“The Brain Is A Fragile Thing”: 50 People Who Woke Up From A Coma Describe What It Was Actually Like

My mum was in a medically induced coma. Her lungs had collapsed and was on the ventilator. Doctors said she wouldn't make it and we should be prepared for the worst. But my dad and I didn't give up on her and my mum is quite the fighter. We would visit her every day and sit beside her bed. I would caress her arm and tell her about my day and constantly reassure her that she was in safe hands and we were right next to her. Against all odds, my mum pulled through. When she was regaining strength, I asked her if she heard me talking to her and she said, she could her me calling out to her. In her comatose state, she felt trapped like someone had strapped her to her bed and wouldn't release her. She saw visions of doctors coming to her bed and injecting her with unknown substances and she would feel terrified. She would call out for my dad and I but we would never come. She said, she felt angry at us for not rescuing her. But ever so often, she would hear me saying, "mom" and feel a warm sensation on her arm. She said, that sensation and my voice was the only reason she needed to come back to us.

In 2013 I was put into a medically induced coma for about 10 days. I only have 1 memory the entire time I was out. My stepfather came to visit and was talking to me and I could hear him and I was trying really hard to talk back, but I couldn't get any words to come out. I was getting immensely frustrated in my head that I couldn't talk back. After they woke me up several days later I was telling him about it and he said that when he was talking to me my eyes were moving around really weirdly, but that was it.

I had no idea that I had been in an induced coma when I woke up. I thought it was the same day that I went into the hospital when and after they got the respirator out and I could finally talk, I kept asking to watch something on TV that would've been on that day that I'd come in. The nurse had to explain to me that I had been out for 10 days. It felt like I just lost that entire time that I was out. It definitely didn't feel like I'd been asleep for any longer than just for the surgery.

Ten years ago my son was put in an induced coma for a week to allow him to recover from a severe croup infection. He was four at the time and in the days after he woke up he talked about memories he had from the hospital. He remembered his mum reading him. He remembered me telling his little sister not to take Rufus (his oversized cuddly toy dog). He remembered hearing me talk about the Transformers movie with his cousin. We were all really surprised at how much he could recall from when he was unconscious. That said… he did respond to his mum one day when she told him it was OK to p**p. The nurse was concerned after day 3 that he hadn’t been to the toilet yet and suggested that he was aware he wasn’t on a toilet. She asked mum to tell him he could go to the toilet in the nappy. He squirmed a little bit and finally did his business. He made a good recovery too and is now a healthy, stroppy 14 year old.

I was in an induced coma for just under a month.

For the most part I dreamed absolutely vivid and terrifying nightmares that incorporated the world around me. Most of the time I dreamed I was on a boat that was sinking (the bed I was on moved automatically to prevent bedsores), but there are also individual points that I remembered. A parade of friends who were either laughing or crying at me as I was tortured (a group of twenty or so friends skipped school to come see me), my father trying to fight someone (him yelling at a nurse about something), and someone trying to choke me (from being intubated).

As the medications were weaned and I started having a longer and longer periods of lucidity everyone had to keep reminding me that, no, I wasn't on a boat, and no, you can't pull the staples out of your scalp.

The boat thing really was traumatizing.I had nightmares about boats (and helicopters, but that was from the Life Flight) for a few years afterward. Before I used to love going out on the water, but afterward even going to the beach would cause me to shake and have cold sweats. It probably took almost a decade before I was able to go to the beach and actually enjoy it.

I’ll have to emphasize the “varying degrees of consciousness” that is mentioned upthread. I was in a coma for 11 days, and I remember none of it. Yay for amnesia! I don’t remember the 3-4 months before the coma, I don’t remember the car accident that led to the coma, I don’t remember being in a coma, I don’t remember waking up from the coma, and I don't remember the hospital or the 3-4 months after the accident. TBH my memory is pretty spotty for a couple of years following the accident.

You might want to look up the Glasgow coma scale, which is used by doctors to measure the “depth” of the coma.

I was in and out if awareness. When aware, I half-screamed/half-cried. No one noticed. It's a stressor that is steadily going away. Almost 2 years.

I was in a coma for nearly a month. I had contracted encephalitis and they didn't think I would live.

I wasn't aware I was in a coma, but I do have memories of things that happened. For example, I know a particular relative visited and recall some things that were said in the room where I was. I was aware of people around me, but didn't understand where I was or anything.

The oddest part was that I only learnt later was that I wasn't just laid there and that I would move around a lot and on one occasion even got out of bed and wandered down the corridor dragging wires and tubes - including catheters behind me.

When I awoke, I have the memories described above but pretty much no memory of anything else of while being ill and for a lot of months before.

Induced comma (2 1/2 months) after giving birth: I don't remember the last month of pregnancy and didn't even meet my daughter until she was almost 5 months old. I don't remember anything that happened. While in a coma, my family came from all over because they were told I may not make it, so there was always a flow of people in and out. I don't remember any of them being there. I do remember the dream. I was in a coffin-like, clear sided, chamber filled with a goo. I was connected to it and other machines. (Think matrix) I could see my friends and family through the glass, but I couldn't hear them, or get a clear look at them. I couldn't move or talk. It was hell for me because even as a dream, I felt trapped, but unlike a normal dream I couldn't/didn't wake up. I remember one time I was trying to get out, all I remember is the feeling of drowning, not able to breath. I don't remember the exact moment they brought me out. When I woke I was connected to multiple machines, breathing machine, feeding tube, and lots of others. By this time most of my family had to go back to their lives. My husband and the family that lives in the area were there, but everyone else was gone. I will say this, I suffered heart, liver, and kidney failure. Due to the heart failure my lungs were filled with fluid. (They had to get drained twice, both times after I woke up). The doctors explained that because I was not fully aware of what was happening, so my mind created it's own interpretation of what was happening. It used things that I knew (matrix-like setting). They said my friends and family were there because my brain was working and could hear them. It took about a little over a year to fully recover. And I heard voices for about a year and a half after everything. The doctors said that the voices are my brain still processing all the voices I heard while out. Imagine for a moment. You are sitting in a room. You can hear two people talking through the wall. You can hear them, but it is muffled enough that you can't understand what they are saying. The voices change, but you can never understand what they are saying. That was what the voices sounded like.

My grandma was in a coma for 10 days when I was little. I would sing you are my sunshine to her every day as that was our special song. She woke up while I was singing it one day and has always said that it’s what pulled her from it :).

I was in a induced coma after having a motorcycle accident and breaking my leg. The break had complications that caused the fat from the bone marrow to get into my blood stream and cause problems for my lungs and brain. I was under for 13 days but distinctly remember every bit of it. I thought that I had been working as a nurse at some made up plastic surgery/emergency somewhere in Asia. I made friends with colleagues that never existed, or at least not in a physical sense. It was very difficult for my family when I woke up as I argued with them about where I was and what I had been doing and the doctors told them that I might stay that way forever and that there was no way of knowing just yet. The problem for me was in the whole split reality. Everything felt just as real as the rest of my life and it really made me question reality. I often wonder about how influenced my dream was by what was going on around me in icu.

Coma at age 16. Kicked in the head during a high school soccer match, I went dark for 3 days. all I remember is getting to the field (it was an away game) and boom. 3 days later I wake up in the hospital. Didn't recognize my parents or siblings for the first 2 days, but I somehow knew to trust them. Within 3 weeks l remembered most people and who I was and what had happened. I was in bedrest for 26 days- and on the 27th day I woke up I was able to do a half day at school. 6 years later, I'm doing well, in Film school with a seizure disorder called myoclonus.

Middle 2015, kidney was failing, caught pneumonia. The doc says we're going to put you out for a few days. I was actually unconscious for five weeks. My parents flew across country to be with me. I have a very sharp recollection of the many dreams and few nightmares I had. The one that sticks out with outside input in particular was Bindi Irwin, yes, Steve Irwin's daughter. She was on TV or more particularly I believe Inside Edition getting ready for Dancing with The Stars. My parents were watching some programming with her on it. Well she popped up into one of my dreams and we were somewhere doing yoga. Always struck me as strange. When I woke I noticed her on Inside Edition which my parents almost always watch and it clicked. I may or may not have had other "outside input" but this was the only one I could recall.

There are varying degrees of consciousness included in the blanket term “coma,” so there is not a single answer for this question.

I was unconscious for 11 days once. I remember my last moments of consciousness, I remember a moment when a nurse was giving me an ice bath and talking to me, and I remember a moment with my mother standing over me weeping. Otherwise, there was nothing.

I was in a short medically-induced coma after a needle biopsy of the lung placed me on a vent for a bit. When the doctors were deciding whether to take me off 0r not, they got sloppy about writing the meds that kept me "under". At about the same time, I started bleeding from the biopsy. So I wake up to a fully paralyzed body, on a vent, not sure what is going on, and I hear my mom crying and telling me it was going to be okay. I thought they were pulling the plug on me. I tried my hardest to move anything, focusing on fingers. Nothing. One of my worst memories.

My sister was in a medically induced coma. She experienced extremely vivid and weird dreams/nightmares that she thought were reality. They repeated over and over and felt like deja vu from her old surgeries.

Was in a coma for a few days following a car accident (subdural hematoma), and I dreamed of the same car accident over and over, then looking at the night sky and everything fading to black. Then repeat.

I woke up in the middle of night confused in the ICU, realized that it wasn’t a dream, and calmed myself down, told myself to go back to sleep, and I’ll figure it out in the morning.

Crazy.

My grandmother fell into a coma a couple of days after having a stroke. She was in "the big sleep", as my family called it, for six days and we all gathered around because the doctors weren't sure if she was going to come out of it or not. I sat down next to her bed, held her hand, and said "Hi Grandma, it's " and she squeezed my hand. Instant tears. She did eventually come out of it and when I asked her if she remembered anything from when she was "sleeping", she said no. It gave me a measure of comfort to think that the hand squeeze I received was intended and not a muscle spasm, but perhaps it was unintended after all.

I was in a coma for five days and all I can say was there was nothingness. I don’t remember hearing anything or any spiritual encounters just nothingness. Then coming to while the nurse was cleaning me and ripping out the ventilator and scaring the living daylights out of the nurse because they quite frankly weren’t expecting me to regain consciousness but could not find any family members to stop life support.

I was in a medically-induced coma for four days due to meningitis/encephalitis. My last memory was collapsing at home, then I have a few brief flashes of memories of me fighting the restraints in the back of the ambulance, and that's it. I woke up four days later, but my memory didn't start working again till the fifth day. It seemed instantaneous to me.

I've had slight memory impairment ever since. The brain is a fragile thing.

My best friend was put in a coma from a football injury. He basically told me all that he saw while in a coma was nothing but darkness. He woke up after 3 weeks and basically had to learn how to walk, talk, and wipe again.

It's basically like your brain getting rebooted and everything you ever learned get's forgotten. I met him AFTER the coma, so I'm not sure what he was like before. But, I do know he's done some stupid [things] as an adult due to the head injury and brain damage.