This is why I have on multiple occasions told people “I know it sounds stupid but if I’m ever in a coma, do not dare pull the fucking plug on me without an FMRI scan to look for any brain response to the outside world”
I can only imagine how much it could suck to be like this, but the idea of being conscious and realising that I have no way to tell them I’m “in here” while they assume I’m never going to recover and pull the plug, slowly dying of dehydration or hypoxia, that is fucking Nightmare Fuel with a capital N capital F, as in No Fucking Way I ever want that to happen.
I have made it clear on multiple occasions that I don’t care what you do once I’m definitely dead, but if you don’t make fucking sure to the best of science’s ability to check,
… not just accepting the doctor saying I’m not responsive and I’m probably gone… if there’s an afterlife I will haunt them, If not I want them to know how much I disapprove and wish their children and children’s children will look upon the decision to not even check I’m alive with the utmost disapproval.
It’s not fucking hard to check if there’s any brain activity in response to talking or touching or opening eyelids and holding things up in front of them… the alternative feels too monstrous to contemplate. We don’t exactly have dozens of stable coma patients who aren’t already likely to die from other issues related to injuries, etc… it really should be mandatory for stable coma patients to be rigorously scanned to make sure we aren’t accidentally murdering people like this…
Also in case anyone mistakes my phrasing as some sort of pro-life or anti-suicide thing… their body their choise… and I also fully support the right of any locked in person (among many other miserable conditions that also seem fair to allow medical suicide for) to say “fuck it, I’m out, this isn’t living” and be allowed medically assisted suicide, but they at least deserve to choose that to themselves. Hell.. I know I’d want the choice if I was in their shoes. Anyone that thinks someone should be forced to live like that should get their head examined.
150 years ago premature burial was one of the greatest fears of many people.
George Washington famously feared premature burial. While on his deathbed in 1799, he instructed his personal secretary Tobias Lear to make sure he was dead before he was buried:
“Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”
Washington ushered in an era of taphophobia, or fear of premature burial. During the 19th century, popular books and magazines promoted the idea that many people were buried alive. They reported tales of bloody shrouds, gnawed fingers and horribly contorted bodies inside their coffins.
“Less than 150 years ago many medical practitioners freely admitted to being uncertain whether their patients were dead or alive,” wrote Jan Bondeson in Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, published in 2002.
The Roman emperor at the time wrote “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum“ as the reason for his crucifixion and although he was confirmed to be dead with a spear, he rose again on the 3rd day and still lives.
Jesus is (and was) the greatest Jew that walked this earth. His life, death and resurrection is foundational to the world having unrestricted access to the God of the Israelites.
I stumbled upon some cave exploring video where a guy got stuck and died as they could not get him out in time; think he was there for a few days before dying.
Edit; found [0] ; 28 hours it was.
Cave exploring is my worst nightmare (I am claustrophobic) but actually seeing videos of people enjoying that and saying ‘now I cannot move my arms and I only can wriggle part of a inch forward or backward at a time’ [1] while smiling is just the stuff of nightmares to me (this guy does many narrow cave videos that trigger angst in me).
This played out in the news. The rescue lasted 28 hours, but he would have been stuck a few hours longer. I was horrified by it, but also remember being angry about the whole thing. John Edward Jones was 6' tall, 200lbs. (slightly above average weight), 26yo medical student with a wife and child. iirc, his being left in the cave was his final wish, his family negotiated for it, the local Sheriff's dept. was probably relieved about the idea, weary of spending resources rescuing people in trouble. They left his remains where stuck and sealed the cave. It was a popular cave, attracting thousands of tourists annually, but they made a special case for this one reckless thrill-seeker, likely highly intelligent who had amateur experience caving, but not much skill or common sense.
The one thing that is nearly always done is bringing the victim home, but here they did something so bazaar that I still can't quite get my head around it, his widow and child left with the thought that his final resting place was upside down and contorted. By the time he gave up and made his final wish, I do not think he was in his right mind, with support for this by his family in horror and grief, likely also not thinking clearly. Maybe it is for the best that they closed and sealed the cave, but leaving him in there was questionable and grotesque. I realize the circumstances were incredibly difficult, but when the rescue failed, all involved quickly took the path of least resistance rather than in consideration of how time changes things for the survivors. I don't know how one would come to terms with that; the tragedy seems left unresolved.
It's definitely seems like a highly unusual thing to want to do, I wouldn't consider myself claustrophobic but that video made me sweat and kind of feel short of breathe.
Why people do that, I have no idea...on the other hand, I feel like maybe I'm judging people for doing something they feel compelled to do and that kind of makes my anxiety about it worse.
I mean, I don't understand it, but I guess that doesn't make it wrong.
So you would rather be stuck in a state where you are aware of your surroundings but have no way to communicate with the outside world for potentially years or decades than suffer for minutes to a few days at the most?
You and I have very, very, different definitions of “nightmare fuel.”
Yea, this is assuming OP it isn’t in a constant state of pain.
What if - being in a conscious coma is worse than dying? What if it isn’t a dream-like wonder of your own world? What if you lay there and you can’t dream? You can’t sleep, you can’t move, you feel everything, you can’t focus or meditate, you just lie there is permanent torture that you can’t stop.
I don’t know why people imagine the cleanest possible scenario for their fantasy play throughs.
At least imagine the dirty murky ones if you refuse to imagine the worst case.
Something I teach with self-defense is ”Ok, you have made peace with yourself that if a 6’4 meth addled line backer breaks in to your house in a rage, you are morally checked out to end them - now what about a pregnant 14yo girl and you can’t see her hands? Maybe, consider your best first move to be asking them to leave?” … don’t be absolute with anything that you plan for.
You might be able to simulate that with psychedelics, meditation, or perhaps if they ever figure out how to reliably induce specific states with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. Then someone can make a choice.
I’ve had experiences where I was aware of people and what was going on, but from the outside, it looks like I am passed out. It wasn’t really that bad.
I know of others who experience what is typically called “sleep paralysis”. It often comes with hallucinations and night terrors.
I get occasional sleep paralysis and it has taken years of practice to not panic and just calmly try and wiggle my toes until my body comes back online. The idea that you could be trapped in that state for days or years is a complete nightmare, if I knew that was the only future I had I would want to be dead ASAP.
It really boils down to medical professionals developing one or more protocols to a peaceful death, this has been hindered by too much religious crap being forced down to everyone. Just give me a bag of nox and leave me high and happily pass out and die ffs.
On the contrary, the "religoius crap" is the guiding reason why we have modern hospice and palliative care at all. From the creator of modern hospice's biography posted at the hospice she founded:
That sounds orthogonal to what the parent is saying, which is that religious leaders fight vehemently against the legalization of physician-assisted suicide.
It sounds orthogonal because it is orthogonal. But it's true and I provided the original source to back up my claim. Hospice and palliative medicine is an accepted by all major faiths.
Physician assisted suicide is another seperate issue - and "pulling the plug" on a comatose patient is NOT euthanasia. That is hospice and palliative care.
Something similar to it happened in 2019. A man became completely paralyzed, but retained his senses. With the help of medical experts, he learned to control his level of brain activity. A computer monitoring his brain activity produced an audio tone which would rise or fall corresponding to his activity level. Soon he was indicating “yes” or “no” to letters. One of his first sentences: “I love my cool son.”
I feel like one of my first sentences in these situations would be "Morse code". Granted, it's not strictly binary, but there's gotta be a way to make it work.
I would tell people to kill me instantly. Imagine just looking foward with no interaction and just your thoughts? I'd go insane and right now I'm thinking of those in comas.
Am I weird that I think suffering past a certain level is worse than death?
Sometimes I think I'm actually the weird one for preferring to live anyway. It seems like the world's best opportunity to cultivate an incredible interior life of prayer or meditation or whatever.
It sounds excruciatingly difficult, but I don't know. It seems worth doing to me.
It depends on the emotional/financial burden you put on your family so you can experiment with introversion. In my case, I couldn't do it, I've learned that feeling useful is an important component of my happiness.
I agree it seems worth doing, especially if you have the belief that at some point technology will advance sufficiently to allow interaction with other people again.
Probably because it'd be excruciatingly difficult, like I said.
I guess it matters what you think life is for. I don't think I get another go at life on this planet, so I figure I might as well experience as much of it as I can, even if it's extremely limited and painful.
That's an interesting point for sure. I guess because it happens against ones will, and I think a coma where one is still conscious would be a similar thing.
I can get used to a pain and touching it doesn’t really help but an itch oooh boy drive me mad, probably because I knew it’ll feel so good in the short term at least!
There have been people with persistent itches that scratch, sometimes subconsciously, in their sleep, etc, until they hit bone or an internal organ, or both, like their brain: https://www.npr.org/2008/06/24/91852486/the-mystery-and-powe... The itch-scratch reflex is mighty powerful.
Yes indeed that was what I was thinking about, that type of case. Literally itch through your skull in the right circumstances and it sure isn't will power.
> Am I weird that I think suffering past a certain level is worse than death?
No you are not. The OP is being emotional and somehow thinks he is special and deserves some more treatment. I think everyone deserves some healthcare (proportional to the advancement of society). But at a certain cost (and time), just pull the stupid plug and move on.
That's how most of your ancestors for most of their lives did.
> The medical team gave her an EEG—placing sensors on her head to monitor her brain’s electrical activity—while they asked her to “keep opening and closing your right hand.” Then they asked her to “stop opening and closing your right hand.” Even though her hands themselves didn’t move, her brain’s activity patterns differed between the two commands.
A eeg is afaik done as a matter of course in these situations. Fmri is not realistic or necessarily
I guess you might think you have a chance of recovery? You don't know if you are doomed.
I mean I would "gladly" spend 2 years starring at the ceiling to see my son again etc. But there is probably a upper limit on the amount of years ... maybe they can induce coma somehow to make time pass and wake you up every month to see if things improve.
If someone is in a coma and pulling the plug would take days to kill them, they should euthanize them. Either way the person will die, but euthanasia speeds up the process and helps if they are still conscious in there somewhere.
It's a weird place where we don't consider it killing to let a helpless body starve, but we do consider it killing to inject something that ends things quickly. Both sound like killing to me, and both are ok in some situations.
You seriously don't see a moral difference between taking active action to end someone's life vs. failing to take an action that will keep someone alive? That's your basic trolley problem
No, it’s petty minded high-school philosophy to pretend that starving a paraplegic is morally speaking better than euthanising them with morphine.
There are endless things that distance this from the trolley problem, but mainly starving someone to death isn’t inaction, it’s a conscious clinical choice.
It’s utterly bizarre in my mind that is what the USA settled on as a grotesque compromise. Particularly so because outside the medical setting this would still be homicide by starvation.
Exactly. Having a duty of care for someone and deliberately not providing that care with the intention of killing them is making you just as complicit in their death as euthanasia.
Furthermore it's not inaction, in order to starve someone to death you have to get a lawyer and a judge to sign the death warrant. Pretending this is ethical is palming off the moral responsibility to some medical-tech who refills the feeding tube.
There's a moral difference if one alternative would result in a slower more painful death . Which is likely to be the "neglect to provide sustenance" option - ie. it's likely to be morally preferable to actively end someone's life quickly/ humanely than it is to just let them die slowly (from dehydration or whatever).
I dunno it seems like basic decency to kill someone painlessly once that is the what's going to happen. It is crazy cruel to just watch someone die of thirst over a period of days, we wouldn't do that to animals.
I once pondered upon what I would consider to still "be alive".
Some of these people who are in a coma can, as has been shown, still hear sound and react or even answer by activating certain brain regions which can be measured.
But what if you can't hear anymore? It doesn't seem to imply you're dead. For instance, I could imagine, purely hypothetically, that someone could use your sense of touch to input a bit-pattern or even Morsecode to initiate communication, to which one might be able to react by thinking (communicate back).
Of course, that seems highly impractical and unlikely to happen, but it is an interesting meditation to contemplate what one would consider for themselves to "be alive".
This reminds me of a joke I once saw acted out on Spanish television. A proud father is at the hospital waiting for his son to be born. The doctor comes out and says, "I'm sorry sir but it seems your son will be born without feet." The father answers "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." The doctor comes out a few minutes later "I'm sorry sir but it seems your son will be born without legs." The father continues "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." The doctor comes out again "I'm sorry sir but your son will be born without arms or hands." The father again says "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." The doctor comes out again "I'm sorry sir but your son will be born without a torso, and will be blind and mute." The father again maintains "He's my son and I'll love him no matter what." At last the doctor comes out cradling an ear--"Sir I present your son". The father proclaims " My son! I love you!" The doctor responds "I'm sorry sir, your son is deaf."
If you're really locked in, wouldn't you be going completely mad after only a few days or weeks? I approve of the idea to really make sure the person is brain dead, but how would you feel to be living locked in for months, years? How do they decide if you want mercy and for this to be done vs continue fighting to get back?
Hence the quick edit to clarify a very important secondary opinion regarding medically assisted suicide.
Also I didn’t feel it necessarily to mention, but there are established protocols for communication with locked in patients. Effectively you explain to them you know they are locked in and work to develop any effective feedback loop, be it brain wave biofeedback, blinking, or anything else.
Once you can reliably ask yes no questions (and trust you aren’t miss interpreting the patient) you can eventually get to important questions like “do you want to live like this?”
Conversely, I've told people that they are absolutely not to keep me on life support for months and years. If there's no prognosis for me waking up within a couple weeks, let me die. Don't risk trapping me in an endless, unendurable hell.
I like to imagine that if I were in that state that my wife would see to it that I get an sizeable administration of intravenous DMT. If I can’t wake in this dimension, let me dream another.
> They will not hesitate to pull the plug in an effort to harvest your organs while they're still "fresh"
On the contrary, it seems like they'll keep you on life support after brain death to ensure your organs are still fresh.
> that decision should be made by my family and not the vultures at the hospital.
I mean, sure. In most places it's your next of kin that decide.
You do know that the hospital doesn't get paid for organs donated, right? I have no idea what incentives you think they have to kill you.
> You do know that the hospital doesn't get paid for organs donated, right? I have no idea what incentives you think they have to kill you.
Believe it or not, money is not the only motivator of people. Wanting to help someone you have a stronger relationship with (because one patient can communicate, the other cannot) could be incentive enough for some people. And doctors are, in the end, just people.
I am not suggesting that most doctors would do this, or even a sizable percentage, but it would be reassuring that measures would be in place to ensure what the GP is talking about cannot happen. I suspect everyone realises this, and there are actually systems in place to protect organ donors against harvesting whilst still alive.
Not only are the two teams of doctors likely different, and the hospitals where they are operating different, but in the US a bureaucracy determines who gets the organ based on need. It's not up to any doctor involved. So the odds that the two doctors who are involved will ever know each other, let alone one doctor knowing both patients, seems microscopic.
The hospitals and doctors transplanting the organs in make a lot of money. Those harvesting the organs do not.
At least if it's aboveboard and in the US. Getting Steve Jobs an off the books pancreas would obviously have been exceedingly profitable. And I cannot speak to what happens in other countries.
But in general, the biggest cost is from the hospital stay for the recipient (the actual majority of it), followed by the surgery transplanting the organ itself. And, usually, the next cost will be transporting the organ, not acquiring it.
Why would your organs become less 'fresh' if you are stable but appear to be in a vegetative state? I understand being worried about people taking advantage of disabled (perhaps temporarily) folks - but I don't think there's a ticking clock issue here?
If you're already (physically) dead by the time you arrive at the hospital, the chances of successfully harvesting a working organ are low.
Thus, organ harvesters prefer patients who are physically alive but brain dead. Organ donor status basically gives them permission to harvest your still-beating heart.
The problem isnt if you are actually brain dead. The problem is if you just appear to be brain dead. Organ harvesting is done without the aid of anaesthetic.
“Also in case anyone mistakes my phrasing as some sort of pro-life or anti-suicide thing… their body their choise…” - applying a similar logic wouldn’t it fair to say: Their equipment, their choice?
A schoolfriend was in a coma for a while after a sports injury[1]. He told us how his parents brought a bottle of lucozade for him to have if he woke up and after they left he heard staff discussing how since he was never going to wake up they would just drink it themselves.
During WWII, my grandfather survived a mortar shell fragment through his skull, leaving him completely paralyzed and blind. He recounted being able to clearly hear the conversations of the doctors and nurses caring for him, and credited his desire to prove them wrong about him being comatose for his eventual recovery. After several months, he was able to move, and eventually regained sight, speech, and most of his mobility. (He lived well into his 70s - long outlasting the physician who diagnosed him, as he would mention on the rare occasions when he discussed his injuries.)
In military they told us to never ever talk in a hopeless way near wounded even if we thought they were completely unconscious.
Usually the hearing is the last sense to go they thought us, and if we said "he'll never make it" it could be the straw that broke the camels back for someone who is fighting the battle of their life.
I don't know enough to know if this is true or not but I think it is a good idea anyway.
It is a very good rule and we shouldn’t leave it only for the apparently unconscious! Hope is a powerful thing and being a naysayer can have a bigger effect than we think (even on us).
>>> He recounted being able to clearly hear the conversations of the doctors and nurses caring for him, and credited his desire to prove them wrong about him being comatose for his eventual recovery.
Different people react to different things in different ways.
In the military, we were also taught that many people die of gunshots simply because they believe the should die (movies/plays/books) when it is perfectly survivable. Sure, some people are motivated to rebel against authority figures telling them what they can’t do, but the vast majority are not.
> In the military, we were also taught that many people die of gunshots simply because they believe the should die (movies/plays/books) when it is perfectly survivable.
This would imply that many people who are uninjured, but believe they have been shot, die of that belief.
I think it’s more a situation of getting shot and then giving up rather than crawling to cover, wrapping a tourniquet and and calling for aid. I’d imagine the shock of being hit by a bullet could be confused for disorientation due to blood loss, even if little blood has been lost yet.
But that is the opposite of the advice being given. Your advice is "if you get shot, do something about it, or it may kill you". The advice above is "if you get shot, grit your teeth and will yourself to stay alive, so that you don't die".
From being in several life-and-death situations, you'd be remarkably surprised how far will-power and adrenaline will get you.
But no. The advice is the opposite: don't give up just because you think you should be dead; do literally anything else other than give up. Preferably, do the things you've been trained to do, but even if you just stay awake and fight for your life ... that is preferrable to giving up.
For more horror: There are stories of people who were legally brain dead who woke up - see Colleen Burns, for example. She woke up just before her organs were going to be removed for donation (quite literally under the surgical lights). The hospital was also fined for inexplicably (possibly maliciously) giving off-the-record sedatives when she started to show signs of life after the diagnosis - but she managed to wake up in time anyway. (It's also why I'm not an organ donor - I'm scared I won't actually be dead, and that the hospital is perhaps not the most impartial decision maker of whether I am dead.)
If you read the medical literature on this they always claim that the test(s!) for death are reliable. But either they aren't, or people aren't able to always reliably perform the tests, or they don't want to.
Agreed that the hospital staff are not impartial, thus, the third option is not unlikely in my mind.
French word for undertaker is 'croquemort' which seems to mean "bite-dead" .. a final check to ensure proper lack of life from an unresponsive body. A low success profession according to the numerous scratch marks found in caskets.
I am an organ donor, already donated one and can assure you I am not dead yet.
Donating organs is an easy way (for the donor -- the medical staff is performing magic) to make a significant, positive difference. And frankly, for many of us, it's probably the only way.
I'm not speaking about when you are alive, go ahead, donate. I'm only talking about the "Donor" tag on your driver's license after an accident - where, well, people have woken up who were considered "brain dead" and were sometimes just minutes from organ removal. Which naturally induces shivers about the people who would have woken up but didn't have enough time...
How likely is that situation vs. being considered brain dead and having all life-supporting treatment halted? It seems like you're more likely to survive if they try to harvest your organs than if they unplug you and leave the room.
Hamilton's Pharmacopeia did a show about people who could be temporarily woken from their comas by Ambien:
> The first awakening occurred in 1999 when a man who had spent three years in a persistent vegetative state spontaneously regained consciousness after ingesting a 10mg tablet. Since then, hundreds of patients have experienced miraculous recoveries from traumatic brain injury using Ambien.
Ambien is an incredibly strange drug. Even in people without brain damage, it can cause hallucinations, weird dreams, sleep walking/eating/other actions (sometimes dangerous, like sleep driving), and major personality shifts.
It's commonly used to treat insomnia, though I believe it's being used less and less due to the side effects
It is indeed a strange drug. I take it on occasions like nights before stressful events such as travelling, to make sure I am well rested the next day. Normally I'm quite an anxious person and suffer from insomnia, so this works wonders to calm my brain down and make me go to bed.
One of the weird side effects is that if I don't go to sleep and force my self to be awake, I get these quirky weak hallucinations, like the letters on my screen are 'wobbly' individually. Static images shift in dream like manners, like they're animated. It looks completely real but I know it isn't, and doesn't particularly impair me, just gives a slight mellow chill.
I can see the recreational potential in this drug, but for insomniacs it can be a godsend to have a small "you will fall asleep in 15 minutes" kill-switch on demand when you need it.
Have you tried amitriplitine? It is mild stuff by comparison and sleepiness is a useful side effect.
Before taking it I had insomnia, prescribed this drug for different reasons but it helped with that: especially the wake up at 3am problem but also the get to sleep problem.
But it is mild as to not worry me I can wake up in an emergency and be lucid if needed.
I had similar hallucinations taking Ambien once (recreationally) as a teen. I was reading Wikipedia when the whole page just came to pieces and clattered to the bottom of the screen, like the widgets came off their hinges. It's like it activates the hypnagogic state without requiring you to be asleep first.
This reminds me of Johnny Got His Gun[1], about a wounded war vet who's locked in and unable to communicate with the outside world despite being conscious.
check out the diving bell and the butterfly, movie adaptation of a first hand account of someone who went through this. incredibly powerful film, and the physical is only half of the nightmare. because the man who had become completely paralyzed (apart from one functional eyelid - his other eye was drying out and had to be sewn shut while he helplessly screamed in silence begging the doctor not to bring the needle near his eye) had a rather unflatteringly messy personal life, and was in a position of witnessing all of his dirty laundry being aired between his mistress, and his wife, and his dying father.
all while he was completely competent mentally, but completely incapable of representing himself in any of the intrigues that were unearthed consequent to his injury. all a true story, written by the author while being locked in, one agonizing eye blank at a time with the aid of a nurse who finally figured out he was conscious.
Still can't believe I read that freshman year of high school as part of the English curriculum there. Book has stuck with me all these years. Good times.
Can say it's true from my experience. My uncle cried and tried to grab my hand when he saw me near his hospital bed, even if he was in a coma. I've knew since then people might be awake even if we perceive then as vegetables
The hardest part would be to see my family move on, my wife remarry, and eventually the last person leaves, hoping that my departure is swift. Then I just wait while the medical staff picks me clean of their burden.
His wife was going to pull the plug, but during the week we were fighting over it, he began to be able to blink to communicate. He then said he did not want the plug pulled.
We should be more honest about how fuzzy and inaccurate our understanding of consciousness is right now, and not pretend that neuroscience is as mature as some other sciences.
We should also be more honest about the fact that many "pull the plug" conversations are about hospital expenses, not about science or ethics.
I think it comes down to resources. If someone is in a coma for more than a year continued care uses resources that could be redirected to others who aren't in a coma even if there's a small probability the person would wake up
We're not talking about a small town in Moldova, we're talking about Boston.
America has, for many intents and purposes, unlimited resources. We waste more money than most countries even have. We could do whatever we want medically, we just choose not to.
Individual hospitals may have constraints, but only because we as a nation choose to allow them to.
The JWST cost as much as 100 new hospitals. We once built half a supercollider that probably cost more than that (relative to then-current construction costs) and never even used it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
Don't get me wrong, I approve of those projects; they're just good examples of how almost hilariously wealthy we are. We're hardly unable to offer medical care to everyone in need and then some. We just let crooks take over the economy.
I believe there should be government run healthcare but there's still limited resources. You're missing my main point, keeping someone alive in a coma for years has little value. Assuming we can devise tests on whether they are awake.
Now imagine we can determine they are conscious. Then we should still put then out of their misery assuming we can't bring them out of it.
You hear people talk about the horrors of solitary confinement, this is even worse.
I didn't note a key condition- that there's some near certainty they won't ever recover. Regardless if they are awake in the coma or not.
Here's an issue. You said it should be up to the person. Sure but it's not boolean. Assume they can't communicate and didn't provide instructions like a DNR. That's not yes or no.
As for the family they are bias in this situation. They reasons are emotional, valid yes but meh.
If the family wanted to keep them alive they could pay for the treatment but that's almost never the case. Insurance is going to cover it and that's really just spreading it around to the public.
Assume the person is in a coma, no idea if they are aware, 99% chance they won't ever wake up, family isn't paying with cash.
If they are awake that's torture for the next 20 years, though to be honest I'd like to hear about it from someone who has gone through it. Also, the family doesn't move on, it's not a thing in their life, yes they want it but is this all for the best?
anything is worse than death as the dead don't suffer, by all currently available evidence.
but yeah, this one is definitely the absolute worse thing that could happen to someone, and let's not forget it is entirely man-made, given that fully paralyzed people are being forcefully kept alive by some f*cking sadist of a pro-lifer...
While on a foot patrol in southern Afghanistan, I took a 500lbs SVBIED impact. Went through a wall, woke up on the ground, confused. Black out, wake up on a chopper, confused. Black out. What happened next was a never-ending dream/nightmare loop that lasted a bit under 1mo. I went from dream world to dream world, until I woke up, with too many pipes coming out of too many places. I have the unfortunate experience of knowing what Neo felt like when he woke up from the matrix. It took me a few weeks to re-acclimate to reality, dealt with a lot of anxiety/panic attacks. It turns out that some of the people I met in the dreamworld were real people. That weird afghan lady who would never leave was in fact my wife. The torturer ended up being my cardiac technician, and he wasn't torturing, he was keeping me alive with cardiac massages. There's a lot more. Some of it was made up some of it was real. I woke up next to a picture of the president giving me a medal, and another picture of myself and bob dole. Basically, my brain was trying to survive, and it fished from books I read, movies I've seen, and then the little bits of reality my wounded self could gather. Pretty trippy stuff. The weird part? I remember that month long coma dream like a crystal clear memory. I'm trying to figure out the best way to brain dump this weird story in a sharable format, but you know. Gotta pay the the bills first. Maybe I'll write a book some day
Just my two cents. Please consider brain dumping while the memories are fresh, as there is strong evidence that our memories evolve over time[1]. It sounds like you have a valuable story to tell. Editing can come later.
You don’t have to worry. There are physiological responses to pain and trauma that the anesthesiologist can observe, even if you are unconscious. Things as simple as heart rate and respiration all the way up to brain wave monitoring. This is part of the anesthesiologists job.
Have you ever received anaesthesia? For me, it was one of the most surreal things I've ever experienced, including psychedelic experiences. The reason it was so surreal is because I have no internal chronology of the surgery (minor surgery to insert two pins into my left ring finger after it was broken). I was actively paying attention to the experience, and there was nothing in between going under and waking up in the recovery room. Not a blank void or an emptiness, not an internal hallucination, but nothing. The experience for me was very much like fading out on the table and almost immediately waking up in the recovery room. By comparison, a potent DMT experience gave me the experience of being pushed and pulled through a local time loop, with a disconnect between my internal chronology and my perception of time, and that was less surreal to me than just outright losing an hour.
The combination of these two events gives me the perception that time is not at all what the vast majority of people think it is, and that everyone most likely experiences the passage of time at a different rate. We all externally synchronize via clocks and measured time, so no matter how fast or slow you experience time, you're tethered to the unit of "seconds" in a fashion. That's honestly probably one of the things that contributes to the mistaken belief that we perceive objective reality, but that's honestly a hell of a tangent.
That's what propofol is for. That's what they give you when they have to do fucked up shit to you but want you awake. Like skin debriding after you've had severe burns.
In the medical industry it's known as "milk of amnesia" because it's white and you don't remember.
I've heard of something like this too for popping dislocated joints back into sockets. It sounds super creepy because you apparently still scream out in pain but don't remember it.
It does induce real-time physiological changes the way a meditative monk can walk on needles while balancing themselves. So I don't think anaesthesia has anything to do with the memory-aspect of forgetting.
Suffering before death obviously can't be remember. If anesthesia only makes you just forget or not able to form memories then wouldn't it be just as bad?
> to date patients with covert consciousness who recovered the ability to communicate and were interviewed later did not remember the experience of being covertly conscious. Mazurkevich, for instance, does not recall any aspect of her time in the intensive care unit when she appeared to be comatose
My studies on the subject, that is observations, experiments, exchanges with experts and reading of the relevant literature, have led me to the firm conviction that the normal case is the exact opposite.
Most people who appear to be conscious are not, for most of their lives.
However, I am also a cynic who threw away his lantern some time ago.
I'm guessing it's the date of when it was/will be published in the print magazine. This article will be in the next edition of Scientific American if so.
As a horror writer, I can’t help but wonder what sorts of stories this leads to, and what you might get wrong while writing about it…
By conscious, do they mean “aware”, or do they also mean “actively thinking about what they are experiencing” ? How often do they come out of it? Do they have clear memories of it?
People have been through it and later recovered enough functionality to write books about their experience. Surprisingly, they report feeling pretty normal and even hopeful for the most part. Most people, when hearing about this, imagine it'd be all feelings of terror and wanting to be dead. But in reality people get used to it pretty quickly and their mental world adapts.
Is the power of acceptance something that saves people in these situations? I guess it's like when you want to stay awake, to watch a movie, but you're just so tired you accept your situation and fall asleep. My experience when I do this I have a really good sleep.
I'm not saying that it's going to be a nice thing, I just mean, that calm feeling of acceptance probably helps people out and as others have said, the mind adapts to the situation. At some point one would have nothing to lose I guess, so they just go along with whatever they have.
Solitary confinement on the other hand is probably harder to accept, because I guess one would feel like "something can be done" about the situation, your torturer, prison guard or whatever could let you out, but they're choosing not too. Sunlight is just behind a door which cannot be opened.
They mean “shows brain activity that appears to be specifically triggered by the semantic content of outside input”. Not even aware, necessarily - that level of response can be shown while asleep, for example. And it says that patients have never remembered this, to date.
I have read about it in 2010 in the book "Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are"
The reason i have bought this book was this sleep paralysis that I had that time.
I was thinking a lot how to help these people in comma. I have bought this eeg by emotive.
So my idea was that person who cant communicate with world but can hear us actually can communicate with us by thinking. So you need first to teach him morse code. Once he is ready you ask him to imagine he is walking for short on long period of time or he is lookong to the roght or left before deciding left is short right is long. His head with eeg let us interpretate the data.
So I was able to test it on myself. I wrote about it to some university but they nevere replayed me.
Awakenings (1990) was an interesting movie and I believe based on a true story. Sounds like the Ambien effects some folks are mentioning.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077
Yes, to think of all the broken bones we could have mended in pre-Egyptian times; all the people who died needlessly from the Black Death in Europe; the sailors we lost to scurvy at sea. The numerous indigenous peoples that did not survive initial contact with European pathogens. So many lives lost needlessly.
https://archive.ph/Mlwn6