My "miraculous" recovery from a 6-week coma through a skeptical and humanist lens, written by a writer published by Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry. When I awoke, I could barely raise my head, and it has been a hard road back. I also aim to educate the public about covert cognition. Too many people who are still conscious are being dismissed as hopeless vegetables, as I was. As many as one in five people with consciousness disorders have covert cognition. For them, there is still hope.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Benedict Arnold 2.0
Miracle Girl: Benedict Arnold 2.0
I'm still incredulous that Donald Trump would actually beg Vladimir Putin to conduct cyberwarfare against a former Secretary of State. And more than that, I'm angry, not just as a Democrat, but as an American.
Yes, Hillary Clinton is his opponent. But I can't believe the supposedly hyper-patriotic Republicans can get behind this near-treasonous behavior.
Is this really the person they want with his finger on the nuclear trigger? Does he want to hand that to Vlad the Terrible, too?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Contact me!
Coma Girl
About Me
Not a miracle recovery, but a miracle of modern medicine
In 2013 I fell into a six-week coma and nearly died after I contracted legionella. The Legionnaire's disease was in turn triggered by immunosuppression caused by the prednisone I was taking for my rare autoimmune disease, dermatomyositis.
I suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when the sepsis caused my blood pressure to plummet. I fell into a deep coma. My kidneys and lungs began to fail, as my body was began dying one organ at a time. My doctors told my loved ones to give up hope for my full recovery. They expected me to die, and even if I somehow lived, I would remain a vegetable or at best left so hopelessly brain-damaged that I would never be same. But unbeknownst to them, while they were shining lights in my eyes and shaking their heads, I was telling them in my coma-dream--my secular version of a near-death experience--to leave me alone because I was trying to get back to sleep. I was experiencing what is known as covert cognition, the subject of my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," which appeared in their July/August issue.
But it wasn't a miracle--despite what so many continue to believe--that I recovered so fully. I owe my life not to God, but the miracles of modern medicine, as well as the nature of the watershed-area brain damage I suffered, as I detailed in my article and in this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comment!