A coma is a state of unconsciousness when a person is unresponsive and cannot be woken up. It can be caused by a number of reasons, including a severe head injury and even alcohol poisoning, and usually lasts a few weeks, during which time the person may start to gradually wake up and gain consciousness, or progress into a different state of unconsciousness.
The experience of being in a coma, however, differs from person to person, and those who emerge from it can have very contrasting memories. Interested in these recollections, Redditor u/jassandra asked other users: "Those who have been in a coma, what was it like?" And the comment section got full of interesting stories. Here are some of them.
#1
Not me, but my dad has described his coma after his car accident. He was pulled up a little too far at a stop sign, and a guy who was speeding and on his phone swerved off the road.
So he was in a coma for about two months. On my end, it wasn’t like the movies. He didn’t just wake up miraculously. It was two months of steady improvements. One eye opened, then a few days later his other eye was half open, then he could wiggle a toe, then he could move his fingers, etc.
On his end, he said he could hear bits and pieces of what was happening around him, but it was like a dream that he couldn’t wake up from. When me and my two younger siblings would come in and talk to him, his heart rate would go down. When a football game was on and his friends came to sit with him and watch it, the nurses made them turn it off once his team started losing because his heart rate blew up.
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195points
General practitioner, medical researcher, and founder of PrimeHealth Clinical Research, Iris Gorfinkel, M.D., told Bored Panda that it's a good idea to start talking about a coma by taking a look at a paper by Dr. Eelco and Dr. Coen, which explains how contemporary motion pictures shaped our understanding about this condition.
"True, it's old; it was done in 2006. But it's still relevant and informs us of the way people think," Gorfinkel said. Dr. Eelco and Dr. Coen looked at 30 different movies depicting a coma and found that the most common reason (18 out of 30 cases) for why people fell into it were motor vehicle accidents.
"What happens to these individuals who are comatose, they get up and suddenly, they're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, they literally open their eyes, they look great, they sound bright, and their makeup is even done," Gorfinkel recalled these pictures.
Next, the doctors pulled 72 viewers and asked them whether these movies seem realistic. The majority said no but 39% said they could potentially allow these scenes to influence decisions in real life, meaning that misrepresentation of a coma and awakening from it was common in motion pictures and has probably shaped an ill public perception of the condition.
#2
My wife was in a coma for about a month. I brought the kids to see her later after prepping them. Despite the initial shock at seeing her with a ventilator, they were vocally loving, hugged her, held her hand, etc. We sat in the room and talked. At one point, I asked the kids what their favorite vacation was. They both agreed it was the road trip we took from Vegas down to Arizona. My wife heard it all but in a hallucinatory way."
"We talked about driving all over and seeing all the incredible sights. We talked about rides and amusements along the way. It was nice, then they kissed her goodbye saying, 'See you soon.
My wife now has — nearly 10 years later — a vivid memory of a second Arizona vacation she went on with us. She even asked me early on after she woke up if we had gone on vacation recently. Her mind went through every detail we talked about and even added to it as if it all actually happened. The memories of it are as real as any.
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175points
There are different levels of a coma, ranging from very deep where the patient shows no response or awareness at all, to shallower levels where they respond to stimulation by movement or opening eyes. Still shallower levels can occur, where the patient is able to somehow reply to speech. The exact level of a coma is usually determined by the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS).
Now let's go back to the definition that we briefly introduced in the beginning of this text. What is a coma? "It's a state of prolonged unconsciousness [that] can last from days to years," Gorfinkel said. "Basically, for whatever reason, the brain is not getting the oxygen that it needs and that can happen because of trauma that can [be caused by] cardiac arrest. That actually accounts for a full quarter of why a coma happens. Stroke is another 20%. But it can also happen because of things like brain tumors and infections, whether viral, bacterial, or fungal. It can happen because of drugs ... [or] other toxins like alcohol, and also because of blood sugar (it's either too high or too low), because of heat ... What happens to these individuals is they simply stop responding to the things we normally do. They don't respond to light, they don't respond to sound, they don't respond to pain."
Gorfinkel pointed out that even though these people have their eyes closed, what they're experiencing is not sleep. "When we look at their brainwaves, the pattern is totally different."
#3
Not me, but my dad—he was in a coma for about a week after riding his bike head first into a telephone pole. He says that he remembers the accident itself, followed by an out of body experience. He remembers flying high above the scene of the accident and looking down at his body laying there lifeless. He remembers seeing a woman from the neighborhood rushing over to see what happened and other neighbors brought out a flat beach chair to put him on while waiting for the ambulance.
After he woke up from the coma and immediately broke down crying as the influx of stimulation and confusion poured in. His brain was stuck about 5 or 6 years in the past. He remembered his phone number, address, etc. but from years ago and he couldn’t remember the current info. It took about two weeks after coming to for his brain to catch back up to current day.
The spookiest part? He went to the house of the woman who he had seen first from “above” and asked if she had been the first to get there and other info about what he saw from outside his body and.... she confirmed all of it.
Pretty wild!
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156points
But those who are looking after coma patients undergo a lot as well. The pressure that they experience is horrendous. "They feel a full burden of care," Dr. Gorfinkel said. "Sometimes they even go into clinical depression. And the truth of the matter is, what they go through is very unlike what movies show because when most people emerge out of a coma, they are suffering very significant deficits. These include physical deficits (because if a person has not been moving for days, weeks, months, or years, they're going to have muscular atrophy from disuse) and intellectual disabilities. Their thinking may not be the way it used to."
Even if we disregard serious psychological difficulties, Gorfinkel said this goes with anybody who has been threatened with their life. "We see that 50% of people who have heart attacks experience clinical depressions. People who emerge from a coma struggle tremendously with very deep questions about life and its meaning." It's a very serious condition that can affect not just the person who plunges into it but also everyone around them.
#4
Not my story but on a previous post asking this question there was a guy who talked about having a whole second life while in his coma. He talked about vivid memories of his family and friends. He met a woman and they had kids together, then one day he was sitting in his lounge and started staring at this lamp. There was something off about it but he couldn't tell what. He stared at it. And kept staring all throughout the night... Then he realised the lamp wasn't real. Suddenly he started recalling his real life and woke up from his coma. He said that to this day he still grieves the loss of his family from the coma. I believe he said he sometimes sees his coma children in his dreams.
It was really interesting and depressing.
150points
#5
I know this will get buried but I’ll post my experience anyway. I went to the hospital with renal failure and a pulse ox reading of 32. I remember the nurse saying my pee looked like root beer and when she stabbed my arm to give me an IV all she said was “Uh oh...” My arm got really warm and my dad moved my head so I wouldn’t see how much blood was coming out. Next thing I know I’m in a hospital bed, tearing through the desert at 60+ MPH. Nothing but me and a hospital bed. No motor, nothing. Just cruising through the desert. I’d see all sorts of weird things, most specifically was Ronald McDonald. I saw him all the time. Then my hospital bed would come to a screeching halt and I’d be in the living room of someone I knew. Gramdma, good friends, former coaches... basically any living room I had spent time in with someone I cared about. The weird thing was the living rooms were always three walled. One wall was missing and beyond that wall was a barren desert. We would talk for awhile about god knows what, then I’d be pulled back into the desert cruising at 60 mph again. It happened over and over again. Sometimes the same living rooms would reappear, but almost all of them were unique. When I came out of the coma everyone kept commenting how good my hair looked. I couldn’t figure out why they kept saying that so I finally asked my mom how long I had been asleep. She said 13 days. And I had cards and flowers from all these people who’s living rooms I’d been visiting in my coma. It was surreal and I definitely can’t explain it. Especially since most of the cards came from people who weren’t allowed to visit me in intensive care and were sending well wishes in writing, not in person.
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127points
#6
10 days I don't remember anything about. Not sure if it is a blessing or a curse. Hit by a drunk driver. My wife and I lived, our daughter didn't.
To me that stuff on tv where the part wakes up and everything goes back to normal is bulls**t. When I woke up I was in a conversation with another pt. Air Force had sick bays, not individual rooms. I can only compare it to a computer, I had been hung in an update and then, flicker, new screen.
I had "woken up" several days earlier, but nothing stayed with me. My wife says I was paranoid that they were "putting acid in my I.V." because I was tripping. I was hostile and aggressive. I read the medical records, they kept me restrained for a couple of days after I hit an nurse. I started acting normal so they moved me from ICU to the sick bay.
The blessing is forgetting 10 days of some pretty intense pain. I was broken in a lot of places and bruised in all the rest. Never knew you could bruise some of them. That freaked me out.
The curse was I wasn't there when my wife needed me most. There is that tinge of guilt that she faced that grief alone for 10 days. I know, couldn't be helped. not my fault, but live through it and tell me how it feels.
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110points
#7
I can only compare it to when you’re little and wake up at a friends house and don’t know where you are. I was in a coma for 2 months after a bad car accident. It wasn’t medically induced, it was thanks to brain damage. When I woke up I was alone in the hospital room and had no clue what happened or why I was there. I had a neck brace on due to a broken neck so I figured something was wrong with my neck but was unsure how or what happened.
For some reason I thought I was 60 years old (I was in my 20s). I was paranoid and scared, but didn’t know why I was there. I used context clues to figure out I was in the hospital. It was frightening. After about 5 minutes I decided to go back to sleep. 2 months of sleep wasn’t quite long enough.
95points
#8
I was in a medically induced coma for 3 days during my cancer treatment. My identical twin brother died around a year prior (also to cancer) and the entire time I was in the coma, I was with him. We were in a large green field with lots of sun and my conversations with him felt real.
Other than that, I didn’t hear any of my family talking to me while I was asleep. It was just like I had gone to bed for 3 days, and I woke up feeling very tired.
I do wonder whether my interactions with my twin brother were real, or if it was just the drugs I was given causing them
94points
#9
2 weeks induced because of Swine Flu. During this time Oprah announced she was ending the Oprah Winfrey Show. I was very upset to learn this after the fact. Mostly because the tv running in my room + the drugs they gave me to keep me under gave the most cinematic dreams I've ever experienced - somehow the news of Oprah retiring filtered into my brain as dreaming about saving the whales with her in a submerged Chicago. We had champagne brunch. It was excellent. I was also a superhero who could fly and fought my enemies on the rims of volcanoes.
And then I woke up and not only could I not fly, but my buddy Oprah had betrayed me into retirement. I was crushed.
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83points
#10
I had meningitis when i was 12, which got misdiagnosed for stomach flue and ended up with me being taken to the hospital last minute. The last memory i had was 'falling asleep' watching the emergency news on the Brussels airport attack. I later on had a sort of fever dream, which ended up to be true, about my parents driving me to tge ER saying 'it's ok' over and over again. I couldn't move or talk, so it seemed more like a dream than something that was actually happening. I saw the lights of the ER parking lot which made me close my eyes and after that it was like taking a nap. I had no awareness of time at all, it's like going to sleep and just waking up what feels like a second later but it's actually morning already. I woke up 6 days later, highly drugged but only gained consciousness the day after. My first 'memory' after waking up is opening my laptop in the hospital bed to play minecraft, i have no idea what happened or what i said when I woke up before that.
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77points
#11
I was in medically induced coma for about a week.
The coma itself is not much to talk about - there is just a gap in your memory, even from before it happened (I don't even remember the accident that brought me there in the first place).
Waking up from it is much different story though. Since I was fully dosed by painkillers and sedatives and whatnot I was basically high as kite and since the trauma I suffered was very serious my brain constructed very stressful, vivid nightmares I remember to this day.
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74points
#12
My daughter was in a medically induced coma for two days from a drowning accident. She made a full recovery, but the things she told us about freaked me out but my wife kind of knew and accepted it.
Imagine having your three year old tell you about playing mermaid tea party with your dead parents. Then describing how she was denied being able to come into the gates of Heaven because St. Patrick told her it wasn’t time yet. (I know it’s supposed to be St. Peter, but I wore a shirt that reads St. Patrick is my homeboy and she exclaimed excitedly that she met him).
The after effects have been extremely weird. Mentally she is ok, physically and emotionally okay, but she sees ghosts. I could write a whole r/nosleep series on what she sees and the things she has said. The most recent one was a few months ago after her uncle/my brother in law passed suddenly.
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64points
#13
In 2016 I was in a coma from March 31 to May 5, then half awake for another month after that.
It was like the longest scariest dream of my life. I was medically induced by a fentanyl drip for about a week at first and let me tell you, fentanyl is a demon. Whacky dreams about fighting corrupt hospital officials, so my brain knew where I was.
They didn't think I'd ever talk or walk again, but in the hospital bed I laughed at an episode of That 70s Show and inclined every day after. Putting me at about 85% health overall these days. But pretty much an average guy.
Oh it was a head injury, had a seizure in the bathroom that made me fall onto the sink.
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61points
#14
When I was in 5th grade I fell out of a tree and bonked my head pretty well. I woke up 3? days later in the hospital. For me, the experience is easily summarized in three parts:
When I fell, I blacked out before I hit the ground... or at least that is where memory fades. And "fades" is really the best word. It was as if my consciousness was drained away and then blackness and nothingness. It was as if my body knew how badly it was going to hurt and so it shut down.
I have very, very, very, vague memories while in the coma of hearing my Dad reading a book, or my Mom telling me that she knew I would pull through, or of a tube in my nose. But these were always super fuzzy moments and I never was conscious during them, it was more like a half second of being aware of one particular thing--the way the tube felt being taped against my arm and wishing I could reach out and move it--and then back into the nothingness. I think that I was somewhat aware of the fact that I was a little more aware each time that this happened but honestly I am not certain of even that much.
Waking up was sudden. So, so sudden. I was in blackness. Had a moment of awareness, like "my neck hurts" and then the pain was magnitudes higher. No longer a distant perception but something that I was actively conscious of. Waking up was the most painful moment of my life and I just started crying and then couldn't even cry it hurt so bad. I think that had more to do with injuries sustained to my neck and head than the coma, but that is what it was like. After an hour my body was used to the pain and I was totally normal, albeit very weak, hungry, and thirsty.
I survived and am fine now without any lasting issues.
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59points
#15
I was in one for three weeks after a brain aneurysm ruptured. I don't remember anything. I remember waking up in rehabilitation confused and weak. I atrophied so badly, I'm 6' 4" and was like 150 pounds when I woke up. I'm now like 210. I also grew two inches. All around would not recommend if you can avoid it. But better than being an organ donor. Edit: not to disparage organ donors!! My family is under explicit instructions from me that I want anything they can use donated. Either to people, or science, I'm just grateful I get to use them for a while longer!
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58points
#16
Was hit by a car when i was 5 years old. Ended up with toxic shock syndrome and went into a coma for 4 months. I just remember some very weird 'dreams,' which i can still recall vividly 26 years later. Someone mentioned something about visiting another realm, and that's pretty close to the mark.
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53points
#17
I was in one for like 2 weeks I would not wish it on anyone. For me I was in a long dream. I did realize I was asleep for a long time. I was still able to feel and hear, which was interpreted into my dream. Example: My hands were restrained so I would not pull out any tubes and my dream was that I was being held in a prison.
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53points
#18
I was in a medically induced coma last year after a cardiac arrest. I remember nothing from the day it happened to when I woke up. It just feels like I existed, then suddenly I didn't, and then I did again. It's the craziest feeling going from sitting at my desk in my office to waking up in a hospital bed and learning over a week of your life has passed. I wish I could say I remembered anything my loved ones said to me while I was "asleep," but I don't. All I remember is opening my eyes and hearing my mom say, "Cinnamonbun, you're in the hospital, your heart stopped but you're okay now."
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51points
#19
I was in coma because I fell 15 meters and broke nearly all of my the bones in my back and it was horrible. When I woke up I thought the nurses were torturing me and that I need to escape. I started hallucinating a lot and couldn't even understand that I am in hospital. The biggest problem were my dreams. I thought I was a time traveler or some kind of God. I thought I was shot by the police and other s**t. I still have flashbacks to this day and it is no fun. But I am getting therapy to deal with it. And I could watch p**n in my dreams so yeah. It was confusing and horrible at the same time. 0/10 would not do again
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46points
#20
I was put in a medically induced coma after a car accident in which the driver fell asleep at the wheel, swerved off the road, and my car flipped over three times. I suffered a brain bleed and traumatic brain injury, and was operated on, with the doctors removing a piece of my skull to relieve the pressure. I was put under for three weeks, and I remember distinctly having a two week long dream. I don’t really know how I knew it was two weeks long, but I had a variety of really weird dreams.
The dreams included scenarios like: 1) I was a box of ginger ale, and I was in a race against a box of Dr. Pepper in a supermarket. We both had a shopping cart we were on, and I barely won against the Dr. Pepper. After that I wanted ginger ale for weeks. 2) something involving a bunch of ninjas and a boat and an assassination that was going to occur. 3) I was a fish stuck in some kind of enclosure that I had to escape. 4) I was in some kind of turf war with my fraternity (they were just my friends) against a rival fraternity, and we both had battleships. Gravy and mash potatoes were involved somehow. 5) I was trying to escape this hospital I was at but I was too weak to walk and could not figure out how to get out of my bed for the life of me.
When I woke up three weeks later, I was a little confused and had to piece together what happened from bits and pieces the doctors had told me. I would laugh very easily, like just from random phrases my friends who would visit me were saying to me. I had to undergo rehab for three months afterwards, learning how to walk and talk again. The doctors told me that my recovery was pretty fast. I still suffer from impaired concentration and energy levels, and I managed to get prescribed adderall for that issue. One positive out of that, I guess.
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45points