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Friday, 21 May 2021

Coma



I was recently talking to a chap about the coronavirus caper and he told me about one of his elderly customers who became very ill with Covid-19. So much so that the old guy went into a coma and at one point was expected to die. Fortunately he recovered and afterwards was asked if being in a coma was much the same as being asleep.

Apparently in his case it wasn’t. While in a coma the chap had a succession of nightmares which of course he couldn’t escape because of his condition. It was so bad that he now has therapy for the nightmares as part of his recovery. Sounds grim and maybe this is common coma knowledge, but it's not something I’d heard of before. Kicking the bucket almost sounds preferable.

2 comments:

Sam Vega said...

I had heard about this, including people who had intense and terrifying religious experiences while in the induced coma.

"a condition called post-ICU syndrome. Thanks to medical advances, a growing number of patients are surviving critical illnesses that would have killed them in the past. But that means more people are encountering a range of intense symptoms—psychological in some cases, physical in others—when they leave the hospital. “There are veterans who have been in combat, and their stay in the ICU was more traumatic than their experience in combat,” ...."
https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/08/24/a-29-year-olds-strange-unforgettable-trip-into-a-covid-coma-and-back/

That one's a rather long and sensationalist read, but quite scary.

Death would probably be preferable, but what about the poor people who go through that and then die with that as their last conscious experience?

A K Haart said...

Sam - I'll bookmark that for reading later. It's a difficult point to make, but I do think we often tend to live for too long. That in itself is scary.