Hello all. I am currently reading Irvine Welsh’s “Marabou Stork Nightmares”. The whole book is told through the mind of a coma patient. It is a very good book, but it got me wondering what, if anything, is happening in a coma patient’s mind? I mean, at first I thought it might be something like a dream, but it seems to me it’s not just like being asleep. I thought I’ve heard that people in comas can hear, though I don’t know how this would factor into it. In the book, the narrator goes from a world of his own creation, to remembering his past, to being in a deep well, where he can hear those who talk to him. Could a coma patient be experiencing similar things? Thanks all.
Quite possibly. The patient might very well be listening to his (or her) next of kin deciding to pull the plug. (I AM KIDDING…plugs are not pulled until the comatose person is brain-dead).
Back to the story. I was in a coma once when someone shoved a sharp object through me and I lost most of my blood. I won’t bore you with the ‘white light NDE’ (which I DID experience), but I was completely unconscious until I came out of it. I didn’t hear a thing, or feel them shoving the foley catheter up my…well, I didn’t feel it.
It was exactly like waking up from a night’s sleep. I didn’t realize that several days had passed and thought that they were kidding me about it. I was convinced beyond all doubt when the catheter came out.
“Get away from me with that Endoscope!!!”
I’ll second that. I was once in a coma for three days, after wrecking an ATV. I didn’t remember anything about the experience, and was very surprised to find out how long I had been out. It was, as tcburnett said, like waking up from a night’s sleep.
No white lights or long tunnels for me, though. I do seem to remember the scent of brimstone…
Don’t have any personal experience here, but, judging from accounts I’ve read, the experience would appear to vary based on the nature of the injury, cause of coma, your overall medical condition, etc. A coma brought on by high fever or a bad drug reaction, I have to think, is bound to differ somewhat from a coma induced by being shot in the head or having your skull crushed in an accident, since different parts of the brain would be affected by the originating event. Some coma patients have said that they could hear and understand everything going on around them and didn’t understand why they couldn’t seem to touch the people who were obviously right there with them. Others wake up and have no recollection whatsoever of the coma itself, the time passed, or what, if anything, went on in their head while they were “away”.
For some reason, Cygnus, I had always assumed that comas induced by being shot in the head were more commonly known as ‘death’, and as such were difficult at best to recover from.
Furthermore, there are those comas induced by cyanide…
You’ve never heard of anyone shot in the head who lived and recovered? Trust me, it does happen. “Shot in the head” is somewhat like “shot in the chest” in the sense that it covers a pretty broad range. If you take a slug in the heart, you’ll probably be dead before you know what hit you. If you get hit in the upper lobe of your right lung, you could well be conscious all the way to the hospital, and discharged before the week ends. If you are shot in the head, the likelihood of fatality and the extent of the damage likewise depends on the location of the wound, the proximity of the shot, and the caliber/type of ammunition, not to mention how quickly you get to the hospital, etc. There are people walking around who still have bullets in their head that were judged more dangerous to remove than to leave, but that didn’t kill them. In fact, I once worked with a person who tried to commit suicide by shooting himself with a gun in the mouth, and he not only lived but recovered fully to the extent that he returned to work and all his other usual functions. Cosmetic damage was extensive, but that’s another subject.
You are quite right about the unlikelihood of recovering from “death”, but mistaken in your thinking that a gunshot wound to the head is invariably fatal.
A few purely random examples, in case you’re still not convinced. You may notice that the victim’s condition ranges from “critical” to “fair” to “thought she’d been hit by a firecracker”. Obviously, some gunshot head wounds result in fatalities, but hopefully these illustrate fairly clearly that not all of them do.
http://www.nashville.net/~melissaj/vcr/1998/july/071398a.htm
http://kcbs-tv.com/news/stories/news-990327-113412.html
http://savannahnow.com/stories/040498/LOCguyshot.html
Cygnus, I’m still not convinced. Explain it a few more times, would you?
I was in an induced coma for five weeks following an operation that resulted in a temperature of 105. I was taken to Intensive care and evetually into a coma. During that time I had a further three operations to correct the problems, and in that time had dialysis, a tracheostomy, pneumonia, blood transfusions and was resussitated a couple of times.
During the coma I had a number of vivid dreams, which I have started to write down to clarify in my mind what went on. The dreams vary widely, but an underlying trend seem to be that I was being held hostage. Later in the coma my eyes must have opened at times as I have incorporated some visions into the dreams.
I went back last week to the intesive care unit and what I saw made sense to some of my dreams. I have managed to walk again after being in hospital for over 4 months and don’t seem to have any lasting effects from this experience although there will be a further operation in 12 months.
Regards
I think Gabby Giffords is a fairly well known example of someone surviving being shot in the head. Malala, the girl who was fighting for education for girls in Pakistan and was shot by the Taliban, is another.
Am I misunderstanding something? I think plenty of people have survived being shot in the head and possibly in a coma because of it. It’s not terribly likely, but certainly happens.
Knows that this is a zombie thread, but posts to send good wishes to indigoblue. I really hope your health gets better.
I was dead for a while, and I didn’t get any of the “go into the light” stuff. I don’t remember anything about it, I only knew I had flatlined because I read my hospital chart. I felt cheated.
I have a friend who was in an induced coma for a couple of months. He said it was like being trapped in a nightmare. He couldn’t hear anyone, couldn’t feel us touching him, had no idea that anyone cared. He says he knows what Hell feels like.
Oh wow, I was not looking at the dates on this thread. My apologies.
Some scary shit sometimes, apparently.
Many people, upon awakening from a medically-induced coma, report that the whole experience seemed like one on-going non-stop nightmare, sometimes of the most gruesome descriptions.
Here is one example, from this article about medically-induced coma in Scientific American. The user comments after the article include this one:
(Yikes! Why is that guy still alive?)
Several other user comments following this one report similar horrors.
I found this by googling for induced coma nightmares, which turned up many many other hits as well, with similar stories.