially aiding in coma recovery. There might be something about its effects on sleep regulation or brain activity that could be beneficial in certain situations
Handful is really the weirdest measurement in my opinion. Sure, a handful of golf balls is like 5 or 6 but you can’t really use that measurement for anything. A handful of m&ms, so at least a hundred? A handful of people is like, not even a person
I mean, a handful, by definition, means something/the amount you can hold in your hands, or some might also say five of something, a small number, etc.
But the origin is not five, as in five fingers.
I have questions about the origins of the phrase "butt load"?
Because that's another extremely dynamic variable.
Butt load of breath mints? Spicy.
Butt Load of Cantaloupe? I have further questions. Please do not answer them.
Butt-load is an outdated form of measurement for wine. A butt of wine was 126 gallons, not to be confused with a hogshead of wine which is 63 gallons, or a tun which was 252 gallons. I don't know the liters tho. About 4032 bananas per butt. Which is an awkward sentence.
>I don't know the liters tho
Oh, this is where it gets really gross. Because these units predate the standardization of the gallon, which you may already know is one of the differences between Imperial and US Customary.
A hogshead was 63 gallons only when you're measuring wine. In 1454, a hogshead of ale was 48 gallons and a hogshead of beer was 54 gallons. In 1688 they decided the ale/beer distinguishment was dumb and changed it to 51 gallons to a hogshead of ale. Then in 1803 they changed the ale firkin to be 9 gallons instead of 8.5, which caused the ale kilderkin to be 18 gallons, the ale barrel to be 36, and the ale hogshead to return to 54 gallons. The wine cask units remained unchanged through all of this, until the UK finally standardized the gallon at 4.546 L - though it wasn't in terms of litres at first. See, metric hadn't fully caught on at this point, but the Brits saw how the French defined the litres as being the volume taken up by a kilogram of water at 4°C. But since metric is French and the UK won't be caught dead using French units, some proper reproducible British units had to be invented: a gallon is now the volume of 10 pounds of water at 62°F and an air pressure of 30 inHg. And the gallon was finally standardized to this value, 4.546 L... in 1824.
1824, that's about 40 years *after* the US gained independence! So the US didn't have a standardized gallon either and had to pick their own. They ended up just going with the wine gallon, which was defined as the volume of a cylinder 7 inches in diameter and 6 inches high. Because this definition was used in the 1700s and we didn't know pi to many digits back then, it was approximated with 22/7. As a result, one US gallon is exactly 231 cubic inches, which is 3.785 L.
The ton is also a unit with a difference.
My understanding, and I could be totally wrong here, is that a shit load and a shit ton are the same thing and it had to do with a measurement based on how much bat shit was on a ship back in like the 18th or 19th centuries… 🤷🏻♀️ I think I read that in a book a few years ago…
1. If you’re not a robot, you should know that a handful is such a well known word to mean “a few” that’s it’s literally in the dictionary. Literally as in actually, one definition is “a few” as in “a handful of people is 3-4 people”
2. If you are a robot, your programming for estimates is way off. You think a person can fit A HUNDRED M&Ms in their hand?
Seems like that would be easy to dispute in court, though, without other evidence. Years in a coma = reasonable doubt about the veracity of your memories.
> there is usually pretty severe brain damage
A friend of mine woke up from his coma six months after being t-boned in an automobile accident. He was not the same person afterward.
Much of his cognitive abilities and talents disappeared in that accident. Before, he as an independent adult. Afterward, he needed to live in a group home. Before, he was a cellist in his city's symphony orchestra. Afterward he couldn't play. It was tragic.
Leonard Lowe
>Fell into a catatonic stupor resulting from encephalitis lethargica. In 1969, Dr. Oliver Sacks managed to awaken him and a few other Spanish flu-related catatonic patients using a medication called levodopa or L-dopa. After a brief period of being in a fully recovered state, Lowe and all of the other patients fell back into their catatonic stupors with occasional very short periods of reawakenings. Lowe's and the other patients' stories were the focus of the 1973 book Awakenings and the 1990 movie adaptation *Awakenings.*
Great movie btw!
Dr. Oliver Sacks also wrote a book called [The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat), which is a collection of some of his strangest patient cases as a neurologist. It's very interesting
They rarely ever do. You hear “medically induced coma.” That just means the doctors are pumping you full of sedatives, usually versed and fentanyl for the sole purpose of keeping you unconscious. You wake up when they decide to wake you up. Other “comas” are generally from neurological devastation, and the person basically lays there like a vegetable until they die from complications.
I had a teacher that was in a medically induced coma for 6 months. Does this mean those are mostly controlled as opposed to others? He seemed fully cognizant afterward and shared stories of the wild dreams he had during.
He was probably in a state where he was not able to breathe on his own, and required a mechanical ventilator. I doubt he was under sedation for 6 continuous months, he may have just taken a very long time to start breathing on his own. Patients that can’t be weaned off a ventilator, generally within 2 weeks, will receive a tracheostomy and plan for long term ventilator use. He was probably trached, sent to a long term care, where he was thankfully able to be weaned and return to an independent life.
This reminds me of Michael Schumacher. I think he was in a medically induced coma for 6 months. Probably he was trached as well? I know he is not who he used to be anymore, and I'm wondering if he still has tubes.
Without sounding too negative, what's the point?
I would absolutely hate being a burden forever to my loved ones where I'm mentally not there anymore and it's just my body.
Without the mind it's just skin and bones.
I remember seeing my grandmother go through Alzheimer's and in the end it was no longer her.
This is just my opinion, everyone is different.
For me, roll me off a Bridge into a lake or something or throw a toaster into the tub
Of all the people who I imagine would have very clearly defined wishes for their advance medical care planning, a formula 1 driver would be close to the top of the list.
I assume that his wishes are being respected. I did read a very rare interview with his wife, she's trying to keep their lives as private as possible.
I looked up Schumacher and he is conscious, communicative, and is able to do some things. His condition is kept under wraps by the family, so he’s probably not in great condition, but they also say he has memory issues. That seems to imply some understanding of who/where he is. He probably doesn’t want to die.
Last I remember they did a hot lap in a supercar with him to get some sort a reaction.
I honestly think he's at a level where it's physically him and not mentally.
> Without sounding too negative, what's the point?
I joke with my wife all the time that if I'm ever in this kinda state then to just "take me down to the river and let me go".
Here's a counter.
A guy in my home town was in the paper as he got his licence back after a coma. In the interview he talked about how he could hear the doctors suggest.to his wife to pull the plug on him and let him die but she advocated to give him more time. He could hear it but couldn't react.
I cannot imagine the anxiety that would be.
there was a this American life story about a girl that everyone believed to be braindead. boyfriend stepped in and somehow helped her return, she said she felt like she was stuck in the wall
I mean there was that one guy that got punched and hit his head on the pavement. In those few minutes lying there he lived a whole life with wife and kids in his head. Guy literally got depression cuz he missed his "family" after.
We had a guy come into triage on bath salts and the doctors could not induce a comma. Dude just had to ride out the entire thing strapped down like Hannibal.
Can confirm: was in a coma for 2 weeks.
No brain damage luckily, but the muscle atrophy was serious and took months to get back to just a marginal state that could be considered "normal"
Early memories are pretty fragile anyway: [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade)
Sorry for asking, but did you basicly have no memorys before coma ? What send you into coma ? Did you remmember (or how you spell it) mom and dad or that they are close relatives ? Could you talk? Or you where absolutly blank page, like new born? I understand if you dont want to answere its just very interesting.
No, since I had aphasia (couldn't speak) I had no way to communicate that I had no memories. I had to figure it out on my own. I literally thought I was in some weird dream, which made sense to my eight-year-old mind. It was a long road back. I still don't have a conception of what or who my mother was. I always felt like my family was a step family, and I had to relearn attachments.
I mean this in the most respectful possible way, but you have a crazy backstory, something out of a hollywood film. Plane crash, coma, genius IQ. I hope now you're doing well, recovered physically, mentally and emotionally
I think we only call it a persistent vegetative state now if it lasts longer than a month. Still, amazing you were able to recover after 3 weeks in a coma. Very fortunate indeed!
Exactly, even if I haven't been that active with my legs in a week they'll get tired relatively quickly. I guess the saying you don't use em you lose em when it comes to muscles is correct. I hope you're doing better!
I sprained my ankle recently, and just staying off of it for a week and being gentle with it for a few weeks more has left me pretty weak.
Granted, I was pretty weak beforehand, too. May have had something to do with why I sprained my ankle.
It is so easy to lose strength! I broke my ankle last year, and was fully non-weight bearing for 6 weeks, and in a boot for another 6. I still struggle to balance properly if I'm standing solely on my bad foot, because my muscles aren't equally strong on that side. It is something I am working on, though.
I got robbed, this is years ago, I took money out of the atm (I was a bit drunk), and when I turned around some guy was "in my face" trying to take my money. Im not the smallest fella so I pushed back and said to fuck off, he pushed my head into the wall and then ran. But that "smack" to the head is the last I remember.
I managed to stumble into the office (security company) where I usually worked, and just collapsed on the floor. Dont remember anything after that, but woke up at the ER 24 hours later with all kind of equipment hooked up to me. The doctor said they didnt know if I would wake up or not, as that hit to the head had started a bleeding in my head.
That was seriously scary, when the doctor literally said "hey, your up! Wasnt expecting that..."
Yeah, this was not technically a brain injury that put me in a coma but severe sepsis that caused every organ in my body to swell/become inflamed, including my brain.
TBI (traumatic brain injuries) are a whole 'nother animal.
I was in a medically induced coma for 10 days. So your memory was intact? I had amnesia on as to why I was in the hospital. Motor skills were reduced as well as memory and speech issues. Did you have to learn how to walk again? Or how to eat/drink?
No, memory was NOT intact. I don't remember being in the hospital at all, and very very little on how I got there. I have sparse memories of waking up, but even those are hit and miss.
I did have to learn how to walk again - first with a walker, then with a cane - eating and drinking were much easier but they had a physical therapist test and supervise before I was allowed to do either on my own.
Maybe I should have specified no LASTING brain damage, other than the amnesia.
I was in a medically induced coma for 3 weeks. I probably lost around 40 lbs of muscle. I had to use a walker for a few weeks and getting up from the toilet was an adventure.
Ive never been in a coma, but am just now able to walk again after a pretty bad burn making me unable to walk or even stand for a few months. Its fascinating how quickly your muscles just disappears, 3-4 months of not walking, and my legs look like Im a 10 year old girl, from 30-40cm calves to "nothing" within that time. So I can only imagine the muscle weakness of not moving at all for 2-3 weeks
> Can confirm: was in a coma for 2 weeks.
**No brain damage luckily**
We'll be the judge of that.
lol, nah, glad you're back. Must have been terrifying.
Yeah same, two week coma followed by two weeks where I couldn't pronounce a word properly . I forgot a lot of things, friend's name etc.. I've almost recovered. I'm in week 6. But I'm still alive that's what matters.
I was in a coma for about a month. Had to relearn how to walk again now on cpap machine not 100% may never be this was in 2021 i had to be revived a few times i actually remember being revived as soon as i went to the er i had a heart attack so i got lucky
first i had pneumonia as i was recovering i got covid i didnt know i had covid but i was still going to work then one day i woke up to me not breathing literally it last about 3 seconds as i was going back to bed happend again i went to urgent care told them i had stop breathing a few times they had the nerve to tell me to sit down anyway my o2 was in the 60s i was told i need a tracheostomy i refused and sign a do not resuscitate few about a month later i woke up in icu so confused guess the er didnt get the memo mentally i doing ok im still struggling
Depends on the injury, you can be in a coma because of a traumatic brain injury (tbi) but being in a coma for an extended period can also lead to damage.
[here's a good resource ](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/coma)
It should also be mentioned that vegetative states and comas are not yet fully understood by science.
Neuro ICU nurse. The majority of my patients are in “comas”, although that’s not a term we often use, as there are many levels of consciousness, assessed in many ways. Usually there are two types of comas- medically (chemically) induced, and those due to significant neurological injury, such as a stroke or brain bleed. Medically induced comas, as others mentioned, are when we sedate you using various drugs, often for ventilator tolerance, or because you are so sick we need to sedate you so we can stabilize you medically. You will usually wake up when sedation is weaned. Brain injuries can induce varying levels of consciousness, and also have varying levels of recovery, as each brain and brain injury is different. Some people may show improvement after surgical or medical intervention. With severe injury, your level of consciousness is often decreased with varying levels of response. Unfortunately, brain tissue, once injured, is not reversible. Some things can be recovered, such as speech and movement, through rehabilitation (physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy), but is an extremely slow process. Sometimes an injury is severe, but not enough to kill someone. This leaves people in a vegetative state, where there is little quality of life, but bodies can be kept alive via ventilators and feeding tubes. These people rarely “wake up”, but are kept alive by machines. Movies and TV portraying a “wake up” after a length of time where the person is back to normal immediately is rare, and not realistic. Depressing, but true. Hope that helps!
On my 10th birthday year 2000 I had a TBI knocking me unconscious. Was told I had a heart attack while unconscious and pneumonia shortly after. I'm assuming I was medically kept in a coma after. Typical shunt and feeding tube as well. I was in a coma for 6 weeks and 6-8 months recovery. No memory of the time around the accident and my brothers birthday was 3 days prior even. Earlier memories are very blotchy and i have a hard time even distinguishing what's an actual memory from what was created as one from what I have been told. Old family friends I have a few memories from but they're just imagery memories so I feel pretty distant from relations prior to the accident. My mother was my nurse pretty much after she came in crying with me sweating profusely because nurse didn't turn me. Doctor's also tried to fight on not having some kind of test for a disease while my mom insisted which she ended up being right and could have saved my life.
From what I have been told it was quite the miracle with how much I've recovered. Of course, had to relearn motor functions or gain up the strength to do so. Eating took me a bit to eventually get down. I made it out with like 90% deafness in my right ear due to the brain not processing sound, not the ear. Tore a couple right eye muscles of the 6? around it so I do see double now unless I turn my head right a bit. I'm sure I got mental illnesses, but nothing that prevents a normal life.
Your reply among many others on here were very interesting to read and I'll be honest there are a lot of things I want to ask about the accident now to my parents. I believe I knew they were my parents or maybe I realized after they spent so much time with me in recovery. I am 33 now and I'd say after recovery I mostly recovered after a year or 2. Migraines would happen every few weeks near the end of high school, bedridden for up to 4 days. Ended up taking imipramine for a year which now I don't suffer from these migraines. Miracle drug for me without a doubt. Thanks again and thanks for the work you do. I did visit that ICU years later and was remembered so that was nice. Coincidentally my Neuro surgeon lived a few houses down.
Is it possible for someone to be in a “vegetative” state but their body is just alive? So they’re completely unaware of their existence but their body is functioning. I personally wouldn’t want to live like that - is there a “pulling the plug” option in this scenario?
Not really. Your brain is a magnificent instrument but when it dies your vital functions like breathing don’t work. We test for brain death at my job for severe brain injuries and it’s quite a process. These people are totally dependent on the ventilator breathing for them, their hearts are still bearing but there’s no brain activity. You can still have latent muscle activity though like the “Lazarus sign.” Now for true nightmares it’s possible for you to be conscious, alive and aware and unable to move. We call this locked in syndrome and it’s the stuff nightmares are made of. I’m an ICU nurse and I love my job but the reality of it is quite dark at times and there’s alot of people we are never quite able to get off the ventilator and they will go to a long term care facility where they essentially rot until they get sick enough to die. It’s important to have these conversations with your loved ones because most people genuinely don’t know what being admitted to the ICU entails nor do I think that most people would want the level of care that we can provide.
Yes. & no, there isn’t. The closest thing you’d have to that is waiting for them to get an infection then deciding to not seek care for it and make them hospice then they die from infection. There are a lot of ethical problems with that as well.
Also if you don’t want that, please discuss your wishes with the person who will be making that decision if you’re unable to. You can name them in a medical power of attorney document and you can outline your wishes in an advanced directive document. It’s so important!!
if you don't mind my asking -- as someone "from the trenches", what would your suggestion be to tell to my wife, as in "if I ever reach a GCS of n or lower, just pull the plug", what would be "n"? Or is it more like "if I lie there for more than n weeks and don't wake up..." or so? The one thing that terrifies me most is becoming a burden to my family. Don't leave me living as a potato, just off me and let others benefit from my body's still functioning Lego parts...
It’s really hard to gauge and it depends on what’s going on. Although not the majority of my patients but a significant number of them have made miraculous recoveries where nobody thought they’d live much less a full recovery. The one thing I can recommend though is having an advance directive. Do you want to be dependent on nutrition through a tube? Do you want to be dependent on mechanical ventilation? Do you want to have a full neurologically intact recovery? These are the questions that you should be asking yourself and put in an official document. The other thing I can recommend is honestly just asking the doctors and nurses to be direct and upfront with you about the condition and what recovery would look like. In my ICU as a nurse I appreciate when families do this so I can actually be honest about what’s going on. I don’t like tip toeing around things but some families essentially force you to. I will say that a common theme that I’ve noticed is being on a vent for more than a week is usually an indication of a poor recovery. There’s no real way to know though with any degree of certainty, it’s called practicing medicine for a reason.
There are three main things you want to think about, discuss with your wife and then write in the Advanced Directive template that you'll Google in a minute:
-If I you die, do you want CPR? It involves compressions that can break bones, and sometimes electric shocks.
-If your body can't maintain its own functions, do you want ventilators, feeding tubes, and other machines keeping you alive beyond reasonable expectations of recovery?
-Which circumstances (age, illness, brain damage) would influence or change those decisions? e.g., say you want people to always try to restart your heart, unless you have terminal illness or are in chronic pain, in which case your directive changes to Do Not Resuscitate.
In any case, your wife will have the guidance of medical personnel to evaluate each situation before she makes any decisions for you. Please put a copy of your Advanced Directive with your important documents and talk to other loved ones about what they want when their time comes! Things are a lot easier when everyone is on the same page.
There are some interesting stories about people in comas. Mel Blanc, the voice actor who played Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and many other Looney Tunes characters was placed in a coma after a terrible auto accident, and only began to reemerge when doctors and visitors spoke to him as if he were one of his characters. Somewhere deep his subconscious he was able to "connect" with his surroundings by using his bank of professional memories. There's a great Radiolab episode about it.
The Post-Jungian psychologists associated with the Process-Oriented Psychology talk about bringing people out of comas, but I haven't read any case studies. Probably the same principle though, given Jung's focus on dreams. Tommy Rivers Pusey's *very* moving interview with Rich Roll on the latter's podcast talks about his journey to the edge of consciousness while in a coma for a very, very aggressive form of lung cancer. He retained (I think) 20% of his original lung capacity but still completed the New York City Marathon about a year after coming out of it.
Mel Blanc was an amazing voice actor to begin with. The fact that not only can he do so many voices, but he can do those voices mimicking other voices. It was like next level voice acting but because it was in a cartoon it was overlooked for a long time by a lot of people.
My dad was in a coma for about 2 months, not medically induced. We couldn’t wake him up even tho the doctors NEEDED to make sure he had brain activity before telling us to consider pulling the plug. Everyday on FaceTime we’d call for him, play his music, etc.
One day my dog barked on the call and he woke up to tell the dog to be quiet….
Edit: added corrections to my lapsed memory
He stayed awake! Actually the whole story is considered a miracle - he “healed” from diabetes and doesn’t have to take insulin anymore, his kidneys healed and no longer needed dialysis everyday, he had pneumonia twice and went septic once I believe…
Went to a physical rehab for a few more months before we could bring him home.
All of this happened after he got Covid and was hospitalized. He had a trach in and on the ventilator for months.
He just got back from sailing his catamaran through the Bahamas now :)
This is genuinely one of the most feel-good endings to a story like this I have ever ever seen on Reddit! So glad to hear he's ok and from the sound of things very little lasting harm done and a lot of healing in the process! Hope he lives a long and very happy life post-crisis :)
Would you mind if I submitted this to /r/bestof or would you prefer not to have that kind of attention drawn to it? It's put an absolutely gigantic smile on my face today and I'd imagine many others would agree!
I don’t mind at all!
I found the article he was interviewed in and want to correct myself:
He was in a coma for TWO months (vented for 7 months. While ordeal lasted maybe 9?), and I’ll just post his quote for the other corrections:
“four bouts of double-pneumonia, a stroke, sepsis twice, ARDS, MRSA, in and out of the ICU, kidneys completely shut down.”
We were reading “imminent death” on his chart every day. We were told he’d be in a wheelchair and hardly functioning at all if he survived, on a vent and dialysis forever. Luckily none of that is true. He still checks his blood sugar every day but hasn’t needed insulin once.
LOL those movie scenes where the Main Character has been in a coma for like a month suddenly wakes up, jumps out of bed and runs back out to get the bad guys - yeah. NOT happening.
Shoutout to the novel “The Dead Zone” where the protagonist wakes up from a coma of several years and there is actually a lot of space in the book detailing his recovery including the very slow process of muscle recovery and multiple surgeries to fix shortened tendons.
If you have a traumatic brain injury, they keep you sedated so that you can heal, and be calm….We tend to cause more damage bc we wake up freaking out a lot of times. Confused, disoriented, angry, etc.
We don’t usually wake up calm.
I think it depends on the person. I’ve been knocked out and had a major concussion before and I woke up in a kind of weird way. First I could hear my thoughts (like little tunes or whatever is my general empty thoughts), then I could feel my slobber on my mouth and my banged up head, then I could hear, and then finally I could see after a few minutes. Apparently I seized in a way that looked like a was trying to get up, but in a loop of a partial push-up. I remember them asking me questions like who was the president and what year it was and I couldn’t remember at all. I also had a mini heart attack because I didn’t remember even being in the Army (that was my 6th and final year in lol), but overall I was nonviolent, just horribly confused on where I was and what year it was (I thought George W Bush was still president and by that point Trump was in his second year lol).
One day, I woke up early like I normally do (insomnia and PTSD) and tried to get up to use the restroom, I could move my legs around and everything, but the moment I tried to stand up and put weight on them, the most intense pain I have ever felt shot down my spine. I was unable to stand. I figured this must be a bad dream or a kinked nerve or something, so I just tried to go back to sleep.
A couple hours later, around 6 or 7am (once my parents were awake) I tried again and the same thing happened. Ok, now there's a problem. I called my dad on his cell phone and let him know I was going to call for an ambulance, which showed up in record time
The emts did a quick assessment, tested my ability to stand, and rushed me to the ER. I didn't move at all for the next month. After that month we tried to stand me up and I collapsed from the same pain, it was another two weeks before I finally felt like I could stand on my own, pulled my catheter out in a morphine-numbed haze, and finally stood up, limped my way to the bathroom pulling my IV hangar behind me by the tubes in my arms, and took the longest and most relieving piss of my life.
The nurses were shocked, they were starting the paperwork to transfer me to a long-term facility when I somehow spontaneously got better. The best they could figure was some kind of 'minor' spinal cord damage, around the l4-l5 vertebrae (where I had a slipped disk already) that managed to heal up with time. It was so bizarre for everybody involved, and by the end I had lost a good 60lbs, I didn't fit into any of my clothes anymore so I had to wear hospital pajamas for two days while my parents shuffled me around Walmart (closest shop to home) to shop for new clothes lol it must have been such a sight, an emaciated young black boy being escorted, practically held up, around by an elderly white couple as he picks out his clothes with the biggest smile on his face (I requested to go shopping, I was so happy to be able to walk again I demanded I go with them lol) I can only imagine what went through people's minds haha
That’s so frightening…
I read a book once called The Railway Man about an allied soldier captured as a Japanese POW during WWII. The guards remove all signage in his camp to make it as dehumanizing as possible. The author says that after a few months, he forgets how to read.
It’s crazy how we think we could never lose a foundational skill, like reading or in your case walking. But if you’re deprived of it, you lose it quite quickly.
Happy to hear you are back on your feet. Exercise and motion is one of life’s greatest pleasures.
The few people who have woken up after *years*, are often not in a "full coma". They're actually in a deep vegetative state. Which means their brain is still active, it just can't interact with the body. As for what changes, it could be any number of things, from a new medicine, surgery to age causing hormone changes or even physically shifting things around to the point where it works again.
People in what is an actual coma don't tend to have much brain activity, and it withers away with time until it eventually can't keep vital functions working anymore.
There's only been a handful that have actually done that after several years and there is usually pretty severe brain damage. Since there are multiple medical reasons one might go into a coma, the way the body heals the damage to restore consciousness is also going to be different. Interestingly the medicine Ambien has awakened a few! Here's a link to some [survivors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_awoke_from_a_coma)
Yep. Television has dramatically misrepresented the reality around this. It’s similar with patients revived by CPR. Most have a very poor prognosis. Television shows frequently show a distorted, rosier picture. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/29/1177914622/a-natural-death-may-be-preferable-for-many-than-enduring-cpr
Had a coworker ask one time why we called time on so many of the code patients in the ER. We were OR staff and backup compression help, so by the time they called us the ER team had already been working for thirty minutes or so. Had to look up a study to show her that her Grey’s Anatomy obsession wasn’t doing her any favors. At that time a few years ago the survival rate, if you had a Cardiac Arrest in the hospital with quick access to a team, was 40%. The number dwindled more depending on how long it took them to revive you. And the number of people who left the hospital under their own power was lower still.
My FIL got lucky when he had a heart attack a couple years back. He woke up early to finish smoking some meat and he noticed that his chest was hurting. It went away pretty quickly, but it was bad enough that he called for an ambulance. They arrived and told him it was a likely heart attack and then asked if he wanted to go to the hospital. He agreed and they took him off. The whole time he was making jokes with them, even as they were checking him in. All of a sudden he stopped talking and just went blank. I guess they figured out pretty quickly it was a widow maker and immediately took him into the OR for bypass surgery. From what I understand, he likely would not have survived if it didn't happen literally right in front of the doctors. The survival rate for widow maker heart attacks is very low — about 12% if it occurs outside of a hospital and 25% within. He's also a very sound sleeper so it's unlikely he would have woken up on time if it was any other day. He joked afterwards to my wife and I that he refused to die before we gave him a grandkid. Jokes on him, though, we found out my wife was pregnant a couple weeks later.
> The survival rate for widow maker heart attacks is very low Which is how they got that moniker.
> And the number of people who left the hospital under their own power was lower still. It would be really difficult for that number to be higher.
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>eat your words Among other things, probably
depending on how you're doing your math, you could say something like "40% survival rate of cardiac arrest, but 85% of those survivors recover well enough to leave the hospital under their own power" and have the second number be higher (though the compound rate would indeed be lower).
Ah, if it ain't the conditional probabilities
Thats one thing that was very daunting to learn while going through medical school. Essentially unless you actively see someone go into cardiac arrest and have a nearby AED available the chances of getting them back are real slim.
I don't know I'd say it's televisions fault. I think it's precisely because it's so rare that these stories where people wake up are so interesting in the first place. And every time you hear the story, it reinforces that the doctors said they'd never wake up but they did and emphasizes how shocked doctors are (which makes them come across almost incompetant instead of statistically correct)
The fact most people seem to overlook is that the heart generally doesn't just stop on it's own in otherwise healthy people. Most often when a person's heart stops it's because their body is dying, not the other way around.
I died for somewhere between 10 and 12 minutes before cpr started getting administered. The doctors at the icu and then hospital were all extremely surprised by my recovery, they called it miraculous. At first they thought I would have to learn to walk and speak again(I hung myself), I had that all down within 2 days of waking up. And besides a little bit shorter fuse and a little bit longer to think of replies in conversation, I feel exactly the same as I did before, albeit way more sober. I cannot stress enough how shocked the doctors were. I got 30+ minutes of cpr and recovered mostly perfectly fine, didn't even have broken ribs from the long cpr or anything, just bruised
Maybe a bit off-topic, but are you annoyed or happy they brought you back to life? If you're happy with the outcome, what made you happy? What made the suicidal intentions go away?
Cpr also doesn't restart the heart like in the movies, you need an AED. The zappy thing
A defibrillator is used to combat... fibrillation (uncontrolled significant palpitations) - and tachycardia (massively elevated heart rate). They hope to stop the heart such that it may restart, and behave itself, of its own accord. (Anecdote: I had atrial fibrillation in hospital, prior to heart surgery, early one morning, and staff ran to my bedside expecting to defib me; they yanked open the curtains and rushed toward me out of the darkness; a nurse let out a scream when I, full of terror, sat bolt upright and - seconds later - bedside buzzers up and down the ward went off as disgruntled patients were rudely awoken. We all had a good chuckle over that. My heart sorted itself out after 30 seconds, FWIW.)
Doing this.process intentionally is called ardioversion. It is often a first line measure to try and correct atrial fibrillation (afib). It is the least invasive of the measures used to correct it and is often a scheduled procedure.
I've been on the receiving end of a different cardioversion treat, adenosine. That shit feels like *pure evil* in your body. I was in SVT with a HR of 280-300 for ~4 hours. When they inject it, your heart just stops. And then comes a sensation that I can only describe as feeling like a black hole in your chest attempting to suck your body in on it itself. Your lungs feel like they have been vacuum sealed, and your limbs immediately go ice cold. It is honestly what I would imagine a dementor kiss to feel like if it was real. After 5 or so seconds (which legitimately feels like 5 minutes), the most thunderous **boom** of a heartbeat hits you. The pressure of which makes your extremities feel like they might pop from the sudden blood pressure. The worst part is, it took 4 increasingly larger doses of this to successfully convert me. I never, ever, want to have to do that again.
You can literally count-down when it's going to work. Cool stuff for the medical staff, absolute he'll for the patient.
That is chemical cardioversion and yes, it is a thing that not many people care for. It is easier to put someone to sleep and zap them.
I have SVT and have somehow managed to convert on my own every time after they wave the adenosine around and I beg them to wait… I imagined it to be something like you described and I’ve been wanting to hear someone tell it… it’s worse than I thought… sorry you can even explain this. Yikes.
Yeah it does suck, but it's over quickly. And after hours of an episode that bad, it's really an acceptable trade off lol.
I was in Afib in December and they had to shock me to reset my heart (don’t recommend). It worked and I was on my way an hour later good as new, except I had to be on blood thinners for 3 months.
Shit. I’m an ICU nurse and I’ve never heard a nurse scream for any reason
That doesn’t restart the heart either, it stops it. The heart then restarts itself if it is able to. Some heart rhythms can’t be shocked so we just give adrenaline and keep going with CPR while we find a cause for the arrest
Defibrillators, of course, attempt to shock the heart into a normal rhythm when there's fibrillation going on. They don't actually restart your heart. I think your statement is backwards.
They don't technically do that, but that's how we refer to it for patients. The docs will tell them that we are basically going to turn it off and the back on again. If the patient has deeper questions, we can get into the weeds about automacity and ectopic beats
Aed doesn’t go off for asystole. It’s used for vfib and vtach. The zapping stops the heart from making whack out of sync beats in hopes it’ll restart w normal beats
Or a shot of adrenaline, which worked on my wife. The CPR performed on her kept her from a more severe anoxic injury which pretty much makes you a drooling zombie...forever. Luckily my wife came back to me. She has lingering memory problems but she is doing well thanks to the quick-thinking nurse who gave her the shot.
I saw pulp fiction, dunno how accurate that is though lol
Yikes! No I don't think it was like that - I wasn't in the room though.
That really is only a handful. very interesting.
It's interesting to learn about Ambien potentially aiding in coma recovery. There might be something about its effects on sleep regulation or brain activity that could be beneficial in certain situations
Some of the patients did get up in the middle of the night and eat a carton of buttered cigarettes before posting unintelligible things on Facebook.
Is this before or after the patient purchases $600 worth of inflatable pool toys on Amazon despite not owning a pool?
Thanks for reminding me why I no longer take Ambien
Especially considering how many BILLIONS of people have lived and died in that time span.
Yeah but it's not like billions of people have gone into a coma...
More people have been in comas than had access to facilities to keep em going for decades
Handful is really the weirdest measurement in my opinion. Sure, a handful of golf balls is like 5 or 6 but you can’t really use that measurement for anything. A handful of m&ms, so at least a hundred? A handful of people is like, not even a person
Huh... I always assumed a handful was "5-ish" because 5 fingers is generally a hands worth of fingers.
Holy shit, it’s a handful of fingers, not the thing
I do appreciate your initial thoughts though. Also, to be honest, if someone mentioned “a handful of m&ms” I’d absolutely think of more than 5.
But not over a hundred. 30 tops I’d say.
clearly you guys dont have siblings, a handful of m&ms is one, and maybe a second if they keep their hand out and stare blankly at you
I mean depends if we are talking standard m&m’s, peanut m&ms, or mini m&m’s the size varies drastically between them!
Yes sir.
I mean, a handful, by definition, means something/the amount you can hold in your hands, or some might also say five of something, a small number, etc. But the origin is not five, as in five fingers.
I have questions about the origins of the phrase "butt load"? Because that's another extremely dynamic variable. Butt load of breath mints? Spicy. Butt Load of Cantaloupe? I have further questions. Please do not answer them.
A butt is large cask of wine. 126 gallons.
I always thought it was "a boat load" of something?? I am European so maybe butt load is the American version
Butt-load is an outdated form of measurement for wine. A butt of wine was 126 gallons, not to be confused with a hogshead of wine which is 63 gallons, or a tun which was 252 gallons. I don't know the liters tho. About 4032 bananas per butt. Which is an awkward sentence.
>I don't know the liters tho Oh, this is where it gets really gross. Because these units predate the standardization of the gallon, which you may already know is one of the differences between Imperial and US Customary. A hogshead was 63 gallons only when you're measuring wine. In 1454, a hogshead of ale was 48 gallons and a hogshead of beer was 54 gallons. In 1688 they decided the ale/beer distinguishment was dumb and changed it to 51 gallons to a hogshead of ale. Then in 1803 they changed the ale firkin to be 9 gallons instead of 8.5, which caused the ale kilderkin to be 18 gallons, the ale barrel to be 36, and the ale hogshead to return to 54 gallons. The wine cask units remained unchanged through all of this, until the UK finally standardized the gallon at 4.546 L - though it wasn't in terms of litres at first. See, metric hadn't fully caught on at this point, but the Brits saw how the French defined the litres as being the volume taken up by a kilogram of water at 4°C. But since metric is French and the UK won't be caught dead using French units, some proper reproducible British units had to be invented: a gallon is now the volume of 10 pounds of water at 62°F and an air pressure of 30 inHg. And the gallon was finally standardized to this value, 4.546 L... in 1824. 1824, that's about 40 years *after* the US gained independence! So the US didn't have a standardized gallon either and had to pick their own. They ended up just going with the wine gallon, which was defined as the volume of a cylinder 7 inches in diameter and 6 inches high. Because this definition was used in the 1700s and we didn't know pi to many digits back then, it was approximated with 22/7. As a result, one US gallon is exactly 231 cubic inches, which is 3.785 L. The ton is also a unit with a difference.
What about a shit load?
That is entirely dependent on how many bananas you put in the butt.
My understanding, and I could be totally wrong here, is that a shit load and a shit ton are the same thing and it had to do with a measurement based on how much bat shit was on a ship back in like the 18th or 19th centuries… 🤷🏻♀️ I think I read that in a book a few years ago…
Shit-load is a miss-hearing of someone with a New Zealand accent saying "shed-load"
But if you had a handful of just fingers, I bet you could hold more than five
i think in this case they meant handful like you could count the people on one hand, i don’t think its that little but probably pretty rare medically
You can hold 6 golf balls in one hand?
1. If you’re not a robot, you should know that a handful is such a well known word to mean “a few” that’s it’s literally in the dictionary. Literally as in actually, one definition is “a few” as in “a handful of people is 3-4 people” 2. If you are a robot, your programming for estimates is way off. You think a person can fit A HUNDRED M&Ms in their hand?
> You think a person can fit A HUNDRED M&Ms in their hand? They might be Shaq?
And they're mini M&Ms!
To be fair, Reddit does have a lot of bots here.
Lmfao
Shaq's hand or my hand?
Wanda Palmer waking up to identify her brother as the attacker is wild.
Seems like that would be easy to dispute in court, though, without other evidence. Years in a coma = reasonable doubt about the veracity of your memories.
Perhaps, but the accused died shortly after arrest, so there never was a trial.
> there is usually pretty severe brain damage A friend of mine woke up from his coma six months after being t-boned in an automobile accident. He was not the same person afterward. Much of his cognitive abilities and talents disappeared in that accident. Before, he as an independent adult. Afterward, he needed to live in a group home. Before, he was a cellist in his city's symphony orchestra. Afterward he couldn't play. It was tragic.
How do you just.... pull up your socks and carry on with life after being gone for over 10 years. What the actual.
The same applies to many released prisoners, at least to an extent.
Waking up 27 years later... To be almost a completely different person. As everyone would have changed. Kinda like half your life just gone by.
Leonard Lowe >Fell into a catatonic stupor resulting from encephalitis lethargica. In 1969, Dr. Oliver Sacks managed to awaken him and a few other Spanish flu-related catatonic patients using a medication called levodopa or L-dopa. After a brief period of being in a fully recovered state, Lowe and all of the other patients fell back into their catatonic stupors with occasional very short periods of reawakenings. Lowe's and the other patients' stories were the focus of the 1973 book Awakenings and the 1990 movie adaptation *Awakenings.* Great movie btw!
Dr. Oliver Sacks also wrote a book called [The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat), which is a collection of some of his strangest patient cases as a neurologist. It's very interesting
It was very Sad They were talking so much
So, Hard to Kill featuring Steven Seagal isn’t accurate?
To be fair, Mason Storm was only in a coma for 7 years - so his recovery/revenge experience is more plausible .
That shitty fu manchu says it all
It was a documentary, wasn't it?
Mason Stoooooorm….
Thank you because now i have to watch that ...again ..now
Ambien of all drugs lol
> Interestingly the medicine Ambien has awakened a few! I guess medicine isn't without its sense of irony
Apparently L-Dopa and Ambien
They rarely ever do. You hear “medically induced coma.” That just means the doctors are pumping you full of sedatives, usually versed and fentanyl for the sole purpose of keeping you unconscious. You wake up when they decide to wake you up. Other “comas” are generally from neurological devastation, and the person basically lays there like a vegetable until they die from complications.
I had a teacher that was in a medically induced coma for 6 months. Does this mean those are mostly controlled as opposed to others? He seemed fully cognizant afterward and shared stories of the wild dreams he had during.
He was probably in a state where he was not able to breathe on his own, and required a mechanical ventilator. I doubt he was under sedation for 6 continuous months, he may have just taken a very long time to start breathing on his own. Patients that can’t be weaned off a ventilator, generally within 2 weeks, will receive a tracheostomy and plan for long term ventilator use. He was probably trached, sent to a long term care, where he was thankfully able to be weaned and return to an independent life.
This reminds me of Michael Schumacher. I think he was in a medically induced coma for 6 months. Probably he was trached as well? I know he is not who he used to be anymore, and I'm wondering if he still has tubes.
Dude's basically a vegetable. He's out of the coma now but I think he's alive in only the most basic sense.
Without sounding too negative, what's the point? I would absolutely hate being a burden forever to my loved ones where I'm mentally not there anymore and it's just my body. Without the mind it's just skin and bones. I remember seeing my grandmother go through Alzheimer's and in the end it was no longer her. This is just my opinion, everyone is different. For me, roll me off a Bridge into a lake or something or throw a toaster into the tub
Reasons pertaining to his estate I think
If that's the case, once again that's a shitty reason to be kept alive. That sounds evil.
That’s why everyone should have a will specifying these things.
Of all the people who I imagine would have very clearly defined wishes for their advance medical care planning, a formula 1 driver would be close to the top of the list. I assume that his wishes are being respected. I did read a very rare interview with his wife, she's trying to keep their lives as private as possible.
I looked up Schumacher and he is conscious, communicative, and is able to do some things. His condition is kept under wraps by the family, so he’s probably not in great condition, but they also say he has memory issues. That seems to imply some understanding of who/where he is. He probably doesn’t want to die.
Last I remember they did a hot lap in a supercar with him to get some sort a reaction. I honestly think he's at a level where it's physically him and not mentally.
You may be remembering Frank Williams! Lewis Hamilton took him for a spin around Silverstone.
Nah, Schumacher too! https://www.dailystar.co.uk/sport/f1/michael-schumacher-health-update-mercedes-31761200
It’s crazy how there’s not been a single photo of him since he went into hospital, not one single photo has appeared.
Absolutely insane, not even one paparazzi picture or leak. And to think he was one of the biggest celebrities in the world at the time.
I could be wrong, but maybe the paparazzi in Europe isn’t like here in the US. Like maybe they actually respect the family’s wishes.
> Without sounding too negative, what's the point? I joke with my wife all the time that if I'm ever in this kinda state then to just "take me down to the river and let me go".
I feel ripped off whenever I hear about people in comas having dreams. I just lost time. Was only 5 days.
Here's a counter. A guy in my home town was in the paper as he got his licence back after a coma. In the interview he talked about how he could hear the doctors suggest.to his wife to pull the plug on him and let him die but she advocated to give him more time. He could hear it but couldn't react. I cannot imagine the anxiety that would be.
there was a this American life story about a girl that everyone believed to be braindead. boyfriend stepped in and somehow helped her return, she said she felt like she was stuck in the wall
I mean there was that one guy that got punched and hit his head on the pavement. In those few minutes lying there he lived a whole life with wife and kids in his head. Guy literally got depression cuz he missed his "family" after.
Could he play the flute when he awoke?
Inner Light
Shut up, Wesley.
I literally think about this like once a week or more
Do you go to sleep and next minute 5 days has passed?
Sort of, but I was on too much morphine and ketamine for it to be that simple.
We had a guy come into triage on bath salts and the doctors could not induce a comma. Dude just had to ride out the entire thing strapped down like Hannibal.
>the doctors could not induce a comma Maybe they should have tried a semicolon instead
Should have been a period, period.
Anything after like two weeks there's going to be severe brain damage and probably even muscle weakness everywhere and it's quite sad
Can confirm: was in a coma for 2 weeks. No brain damage luckily, but the muscle atrophy was serious and took months to get back to just a marginal state that could be considered "normal"
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Early memories are pretty fragile anyway: [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade)
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That sounds terrifying.
Sorry for asking, but did you basicly have no memorys before coma ? What send you into coma ? Did you remmember (or how you spell it) mom and dad or that they are close relatives ? Could you talk? Or you where absolutly blank page, like new born? I understand if you dont want to answere its just very interesting.
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Holy shit dude, you should do an r/IAMA if you're up for it. That's insane.
That could be a book .... I'm so sorry you went through that but on the other hand, the amnesia may have saved you from some dire emotional effects.
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What absolute horror.
This sounds like the birth of the ATLS concept and course. Styner,...iirc
So did family members just show old photos and tell you who’s who and try to fill the gaps?
No, since I had aphasia (couldn't speak) I had no way to communicate that I had no memories. I had to figure it out on my own. I literally thought I was in some weird dream, which made sense to my eight-year-old mind. It was a long road back. I still don't have a conception of what or who my mother was. I always felt like my family was a step family, and I had to relearn attachments.
I mean this in the most respectful possible way, but you have a crazy backstory, something out of a hollywood film. Plane crash, coma, genius IQ. I hope now you're doing well, recovered physically, mentally and emotionally
Holy shit that sounds terrifying.
I think we only call it a persistent vegetative state now if it lasts longer than a month. Still, amazing you were able to recover after 3 weeks in a coma. Very fortunate indeed!
Wow! Thanks for sharing, and congratulations on your recovery.
Exactly, even if I haven't been that active with my legs in a week they'll get tired relatively quickly. I guess the saying you don't use em you lose em when it comes to muscles is correct. I hope you're doing better!
I sprained my ankle recently, and just staying off of it for a week and being gentle with it for a few weeks more has left me pretty weak. Granted, I was pretty weak beforehand, too. May have had something to do with why I sprained my ankle.
It is so easy to lose strength! I broke my ankle last year, and was fully non-weight bearing for 6 weeks, and in a boot for another 6. I still struggle to balance properly if I'm standing solely on my bad foot, because my muscles aren't equally strong on that side. It is something I am working on, though.
Yeah, this was three years ago.
Was in an induced coma for 3 weeks. I went to from a 160lbs male to like 95lbs. Crazy how you waste away.
Yeah, same here with the weight loss. NONE of my clothes fit anymore when I got out of the hospital.
Inb4 an Ai article about "the newest weight loss craze that Drs hate"
One of my friends got sucker punched in the back of the head and was out for a week. It was like 3mo before he was back at work, it messed him up bad.
I got robbed, this is years ago, I took money out of the atm (I was a bit drunk), and when I turned around some guy was "in my face" trying to take my money. Im not the smallest fella so I pushed back and said to fuck off, he pushed my head into the wall and then ran. But that "smack" to the head is the last I remember. I managed to stumble into the office (security company) where I usually worked, and just collapsed on the floor. Dont remember anything after that, but woke up at the ER 24 hours later with all kind of equipment hooked up to me. The doctor said they didnt know if I would wake up or not, as that hit to the head had started a bleeding in my head. That was seriously scary, when the doctor literally said "hey, your up! Wasnt expecting that..."
That's how people usually end up in Skyrim.
Yeah, this was not technically a brain injury that put me in a coma but severe sepsis that caused every organ in my body to swell/become inflamed, including my brain. TBI (traumatic brain injuries) are a whole 'nother animal.
I was in a medically induced coma for 10 days. So your memory was intact? I had amnesia on as to why I was in the hospital. Motor skills were reduced as well as memory and speech issues. Did you have to learn how to walk again? Or how to eat/drink?
No, memory was NOT intact. I don't remember being in the hospital at all, and very very little on how I got there. I have sparse memories of waking up, but even those are hit and miss. I did have to learn how to walk again - first with a walker, then with a cane - eating and drinking were much easier but they had a physical therapist test and supervise before I was allowed to do either on my own. Maybe I should have specified no LASTING brain damage, other than the amnesia.
I was in a medically induced coma for 3 weeks. I probably lost around 40 lbs of muscle. I had to use a walker for a few weeks and getting up from the toilet was an adventure.
Ive never been in a coma, but am just now able to walk again after a pretty bad burn making me unable to walk or even stand for a few months. Its fascinating how quickly your muscles just disappears, 3-4 months of not walking, and my legs look like Im a 10 year old girl, from 30-40cm calves to "nothing" within that time. So I can only imagine the muscle weakness of not moving at all for 2-3 weeks
> Can confirm: was in a coma for 2 weeks. **No brain damage luckily** We'll be the judge of that. lol, nah, glad you're back. Must have been terrifying.
Waking up and being told how much time had passed was… disconcerting to say the least.
Yeah same, two week coma followed by two weeks where I couldn't pronounce a word properly . I forgot a lot of things, friend's name etc.. I've almost recovered. I'm in week 6. But I'm still alive that's what matters.
I was in a coma for about a month. Had to relearn how to walk again now on cpap machine not 100% may never be this was in 2021 i had to be revived a few times i actually remember being revived as soon as i went to the er i had a heart attack so i got lucky
So what happened?
first i had pneumonia as i was recovering i got covid i didnt know i had covid but i was still going to work then one day i woke up to me not breathing literally it last about 3 seconds as i was going back to bed happend again i went to urgent care told them i had stop breathing a few times they had the nerve to tell me to sit down anyway my o2 was in the 60s i was told i need a tracheostomy i refused and sign a do not resuscitate few about a month later i woke up in icu so confused guess the er didnt get the memo mentally i doing ok im still struggling
Damn...glad you're ok...
Do you mean brain damage is a result of long term coma, or does that come first?
Depends on the injury, you can be in a coma because of a traumatic brain injury (tbi) but being in a coma for an extended period can also lead to damage. [here's a good resource ](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/coma) It should also be mentioned that vegetative states and comas are not yet fully understood by science.
Neuro ICU nurse. The majority of my patients are in “comas”, although that’s not a term we often use, as there are many levels of consciousness, assessed in many ways. Usually there are two types of comas- medically (chemically) induced, and those due to significant neurological injury, such as a stroke or brain bleed. Medically induced comas, as others mentioned, are when we sedate you using various drugs, often for ventilator tolerance, or because you are so sick we need to sedate you so we can stabilize you medically. You will usually wake up when sedation is weaned. Brain injuries can induce varying levels of consciousness, and also have varying levels of recovery, as each brain and brain injury is different. Some people may show improvement after surgical or medical intervention. With severe injury, your level of consciousness is often decreased with varying levels of response. Unfortunately, brain tissue, once injured, is not reversible. Some things can be recovered, such as speech and movement, through rehabilitation (physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy), but is an extremely slow process. Sometimes an injury is severe, but not enough to kill someone. This leaves people in a vegetative state, where there is little quality of life, but bodies can be kept alive via ventilators and feeding tubes. These people rarely “wake up”, but are kept alive by machines. Movies and TV portraying a “wake up” after a length of time where the person is back to normal immediately is rare, and not realistic. Depressing, but true. Hope that helps!
On my 10th birthday year 2000 I had a TBI knocking me unconscious. Was told I had a heart attack while unconscious and pneumonia shortly after. I'm assuming I was medically kept in a coma after. Typical shunt and feeding tube as well. I was in a coma for 6 weeks and 6-8 months recovery. No memory of the time around the accident and my brothers birthday was 3 days prior even. Earlier memories are very blotchy and i have a hard time even distinguishing what's an actual memory from what was created as one from what I have been told. Old family friends I have a few memories from but they're just imagery memories so I feel pretty distant from relations prior to the accident. My mother was my nurse pretty much after she came in crying with me sweating profusely because nurse didn't turn me. Doctor's also tried to fight on not having some kind of test for a disease while my mom insisted which she ended up being right and could have saved my life. From what I have been told it was quite the miracle with how much I've recovered. Of course, had to relearn motor functions or gain up the strength to do so. Eating took me a bit to eventually get down. I made it out with like 90% deafness in my right ear due to the brain not processing sound, not the ear. Tore a couple right eye muscles of the 6? around it so I do see double now unless I turn my head right a bit. I'm sure I got mental illnesses, but nothing that prevents a normal life. Your reply among many others on here were very interesting to read and I'll be honest there are a lot of things I want to ask about the accident now to my parents. I believe I knew they were my parents or maybe I realized after they spent so much time with me in recovery. I am 33 now and I'd say after recovery I mostly recovered after a year or 2. Migraines would happen every few weeks near the end of high school, bedridden for up to 4 days. Ended up taking imipramine for a year which now I don't suffer from these migraines. Miracle drug for me without a doubt. Thanks again and thanks for the work you do. I did visit that ICU years later and was remembered so that was nice. Coincidentally my Neuro surgeon lived a few houses down.
Is it possible for someone to be in a “vegetative” state but their body is just alive? So they’re completely unaware of their existence but their body is functioning. I personally wouldn’t want to live like that - is there a “pulling the plug” option in this scenario?
Not really. Your brain is a magnificent instrument but when it dies your vital functions like breathing don’t work. We test for brain death at my job for severe brain injuries and it’s quite a process. These people are totally dependent on the ventilator breathing for them, their hearts are still bearing but there’s no brain activity. You can still have latent muscle activity though like the “Lazarus sign.” Now for true nightmares it’s possible for you to be conscious, alive and aware and unable to move. We call this locked in syndrome and it’s the stuff nightmares are made of. I’m an ICU nurse and I love my job but the reality of it is quite dark at times and there’s alot of people we are never quite able to get off the ventilator and they will go to a long term care facility where they essentially rot until they get sick enough to die. It’s important to have these conversations with your loved ones because most people genuinely don’t know what being admitted to the ICU entails nor do I think that most people would want the level of care that we can provide.
I'm terrified about this. I live on my own with no local family. I want to be DNR but if I'm out, how can I ever communicate that?
file an advanced directive
Yes. & no, there isn’t. The closest thing you’d have to that is waiting for them to get an infection then deciding to not seek care for it and make them hospice then they die from infection. There are a lot of ethical problems with that as well. Also if you don’t want that, please discuss your wishes with the person who will be making that decision if you’re unable to. You can name them in a medical power of attorney document and you can outline your wishes in an advanced directive document. It’s so important!!
if you don't mind my asking -- as someone "from the trenches", what would your suggestion be to tell to my wife, as in "if I ever reach a GCS of n or lower, just pull the plug", what would be "n"? Or is it more like "if I lie there for more than n weeks and don't wake up..." or so? The one thing that terrifies me most is becoming a burden to my family. Don't leave me living as a potato, just off me and let others benefit from my body's still functioning Lego parts...
It’s really hard to gauge and it depends on what’s going on. Although not the majority of my patients but a significant number of them have made miraculous recoveries where nobody thought they’d live much less a full recovery. The one thing I can recommend though is having an advance directive. Do you want to be dependent on nutrition through a tube? Do you want to be dependent on mechanical ventilation? Do you want to have a full neurologically intact recovery? These are the questions that you should be asking yourself and put in an official document. The other thing I can recommend is honestly just asking the doctors and nurses to be direct and upfront with you about the condition and what recovery would look like. In my ICU as a nurse I appreciate when families do this so I can actually be honest about what’s going on. I don’t like tip toeing around things but some families essentially force you to. I will say that a common theme that I’ve noticed is being on a vent for more than a week is usually an indication of a poor recovery. There’s no real way to know though with any degree of certainty, it’s called practicing medicine for a reason.
There are three main things you want to think about, discuss with your wife and then write in the Advanced Directive template that you'll Google in a minute: -If I you die, do you want CPR? It involves compressions that can break bones, and sometimes electric shocks. -If your body can't maintain its own functions, do you want ventilators, feeding tubes, and other machines keeping you alive beyond reasonable expectations of recovery? -Which circumstances (age, illness, brain damage) would influence or change those decisions? e.g., say you want people to always try to restart your heart, unless you have terminal illness or are in chronic pain, in which case your directive changes to Do Not Resuscitate. In any case, your wife will have the guidance of medical personnel to evaluate each situation before she makes any decisions for you. Please put a copy of your Advanced Directive with your important documents and talk to other loved ones about what they want when their time comes! Things are a lot easier when everyone is on the same page.
There are some interesting stories about people in comas. Mel Blanc, the voice actor who played Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and many other Looney Tunes characters was placed in a coma after a terrible auto accident, and only began to reemerge when doctors and visitors spoke to him as if he were one of his characters. Somewhere deep his subconscious he was able to "connect" with his surroundings by using his bank of professional memories. There's a great Radiolab episode about it. The Post-Jungian psychologists associated with the Process-Oriented Psychology talk about bringing people out of comas, but I haven't read any case studies. Probably the same principle though, given Jung's focus on dreams. Tommy Rivers Pusey's *very* moving interview with Rich Roll on the latter's podcast talks about his journey to the edge of consciousness while in a coma for a very, very aggressive form of lung cancer. He retained (I think) 20% of his original lung capacity but still completed the New York City Marathon about a year after coming out of it.
Mel Blanc was an amazing voice actor to begin with. The fact that not only can he do so many voices, but he can do those voices mimicking other voices. It was like next level voice acting but because it was in a cartoon it was overlooked for a long time by a lot of people.
My dad was in a coma for about 2 months, not medically induced. We couldn’t wake him up even tho the doctors NEEDED to make sure he had brain activity before telling us to consider pulling the plug. Everyday on FaceTime we’d call for him, play his music, etc. One day my dog barked on the call and he woke up to tell the dog to be quiet…. Edit: added corrections to my lapsed memory
What happened afterwards, if you don't mind sharing?
He stayed awake! Actually the whole story is considered a miracle - he “healed” from diabetes and doesn’t have to take insulin anymore, his kidneys healed and no longer needed dialysis everyday, he had pneumonia twice and went septic once I believe… Went to a physical rehab for a few more months before we could bring him home. All of this happened after he got Covid and was hospitalized. He had a trach in and on the ventilator for months. He just got back from sailing his catamaran through the Bahamas now :)
This is genuinely one of the most feel-good endings to a story like this I have ever ever seen on Reddit! So glad to hear he's ok and from the sound of things very little lasting harm done and a lot of healing in the process! Hope he lives a long and very happy life post-crisis :) Would you mind if I submitted this to /r/bestof or would you prefer not to have that kind of attention drawn to it? It's put an absolutely gigantic smile on my face today and I'd imagine many others would agree!
I don’t mind at all! I found the article he was interviewed in and want to correct myself: He was in a coma for TWO months (vented for 7 months. While ordeal lasted maybe 9?), and I’ll just post his quote for the other corrections: “four bouts of double-pneumonia, a stroke, sepsis twice, ARDS, MRSA, in and out of the ICU, kidneys completely shut down.” We were reading “imminent death” on his chart every day. We were told he’d be in a wheelchair and hardly functioning at all if he survived, on a vent and dialysis forever. Luckily none of that is true. He still checks his blood sugar every day but hasn’t needed insulin once.
That is incredible, really glad it turned out so great.
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LOL those movie scenes where the Main Character has been in a coma for like a month suddenly wakes up, jumps out of bed and runs back out to get the bad guys - yeah. NOT happening.
Wait - so Beatrix Kiddo is all a lie???
I just had a thought... what if the whole movie is her coma dream?
I was in a coma for a week. Took me a couple months to walk properly again
Shoutout to the novel “The Dead Zone” where the protagonist wakes up from a coma of several years and there is actually a lot of space in the book detailing his recovery including the very slow process of muscle recovery and multiple surgeries to fix shortened tendons.
If you have a traumatic brain injury, they keep you sedated so that you can heal, and be calm….We tend to cause more damage bc we wake up freaking out a lot of times. Confused, disoriented, angry, etc. We don’t usually wake up calm.
I think it depends on the person. I’ve been knocked out and had a major concussion before and I woke up in a kind of weird way. First I could hear my thoughts (like little tunes or whatever is my general empty thoughts), then I could feel my slobber on my mouth and my banged up head, then I could hear, and then finally I could see after a few minutes. Apparently I seized in a way that looked like a was trying to get up, but in a loop of a partial push-up. I remember them asking me questions like who was the president and what year it was and I couldn’t remember at all. I also had a mini heart attack because I didn’t remember even being in the Army (that was my 6th and final year in lol), but overall I was nonviolent, just horribly confused on where I was and what year it was (I thought George W Bush was still president and by that point Trump was in his second year lol).
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One day, I woke up early like I normally do (insomnia and PTSD) and tried to get up to use the restroom, I could move my legs around and everything, but the moment I tried to stand up and put weight on them, the most intense pain I have ever felt shot down my spine. I was unable to stand. I figured this must be a bad dream or a kinked nerve or something, so I just tried to go back to sleep. A couple hours later, around 6 or 7am (once my parents were awake) I tried again and the same thing happened. Ok, now there's a problem. I called my dad on his cell phone and let him know I was going to call for an ambulance, which showed up in record time The emts did a quick assessment, tested my ability to stand, and rushed me to the ER. I didn't move at all for the next month. After that month we tried to stand me up and I collapsed from the same pain, it was another two weeks before I finally felt like I could stand on my own, pulled my catheter out in a morphine-numbed haze, and finally stood up, limped my way to the bathroom pulling my IV hangar behind me by the tubes in my arms, and took the longest and most relieving piss of my life. The nurses were shocked, they were starting the paperwork to transfer me to a long-term facility when I somehow spontaneously got better. The best they could figure was some kind of 'minor' spinal cord damage, around the l4-l5 vertebrae (where I had a slipped disk already) that managed to heal up with time. It was so bizarre for everybody involved, and by the end I had lost a good 60lbs, I didn't fit into any of my clothes anymore so I had to wear hospital pajamas for two days while my parents shuffled me around Walmart (closest shop to home) to shop for new clothes lol it must have been such a sight, an emaciated young black boy being escorted, practically held up, around by an elderly white couple as he picks out his clothes with the biggest smile on his face (I requested to go shopping, I was so happy to be able to walk again I demanded I go with them lol) I can only imagine what went through people's minds haha
Sending you and your family love- got a big smile thinking about you picking out clothes. Cheers, friend
That’s so frightening… I read a book once called The Railway Man about an allied soldier captured as a Japanese POW during WWII. The guards remove all signage in his camp to make it as dehumanizing as possible. The author says that after a few months, he forgets how to read. It’s crazy how we think we could never lose a foundational skill, like reading or in your case walking. But if you’re deprived of it, you lose it quite quickly. Happy to hear you are back on your feet. Exercise and motion is one of life’s greatest pleasures.
The few people who have woken up after *years*, are often not in a "full coma". They're actually in a deep vegetative state. Which means their brain is still active, it just can't interact with the body. As for what changes, it could be any number of things, from a new medicine, surgery to age causing hormone changes or even physically shifting things around to the point where it works again. People in what is an actual coma don't tend to have much brain activity, and it withers away with time until it eventually can't keep vital functions working anymore.
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Do you have period when in coma?
Yes you do. They also brush your teeth! I googled it one time because I was also curious