No doubt you have read or heard about the fireman who was recently ‘recalled to life’ after being comatose for 10 years. After a decade of being nonresponsive he asked to talk to his wife and then had conversations with many family members. He appears to be doing well and had thought that he was “under” for only 3 months.
This got me thinking, as these things do, about what I would do if I was in this situation. He obviously has physical recovery issues to overcome but lets say for the sake of argument that you awoke from a 10 year nap and were physically and mentally fit and ready to go. What would you do? Obviously family reconnection would be an ongoing priority but what else?
I think the first thing I would want to do would be to spend some time with my wife….wink wink, nudge nudge. Its sad to say but I’m not sure that discovering the political events of the last decade would be a priority. I’d want to catch up on the movies that I had missed….the DVD would be a technical marvel! (at least I didn’t have a DVD player 10 years ago!) And books! My favorite authors would seem like writing machines after a ten year span!
Which leads to another interesting question: would you remember the last pages of books that you had read or the last tv shows that you watched? If your brain only registered a 3 month absence could you just pick up your last novel and dive right in?….assuming of course that you can regularly remember things you read 3 months later! 🙂 And what would it do to your psyche to see your spouse, yourself, friends, family, and most importantly your kids after a decade of aging? There has to be some literature out about this or at least a cheesy made-for-tv documentary of some kind. This isn’t the first person to ‘wake up’ after a long period of time in a coma. Fascinating stuff!
Speaking of comas there is a wonderful looking movie that completely slipped under my radar when it was in theatres that my brother in law pointed me to yesterday. It is called Goodbye, Lenin.
It is a German film that looks fantastic. The idea is that this woman fell into a coma before the Berlin wall fell and she wakes up after the wall has fallen and commercialism has run rampant through the nation. Her family is warned that she shouldn’t receive any shocks so they recreate her room at home and proceed to pretend that all is as it was until the day she discovers that the world is not what she had believed. It looks very, very good! I have it coming on Netflix and will do a review when the time comes. You can check out the trailer here.
Now that I have sufficiently put all of you reading this into a coma, any thoughts?
Very cool post, Carl. I love these sort of brain teasing hypotheticals. Another favorite of mine is: what if you were literally the last person on the planet, but the suburban infrastructure were still intact?
I digress. The coma hypthetical is a weird one! There’s a great novel by Douglas Coupland called Girlfriend in a Coma. It’s a fun trip of a book.
I would hope that his wife stayed with him all that time. I haven’t read the news story so I don’t know if she did.
The last person on earth? Rob, you should check out the movie “The Quiet Earth.” Released in the mid 80s, I think it’s available on VHS but not DVD.
I would want to be grateful to have my life back but being robbed of ten years right in the middle of it would be a hard thing to come to terms with. Though I could count on my family, the world goes on…I’d have to piece together a whole new life and daily routine. I would not be amused. Fortunately, I’ve given explicit instructions to my family that under no circumstances should I be maintained in a persistent vegetative state so this nightmare is not one I will have to deal with (you listening Dominique?).
If you read this and other googled articles about him it looks like his wife stayed with him and they explain that he was not in a persistent vegetative state like Schiavo…he was evidently going through different drug, etc therapies with the hope that something like this would happen.
That book sounds/looks interesting, Rob.
There would obviously be lonliness to deal with if you were the last person on earth but the opportunities to keep yourself occupied would be fairly endless if the infrastructure was still in place as you could live anywhere, go anywhere, do anything.
Another hypothetical situation is the situation like Lazarus Long and his family in Robert Heinlein‘s novels, particularly Time Enough for Love. Or the family in Tuck Everlasting, or Hob Gadling in the Sandman series, or Highlander…the list goes on and on….you essentially live forever but those around you grow old and die. Would you choose to be immortal on this earth if you could?
Dang, Netflix doesn’t have that movie, Suzanne! Hmm…
A close match is a Charlton Heston sci-fi from the 70s called Omega Man. That was campy fun.
Then there was an ep of Twilight Zone where this guy is in a dream state induced by scientists, but thinks he’s awake and one of the last men on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Can’t remember the name.
You can see, this fantasy of mine runs pretty deep. What does that say about me?! What would Freud think?
Don’t forget the Vincent Price classic Last Man on Earth from the novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson. The story is better than the movie but the movie is good Price fun!
I saw Omega Man, or part of it anyway. Definitely campy.
Suzanne, your wishes are duly noted, particularly as I expressed the same thing myself when we talked about the Schiavo case.
As to the spouse hanging out for ten years, just in case you wake up, I don’t know. Whether they moved on to other relationships or not, they would have (or should have) evolved emotionally as well as physically during that time period and would not be the same person that you remember.
Yep, there would be a lot of baggage….worse are those rare stories where a person gets total amnesia and the spouse sticks around to try and get them to fall in love with them all over again. That would be emotionally gut-wrenching!
Did anyone check out this trailer?
Rob, I think Freud might wonder when you last had a vacation!
did someone say “Hilander”?! 🙂
hehe
i’ll have to check out the trailer at home..
oops i meant highlander.. it’s 8am & i can’t spell
I have good intentions to make my way through the Highlander TV series via Netflix. I only caught an episode here and there when it was on but really enjoyed the ones that I saw.
you’ll have to let me know how this movie is, i’ve heard it was good
I just got in yesterday in the mail from Netflix and we are going to watch it this weekend and I’ll probably do a review if its any good.