Does that really happen?
I have a nack of running out of space in thread tityles.
I am curious because I’ve always wondered what it would be like to miss out say 15 years of technological progression and then suddenly wake up to find out about it all.
Going into a coma for many years and then suddenly coming out with lucidity intact…
Heh…sounds like marrage / divorce to me…
There was a case a couple years ago of a person coming out of a 20 year coma. I remember hearing it on the radio and thinking about that all day. Could you imagine!?
Also this recent example of a firefighter coming around from a decade long coma:
In 40 years I saw one. A child who had encephalitis, was in a persistant vegatative state for a little over a year. She was admitted on her dad’s birthday in Febuary of one year and awakened on Easter of the next. She still required a lot of rehabilitation.
The movie * Awakenings*, with Robin Williams, is based on a true event. I don’t know the details, but they were not as dramatic as the movie. If you’re unfamilar, Williams character is a physician/researcher who is testing L-Dopa inParkinsonism. He found that some patients, after having had encephalitis as children became vegatative, awakened with the L-Dopa treatment. Leading to the conclusion that parkinsonism could be brought on by brain injury.
We don’t know everything about the brain, heck, we hardly know anything… about anything… But that’s another thread.
There are patients who have been unconscious for shorter periods, who’s CAT and MRI scans have shown such damage that the doctors recommended removal of life support, that woke up.
My daughter-in-law was one.
One week after her injury, the team doctor took me aside and showed me both of her scans. Thy both showed clear damage to the frontal lobe, which is the thought center and to her speech and balance centers. They looked a little like swiss cheese.
Because she had no family present, he asked if I would speak to them and encourage withdrawal.
That night she recognized me. Three days later she “withdrew support” herself by pulling her breathing tube when the nurse wasn’t looking, then swearing at the nurse for keeping her there.
She had retrograde amnesia. She didn’t know that my son had died, but she remember hearing my voice that night the doctors wanted to let her die.
Today her scans show no significant injury. She does have a seizure disorder, that is well controlled with drugs.
She has no other signs that she was ever critically ill. She did have 6 months of physical rehab in hospital, and anothe 6 months at my house.
But not a lot changed in the world while she was “gone.”
Supposedly Conley Holbrook of North Carolina came out of an eight-year-long coma, and was lucid enough to name the attackers who allegedly beat him into the coma.
So, to answer your question, the answer might be “Yes, but that’s not normally the way it happens.”