That is fiction for you, it has amazing people in it.
But in real life this would be impossible medically, one person simply could not keep such a body functioning.
And more importantly mentally impossible.
And setting yourself up against fictional stories probably isn't good for you.
Fiction might be good to push yourself as a better person, but not to these ridiculous saccharine extremes.
With anything real, like palliative care, get support as soon as you can, by the time you are overwhelmed doing the paperwork and the waiting periods will be impossibly harder.
The story probably happened, but the coma portion is embellished. It notes that she was able to participate in rehab and eat food, so she wasn’t unconscious in the traditional sense.
It sounds like there was spontaneous return of function, which happens in various degrees following stroke anyway. Residual function plateaus about 1-2 years after on average, but this case would be an outlier.
I am more intrigued which med the physician prescribed, and whether there’s current research to support its use in post-stroke care as a neuroprotectant.
I did a books.google.com search and there were no primary references, just a few lines in books about "amazing facts" and a reference to an episode of "Maury."
I was in a dead ass coma for a month. When I awoke I couldn't talk or move my arms and legs. After 3 months of daily in hospital rehab I could walk maybe 50 yards at a time and get up from a sitting position without aid and went home. It was a year before I felt I was normal. I was not overweight or in bad health before this. It's amazing how fast your body just quits if you don't move at all.
I was in an induced coma for a couple weeks, and intubated in the ICU for a total of about 30 days. When they deintubated me my breathing muscles were so weak I thought I would die of asphyxiation. They sent me home a few days later, as soon as I could climb a staircase (there were stairs leading to my front door).
Several days after returning home I got stuck in the bathtub: I couldn't lift myself out, my wife couldn't lift me. After several false starts, we got me out by me lifting up a couple inches, and my wife shoving a pillow under my butt, several times. :-)
I was back at (office) work 2.5 months later, and biking to work 3 months after that.
All of which to say: 100% agreed -- do absolutely nothing and the body just wastes away.
"Lift assist" is a common 911 call here (California). Those of us without EMT training (myself included) are taught to look hard at these situations and if anything is amiss, call in the paramedics. That said, don't be afraid to call emergency services... if your district is anything like ours, we like to help and as long as you don't get in an ambulance, there's no charge :-)
Eye Opening Response
• Spontaneous--open with blinking at baseline 4 points
• To verbal stimuli, command, speech 3 points
• To pain only (not applied to face) 2 points
• No response 1 point
Verbal Response
• Oriented 5 points
• Confused conversation, but able to answer questions 4 points
• Inappropriate words 3 points
• Incomprehensible speech 2 points
• No response 1 point
Motor Response
• Obeys commands for movement 6 points
• Purposeful movement to painful stimulus 5 points
• Withdraws in response to pain 4 points
• Flexion in response to pain (decorticate posturing) 3 points
• Extension response in response to pain (decerebrate posturing) 2 points
• No response 1 point
Categorization:
Coma: No eye opening, no ability to follow commands, no word verbalizations (3-8)
Head Injury Classification:
Severe Head Injury----GCS score of 8 or less
Moderate Head Injury----GCS score of 9 to 12
Mild Head Injury----GCS score of 13 to 15
Yeah, I wish the story gave a more precise explanation about her medical diagnosis. Even being able to walk with help doesn't fit my understanding of coma.
To answer both of you, it's basically sleepwalking. The person is not conscious, but is able to function in an instinctive manner.
There are stories of people in comas who were given a medication like zolpidem that wakes them, but it's actually sleepwalking and the person is not conscious. Search: https://www.google.com/search?q=zolpidem+coma
These kinds of cases can help explain what consciousness actually is, which is hardly a settled question.
On the other hand, she had no recollection of anything in between but seemed to very well recall what was recently happening before she fell into that state. Mentally what we'd call a coma even if her body was not at the level of a vegetable. Intriguing story either way.
Steve Wozniak mentions this happening to him after a plane crash. Where he had a period where he didn't form permanent memories, and when that passed and he was able to, it was as if he awoke from a coma, even though he was functioning and interacting with people during this time. Think if the Memento (kinda based on a real case) guy suddenly regained the ability to hold memories, he would "awake" and to a period years later.
Perhaps something like this happened, where she was "around" and "interacting" but regained the ability to store memories and thus she "awoke".
I'm unclear on the circumstances here. It says after 2 years she could sit up and walk and whanot. So what were the other 28 years? I always thought coma more or less meant like in a bed sleeping. Is it still a coma if you're able to stand and walk assisted? Or did I read that wrong?
They were like web directories and the stuff they link to, but for one person's interests. The closest comparison in modern terms is a personal blog, but these would often host music and videos and random niche stuff like game save files and code.
They often had a MIDI file auto-play if you had a sound card with MIDI support. Fancier sites had an MP3, but not every computer could handle it. Some had guestbooks or forums.
Everything/nothing was usually abbreviated to e/n, but that leads to even fewer results on Google.
This is the kind of detail a writer would throw into a heart wrenching story about love. A faithful husband dies just days before his wife wakes up from a 30 year coma.
Forever Love is a poignant new television movie about a woman who awakens from a 20-year-long coma and begins her life all over again. ... 24-year-old Lizzie suffers a stoke. ... 20 years after her stroke, Lizzie wakes up. Miraculously, Lizzie is pronounced perfectly healthy and begins to try to assimilate back into a world that has radically changed ... [1]
50's to 80's seems like a much more dramatic jump on so many levels than 20's to 40's. For the latter, you are dropped into the second act of your life and expected to catch up to a new world. Fish out of water stuff.
The second, real story seems so much more tragic somehow.
I wonder if it only seems more dramatic because you are more familiar with the 50s and 80s than with the 20s and 40s? E.g. in many ways the 20s was a lot more liberal/"modern" than the 40s in a lot of places. I think a European going from the roaring 20s to the fascist/nazi 40s would have a hell of a shock.
> The Vietnam War ended, astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal, communism collapsed and the world entered the computer age.
Americans tend to overestimate the importance of their events to describe the world changing.
