Hijabs? Muslim traditional dress? You mean Sari’s right?
Tell:
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“You’ve been in a coma… for a long time.”
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“No, we’re talking more than weeks, I’m afraid.”
<insert gentle ‘easing him into the 20-year thing’ here>
- "Well, they’re fine. <said at the same time as Show: (1) below>
Show:
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Recent pictures of his family. (Possibly with 20-year old versions of the same, if available.)
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A newspaper. (Similar to Mangetout’s idea - start out with a medium he’s familiar with and let him ask questions about current politics, world events, etc.)
Best answer yet.
Yes, start with something familiar.
Then, dive headlong into the internet.
Well , if I was the guy waking after 20 years and somebody showed me an 'NSync video , I’d ask to be put back to sleep.
All joking aside–
Seriously, now.
A person who’s been in a coma for twenty years needs reassurance that SOMETHING is constant and unchanging. Once he has this reassurance, he can begin to adjust to the myriad of thimgs that HAVE changed.
So the very first thing you must do is introduce him to your dog. Let them wrestle and roll around on the carpet. Let the dog lick his face. Let them play tug-of-war with the sock.
There will be lots of time to tell the patient about the changes in the world tomorrow morning. And he’ll be a lot more receptive after he’s played with the dog.
Green Bean and Ryan_Liam - Shalwar Kameez, aka Punjabi Suit.
I agree with Mangetout , Ferris and SnugTheJoiner that it’s important to take things slowly, to reassure the guy that this IS the same planet.
Ease him into the idea that we don’t have flying cars for the general public yet.
Man, the temptation to really Eff with someone is powerful for me!
But, first I would reassure him of how his friedns and family are doing. Let him get caught up on the emotional stuff.
Then, explain to him the new world picture. This includes Cold War developements, 9/11, AIDS, hate crimes, amazing computer technology improvements, Jesus’ return and the Rapture, rebuilding from the global thermonuclear war after the Rapture took only the fundies but lost power halfway up the atmosphere and dropped them all on the Vatican, alt rock, new Star Wars and Star Trek movies/series, viagra, Hair Club For Men, cable TV, etc…
Serious, tho… ease him into it AFTER dealing with the emotional needs.
No matter what you did, his first question would probably concern his loved ones and whether they were all still around, right? How could you gently break that to someone so early on? Poor fellow.
This was a question in the Miss Universe pageant a few years ago, I remember of the answers was something along the lines of, “I’d tell him to get up and stop dreaming and go out and do things.”
The first thing I would show him would be the E! channel. Because the lives of celebrities we don’t personally know are more important than our own.
Sonny Bono’s Congressional district was in California.
Sonny has also been dead for several years, and I’m not aware that he was ever particularly respected. He WAS Sonny Bono, after all.
No, the IBM PC, the Apple Lisa, and the just-debuted Apple Macintosh were.
Television remote controls were invented in the 1950s. Most TV sets came with remote controls by 1984.