Some people who appear to be in a coma may be conscious
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
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.
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?”
Are you talking to the conscious or subconscious?
Am I weird that I think suffering past a certain level is worse than death?
It sounds excruciatingly difficult, but I don't know. It seems worth doing to me.
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.
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.
How is being trapped inside your head, potentially forever less of a nightmare scenario?
I'll go the opposite "If you detect I'm conscious, kill me asap!"
But if they can detect I'm thinking, they can detect at least binary differences between my mental state. Which means that I can communicate somehow.
It's hard to do both of those things; you will die of dehydration before hunger is more than an inconvenience.
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.
By your logic lets pull the plug off everyone who has a minor incident leaving in coma for a few days
This is a fair point, and for me I would accept the solution of massive doses of diamorphine.
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.
https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/when-fears-of-pr...
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/3515/ancient-traditi...
“If he wasn’t dead before, he is now!”
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’m firmly in the camp of being vastly more terrified of being stuck or trapped somewhere for an indefinite amount of time.
[1]https://www.popsci.com/article/science/how-long-could-you-su...
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).
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Collins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9VGZeqMfo if you fancy a documentary
A eeg is afaik done as a matter of course in these situations. Fmri is not realistic or necessarily
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".
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.
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.
You and I have very, very, different definitions of “nightmare fuel.”
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.
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.
Source:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/22/1047664/locked-i...
https://www.stchristophers.org.uk/about/damecicelysaunders
"Cicely's strong Christian faith was a fundamental factor in her commitment to the dying"
Physician assisted suicide is another seperate issue - and "pulling the plug" on a comatose patient is NOT euthanasia. That is hospice and palliative care.
You're beating the straw man my friend...
[1] Rugby scrum collapse
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.
This is a funny response to
>>> 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.
This would imply that many people who are uninjured, but believe they have been shot, die of that belief.
I suspect that's not true.
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.
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2013/07/st_joes_fined_over_dea...
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/dead-patient-collee...
See also Zack Dunlap, a 21-year-old man who claims to have heard the doctors pronounce his death - and also awoke very shortly before organ removal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23768436
https://www.today.com/news/pronounced-dead-man-takes-miracul...
There are about a ~dozen others out there as well.
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.
No need to be afraid.
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.
> 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.
It's commonly used to treat insomnia, though I believe it's being used less and less due to the side effects
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.
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.
http://www.ghostboybook.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Pistorius
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/l...
* A man who woke after 6 years in a coma: https://web.archive.org/web/20081203230030/https://cornellsu...
* Haleigh Poutre who woke after months in a coma: https://www.wwlp.com/news/haleigh-poutre-10-years-later/
* Jesse Ramirez who was in a coma and declared "vegetative" but recovered 3 weeks later: https://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/crash-survivor-s-cas...
It's a living nightmare.
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.
Peace though in your grief.
He wasn't.
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.
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.
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 don't think the comatose person would agree, were they to wake up -- and that has happened repeatedly, it's not exactly fantasy.
Should it not be their decision, or the decision of their family?
Whether or not it is misery, and whether or not it is worth coping with that is really to be decided by the person experiencing it, isn't it?
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?
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...
However, "anything is worse than death" seems like an ironic hyperbole; "cake or death?" he chooses death because cake is worse?
It genuinely terrifies me that this could happen to anyone in a moments notice
I really need to "process" it all into a written document
In the medical industry it's known as "milk of amnesia" because it's white and you don't remember.
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.
It’s not obvious that they were by merely passing this covert consciousness test
> 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
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.
1: https://fyfluiddynamics.com/2018/07/when-i-was-a-child-my-fa...
Edit: Yes, seems to be correct. https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2022/11-01/ shows which articles are featured in the November edition, all of which have the published date as November 1.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(1978_film)
This kind of thing could never happen, right?
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/serial-infector-gets-39-yea...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-nurse-suspected-of-hepatit...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-nurse-linked-to-hepa...
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.
This messed me up, back in the day…
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
I would absolutely prefer to be dead then to be in such a coma, or paralyzed. Or if I have Alzheimer.
The mere idea that there is a predictable end wild make it easier to go through that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpn7C6r-WEM @ 7m20s