Facebook

Twitter

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Covert Awareness Club: Coma Comradery in the Internet Age


Miracle Girl: Covert Awareness Club: Coma Comradery in the Internet Age

This recovery blog has helped some coma survivors come to terms with their experiences. But I haven't been able to help a loved one of a patient until this week.
A wife contacted me via Coma Chameleon about her minimally conscious husband, asking my advice how to awaken him.
It was that very possibility that has lead me to keep this blog up in the first place.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your comment!

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Contact me!

Name

Email *

Message *

Coma Girl

Coma Girl

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.