12 Puzzling Questions of Coma Coma People

It is a little uncomfortable to admit that, in the modern world, coma has become a somewhat ‘idealized’ phenomenon. Explaining better: how many stories and movie scripts are based, for example, on the idea that a person reevaluates their life, conserves their youth, gets forgiveness or even leaves their comfort zone after having been through this situation?

O awesome.club decided to research what people who actually experienced the coma felt and how they live now.

Before talking about the world of loss of consciousness, we want to remind you that this state can be brought about by accidents much more trivial than we usually imagine. It can be from a simple brain injury, poisoning or even problems with circulation.

No coma lasts longer than 4 weeks. What happens next is no longer a coma, but one of the following states: either recovery, or a vegetative state (for example, when the eyes are open), or the condition of minimal consciousness (when the person unconsciously reacts to the environment), or stupor (a deep and continuous dream) or death. In any case, there is a universal law: the longer a person stays in a coma, the less likely they are to come out of it.

But the history of medicine knows many exceptions or cases where a person woke up not from a coma dozens of days later, but dozens of years later. For example, a decade ago, news spread around the world that a Polish railwayman, Jan Grzebski, had emerged from a coma that had lasted 19 years. And the longest coma, according to the Guinness Book of Records, that of American Elaine Sposito (who entered this state due to a bad anesthesia) lasted about 37 years. But, unfortunately, the patient never came out of it.

Due to these cases, the victim’s doctors and relatives often have to face one of the most complex ethical issues: leaving the patient in a coma or disconnecting him from the devices that keep him alive. In most cases, in the end, everything is decided by the money. Hospital costs to keep a patient in a coma are very high.

On the Internet there is only one more or less reliable statistic on the subject, and it is from 2002. At that time, the annual maintenance of a patient in a coma cost, on average, about 140 thousand dollars. For low-risk patients, this cost was approximately $87,000 per year.

Here the answer is quite complicated, as it all depends on the depth of the coma, its classification and the reasons that caused it. Most doctors advise, in any case, to treat the patient as if he were listening. This is because many of the people who have experienced this state describe it as a common dream or something like the following:

As we know, most people remember coma as if it were a quick dream. But there are also those who ‘see’ something during this mysterious state and here are the main varieties of these visions:

A tunnel. There is an assumption that this is how people see the light from the lamps on the operating table.

battles🇧🇷
own memories (especially with the participation of family members). Reactions to the environment.

Yup. It’s called the incarceration syndrome. This is when the patient is diagnosed with a coma and has a clear conscience, sees and hears everything, but as a result of paralysis and complete loss of speech, is unable to express himself. What’s worse is that, in the presence of such a patient, all formal medical issues are freely discussed, including the probability of death, the subsequent distribution of his organs (yes, it happened), or even acts of a violent nature (this has also happened). , which can cause a traumatic mental disorder.

The bright side is that these cases show that there is a possible way out of the coma. And this again confirms the fact that you should always talk to the patient, as if he can understand what is being said.

Not.

The muscles of a person who hasn’t woken up for a long time and doesn’t do any physical exercise lose mass and weaken. Most likely you can’t even move your limbs right away, let alone get up and run.

In a prolonged coma, the work of all organs and systems of the body in general decreases, muscle atrophy occurs, the level of hormones and the volume of circulating blood are reduced, but everything continues to work. Therefore, the person will grow or age anyway, albeit much more slowly than his contemporaries.

For example, the aforementioned Elaine Esposito, went into a coma at age 6 and stayed there for 37 years, only opening her eyes a few times but never fully waking up. During that time, she gained 39 kg and her hair turned slightly gray.

As we have already described in the previous paragraph, the organism and, in particular, the uterus, continues to function normally. That’s why menstruation occurs. During this period, nurses use special sanitary pads or adult diapers.

Only indirectly: even trivial stress can cause attacks or accidents which, in turn, can lead to coma.

Even without taking into account the paranormal cases, where people supposedly discover they have superpowers after coming out of a coma, strange things happen. There are recorded cases of people who, after coma, suddenly began to speak in another language.

Australian Ben McMahon was studying Chinese. In 2012, after a car accident, he was in a coma for a week, and when he woke up, he began to speak perfect Chinese. But at the same time, he could no longer speak English. Some time later, he remembered his mother tongue, but he did not lose the ability to speak Chinese, which helped him find a girlfriend on a television show in that country. What a fate! The same (although less romantic) story happened to Croatian Sandra Ralic, who studied German. After a day in a coma, Sandra couldn’t remember the Croatian language, but she spoke perfect German. An even stranger situation occurred with the American Michael Boatwright, a traveler and English teacher who, after a coma, woke up speaking Swedish and stating that his name was Johan Ek.

These types of anomalies still have no scientific explanation.

While there are surprising cases of people waking up to certain words that are important to them, such as a familiar sound (like, for example, this man woke up to a song by the Rolling Stones), this is not a panacea.

In any case, as we have already said, it is worth talking to the patient, putting on his favorite music, calming him down and touching him.