Pulling the Plug: Given a Death Sentence for Being Unable to Respond

Miracle Girl: Pulling the Plug: Given a Death Sentence for Being Unable to Respond

One in five apparently vegetative patients are actually covertly aware. Should they receive the death penalty for their body's incapacity? 

The more we learn about cognition in the vegetative, the more we realize how little we know. We should keep that in mind when considering pulling the plug.

Celebrating Coma Day: 5 Explorations of Covert Awareness

Miracle Girl: Celebrating Coma Day: 5 Explorations of Covert Awareness

Celebrating Coma Day -- the anniversary of my awakening -- by exploring my journey and the researchers who allow the covertly aware to speak for themselves. What better way to mark my rebirthday than by cheering the heroes of covert awareness?

Tennis Study: Revealing Active Minds Adrift in Inactivated Bodies

Miracle Girl: Tennis Study: Revealing Active Minds Adrift in Inactivated Bodies

A seemingly vegetative patient participated in his own care using the tennis study technique. But thousand of covertly aware patients languish...for now. 

Scott Routley's heroic efforts reach out from the gray zone of consciousness will help countless others. 

Juan Torres: Another Member of the ‘Miraculous’ Coma Recovery Club

Miracle Girl: Juan Torres: Another Member of the ‘Miraculous’ Coma Recovery Club

Is God handing out miraculous coma cures like candy?Juan Torres's recovery was more remarkable than mine. Doctors gave up on another now-recovered man.

But how many others have their plugs pulled?

The Owen Lab: On the Road to Widespread Covert Awareness Testing

Miracle Girl: The Owen Lab: On the Road to Widespread Covert Awareness Testing

My mom thinks nurses were trying to nudge her toward eventually pulling my plug. She refused to even consider it. But what about the other covertly aware consciousness disorder patients?

False hope is a danger, yet false doom can be deadly. Mobile testing by the Owen Lab may save the lives of countless covertly aware vegetative patients.

Covert Awareness: Into and Out of the Gray Zone of Consciousness

Miracle Girl: Covert Awareness: Into and Out of the Gray Zone of Consciousness

My coma awakening was a quirk, but Dr. Adrian Owen is making awareness testing a science. Few consciousness disorder patients recover as fully from the "gray zone'' as I have. But the work of dedicated researchers may change that.

Locked-in Syndrome: Recovering Against All Odds, Without God’s Help

Miracle Girl: Locked-in Syndrome: Recovering Against All Odds, Without God’s Help

Kate Allatt unlocked her locked-in state against all odds. My coma recovery was nearly as unlikely. Yet neither of us attributes our recovery to God.

Don't tell Kate Allatt that her difficult -- and unusually complete -- recovery from locked-in syndrome was a miracle. As she said, "It's called bloody hard work."

Stem Cell Regeneration Clinics: Waiting to Pounce on the Desperate

Miracle Girl: Stem Cell Regeneration Clinics: Waiting to Pounce on the Desperate

Predatory stem cell regeneration clinics are ready to pounce on a wife of a minimally conscious patient who has sought my advice. Will she take it this time?

What kind of desperately-needed hope can I offer Manuela?

Tennis Anyone?--Communicating with the Vegetative

Miracle Girl: Tennis Anyone?--Communicating with the Vegetative

While the Owen Lab is still in the process of making covert cognition detection widely available, they have already produced tangible benefits for a few seemingly vegetative patients...and their families.

In the case of Jeff Tremblay, the results have been quite moving.

"Hello, I'm in Here!"--Giving Voice to the Voiceless

Miracle Girl: "Hello, I'm in Here!"--Giving Voice to the Voiceless

I was cold; Kate Bainbridge was thirsty. Our discomfort was ignored because our caregivers though we were vegetables, unable to feel pain. That may soon end if the Owen Lab's covert awareness detection research continues to pay off.

Not only would covert cognition be less covert if they succeed, patients who will never recover as well as Kate and I have may someday have a say in their own treatment.

Celebrating Another Year of Consciousness

This is my brain on strokes.

Miracle Girl: Celebrating Another Year of Consciousness

Finally, Miracle Girl and Coma Chameleon blogs come together, as I begin a series of posts about covert cognition in celebration of my awakening, otherwise known as Coma Day.

As one of the few among the one in five vegetative patients with covert awareness to experience a full recovery, I feel a special obligation to speak out for those who cannot.

A major advance in covert cognition detection

Both the left and center scans are of vegetative patients who were behaviorally identical. The scan on the right was of a healthy control.

Somewhat amusingly, I learned about a recent breakthrough in covert awareness detection using EEGs while I was researching a future post for the Secular Spectrum that will in part be about Eben Alexander (yes, him again). After all, I contend that he was simply experiencing a form of covert cognition during his NDE, much as I was.

In a related stories link within a typically sensationalist Daily Mail article about Alexander's story, I found an article that I initially dismissed--after a quick skim--as only being about Adrian Owen's tennis study and the Owen Lab's Hitchcock study, both of which I'm a intimately familiar with. But I'm a terrible skimmer, and it turns out that the article was really about a 2014 Cambridge study (the university where Dr. Owen conducted his famous tennis study) that had employed the tennis technique to test a method of using EEGs to map patterns of brain activity in vegetative patients. Using graph theory, they detected coordinated signals of brain activity, which indicated that the neuronal networks of the subset of patients who were covertly aware connected in similar patterns as the study's healthy controls. They were able to cross-reference their results with fMRI scans by asking the same patients to imagine playing tennis while having their brain activity measured by each form of scan. The same patients whose fMRI scans indicated that they were imagining playing tennis also showed the signature signs of that activity during their EEGs. The above image shows two vegetative patients on the left and in the center. The one on the right is a healthy control. As you can see, the one in the center is virtually identical to the one on the right.

This is what co-author of the study, Tristan Beckinschtein, said about the detection of covert cognition:

This data gives you a different way to think about what the patients can do. You can do the classic test to see if the patient is responding or not. But even if the patient shows nothing, you may see a well-informed information processing network using EEG. And if that is the case, regardless of any other test, the clinician can say, "This guy has the potential to process information. I don't know why he's not processing information, but maybe we can find out." And hopefully, knowing that capacity is there will make physicians keep their eyes open and less likely to write the patient off.

As my doctors did.

For those who aren't regular readers of my blog, I should point out that I received an EEG, which not surprisingly showed that my brain was functioning. Yet it couldn't detect my covert cognition. Eben Alexander hasn't released his medical records, but if he had his EEG would undoubtedly show that his brain was functioning, as well. If it hadn't been, that would mean that he was brain-dead, and he wouldn't have been able to write his two books about his near-death experience, just as I wouldn't be typing this sentence now.

Oh, and by the way, when I clicked on the link to the study, whose name do you think I read listed among the researchers? I'll give you a hint: it's an actual neuroscientist, instead of declared "scientist" who throws out everything we know about neuroscience. Yup, it was none other than our old friend, Dr. Adrian Owen. He's still working with Cambridge University, though he's now at Canada's Western University, ever striving for the advancement of covert cognition detection.

The view from the other side of the bed

When I wrote my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," I was hoping that my experience and my research into covert awareness would help inform the public about the one in five people with consciousness disorders who have covert cognition. But it didn't occur to me (but should've) that my article would also affect the family members who have already faced that unimaginably painful position...from the other side of the bed.

After Skeptical Inquirer shared my VICE Post Mortem column interview on Facebook, which linked to my article, one woman thought the article was fascinating, but also found it “very painful and heartbreaking to read.” That's because she was forced into a situation no one would ever want to be in. Her father was in a coma and he had a do not resuscitate order. She sadly, and obviously extremely reluctantly, gave the order to pull the plug.

I gave her my sympathy and told her that if he had a DNR, then she did what he wanted. Few ever sign a DNR, and those that do usually have a good reason for it. But ever since she was forced into this wrenching decision, she's probably had pangs of doubt. And then she reads my article explaining why people like her father might still be "in there."

In answer to someone who posted that it sounds frightening to be trapped in a seemingly endless dream/nightmare, I responded that it wasn't really that scary. But another Facebook member, who is living through every parent’s nightmare, responded, “I try not to think how frightening it would be. My son has been in a coma since he was 14. He's now 31.” And in a second post, he added, “I hope it's just blank.”

I said, “I'm so sorry to hear this. My heart is with you.” But, really, there’s nothing anyone can say to ease his anguish. I certainly hope I did nothing to deepen it. I'm afraid the answer is that I did, and it makes me sad. Replying to another poster, he said, "One person's comatose recollection does NOT a true story make." He has good reasons to wish my story weren't true, and I hope for him that his son is among the four out of five patients without covert awareness.

It’s likely that many more who have faced these unimaginably painful situations read my article in SI and the VICE interview. Do I regret publishing it? No, because I think my greater obligation is to those voiceless patients with covert cognition. How many are having their plugs pulled not because they have a DNR, but because their doctors say they're hopeless? Kate Bainbridge and others who were in similar situations have spoken of the same concerns. As a writer, I'm in a unique position to spread knowledge of covert awareness to the general public. Perhaps in the future, my words will give ammunition to the arguments of the family members of the covertly aware when doctors pooh-pooh their observations, as mine did.

The daughter who faced that horrific choice with her father noted the advances in covert cognition research Dr. Adrian Owen I mentioned in my article. I added that he’s made considerable progress in developing techniques to detect covert awareness in community hospitals. In the future, people like her may no longer be forced to guess about cognition of their loved ones. 

So, would I do anything different? Yes, next time I will add a sympathetic paragraph about the countless families facing that inadequate testing and incomplete knowledge.

My heart goes out to them all.

Brain dead arguments: The skeptics version

This is only possible for stick figures, but that doesn't mean NDEs aren't a real neurological phenomenon.

So far I've only taken near-death experience true believers to task. But what about the skeptics? I feel I must take exception to some comments a prominent skeptic, Steven Novella, made regarding NDEs.  

I and most scientist favor the more mundane and likely explanation that memories of NDEs are formed at other times, when the brain is functioning, for example during the long recovery process. 

But I remembered my coma-dream immediately after my awakening. I think such esteemed skeptics are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing NDEs as simple woo. Of course, the thinking goes, the "experiencers" aren't seeing Heaven. As Keith put it, that would be magic. Mind-brain separation is impossible, as well, so NDEs must all be bunk. I fell victim to the same thinking until I researched NDEs. It was a real eye-opener when I realized that NDEs were experienced in a wide variety of circumstances that aren't life-threatening, such as fainting. And there are plenty of credible theorists who support the basic existence of NDEs, but nonetheless doubt the supernatural underpinnings, such as neurology professor Kevin Nelson, with his REM intrusion theory.

Maybe the brains of the "experiencers" were functioning in a way that the available emergency room equipment couldn't detect. Perhaps, if the hospital where that one patient was taken happened to have a spare fMRI machine handy, we could've found out. As I said in my Skeptical Inquirer article Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-DeathExperience, "NDEs can't be proof of mind-brain separation if the minds of those experiencing them are still active."

Novella goes on to quote the same snippet from the AWARE study that I did in my last blog:  

Among 2060 CA events, 140 survivors completed stage 1 interviews, while 101 of 140 patients completed stage 2 interviews. 46% had memories with 7 major cognitive themes: fear; animals/plants; bright light; violence/persecution; deja-vu; family; recalling events post-CA and 9% had NDEs, while 2% described awareness with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ actual events related to their resuscitation. One had a verifiable period of conscious awareness during which time cerebral function was not expected. 

He uses it as an example of a dodge because the study failed to find a single instance of remote viewing of the targets by the cardiac arrest patients. (Now there's a shocker.) Fair enough, and he's right to question the validity of anecdotal recalled accounts. Yes, even my own. He's being a good skeptic by doing this. However, I took a different lesson from those findings. I believe it's entirely possible that the one patient was indeed aware, though it had nothing to do with mind-brain separation. It was a form of covert cognition.

I think both sides of this issue are succumbing to the same assumption: the brains of these patients are not functioning. I would add...that we can presently detect. The science of covert cognition is quite new, and it contradicts longstanding neurological understanding so radically that the implications haven't fully sunk in.

Now, Novella makes some excellent points about the methodological shortcomings of the study. He's a clinical neurologist and an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, so I'll allow that he knows more about this subject than I do. The same goes for Kevin Nelson, whose extensive research into NDEs has convinced him of the neurological validity of the phenomenon. And let's not forget Dr. Adrian Owen, as well as the other covert cognition researchers who believe, based on their findings, that as many as one in five patients with disorders of consciousness have covert cognition.

If Dr. Owen is able to eventually succeed in developing standardized techniques to sense covert cognition using EEGs, the process could also be applied to heart attack patients. And then perhaps well find that cardiac arrest victims thought to lack brain functioning still have a level of consciousness, as well.

Brain dead arguments

It was inevitable that as my story became known outside the skeptical world, some people would feel defensive about my non-spiritual near-death experience and my theories about NDEs. It happened after the Washington post wrote about my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience." And after Simon Davis interviewed me for his Post Mortem column, as well. To some true believers, books like "Proof of Heaven" reaffirm their faith in their eternal reward. Yeah, life sucks, but in the end I'll get to go to the Club Med in the sky. A recent study shows that thinking about atheists increase thoughts of death, even in atheists, which Simon Davis has written about incisively.

Indeed, it's not surprising that a few atheists who have seen heaven in their NDEs have become believers. Most atheists grew up religious; I was raised an agnostic. As I put it to Simon Davis, angels and heaven were not in my mental landscape. There's a reason that the aliens people tend to see in their "encounters" look a lot like the media depictions...and it has nothing to do with spindly little green men buzzing isolated highways.

I have resisted the urge to reply to the commentators on the column. While the epithet Nazi has yet to be thrown, variations of retard has been deployed with regularity. However, I will respond in my own soapbox--this blog. First, Eben Alexander was not brain dead when he had his NDE. This is what Oliver Sacks--that great humanist and polymath whom the world sadly lost a few days ago--had to say about Alexander's experience.

He had a nasty bacterial meningitis. He was in a coma for several days. But when he came to, he described an enormously complex so-called near-death experience. These experiences are often rather stereotyped in quality. People may feel they’re in a dark corridor and moving towards some bright light. Feelings of bliss envelop them as they are drawn towards the light. They sense, in a way, that the light is the boundary between life and death. And they would then come back or “float back.” In Musicophilia, I described such a sequence with a subject, another surgeon as it happened, who had been struck by lightning.

And he had this sort of blissful moment and then he said, “Slam! I was back.” He was back because someone was doing CPR on his heart and his heart started beating again twenty or thirty seconds afterwards. So, his whole cosmic journey only occupied a matter of seconds. Dr. Alexander feels that his cortex was out of action while he was having his visions and therefore it must have been direct supernatural intervention. I think such a claim can’t be sustained and indeed, a few seconds of altered consciousness as one emerges from coma would be enough to give him such a state.

You don't recover from brain death. After brain death, your brain begins to liquify. You know, kind of like watching a marathon of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. You don't come back from brain death...or Honey Boo Boo.

Here's Michael Shermer's take: Why Near-Death Experience Isn't Proof of Heaven. I wish the commentators had been able to read my Skeptical Inquirer article [it wasn't posted until today]. It's not yet available online, though it should be fairly soon, Simon decided to focus, understably considering his readership, on my NDE, but I think the covert cognition I experienced is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Eben Alexander's brain wasn't off, it was on dimmer. Covert cognition means that while doctors can't detect signs of awareness, the brain is still active on some level. That's what I experienced during my coma, and it's the reason why things that were going around me leaked into my coma-dream, despite my unresponsive state.

Kate Bainbridge, also known as Cambridge Kate, is a famous example of the phenomenon. She was the first patient Dr. Adrian Owen tested for signs of covert cognition. Luckily for her, Dr. Owen was able to see that she was, as Kate put it, "still in there," while showing her pictures of her loved ones during a PET scan. His discovery set him on a new career path that I hope will one day help doctors detect awareness in the (as many as) one in five consciousness disorder patients with covert cognition. Meanwhile, Kate received therapy and eventually woke up. Tragically, though she also exhibits no signs of cognitive dysfunction, she remains severely handicapped. There for the grace of the God I don't believe in go I.

I will have to get into the arguments about whether I had an NDE in my next blog or this one will start feeling like it's lasting as long as my coma. But here's a preview: Yes, it was a dream, as are all NDEs according to the REM intrusion theory formulated by Kevin Nelson. But there's more to it than that.To be continued...

Interview with the vampire...er, ex-night owl

Today, Simon Davis, a fellow skeptic who writes the Post Mortem column for VICE interviewed me about my coma experience and my Skeptical Inquirer article, "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience." His column focuses on death-related subjects. I did nearly die, after all. I've often joked that I came about as close to dying as you can get without actually dying. Plus, I did have a near-death experience, a subject that came up repeatedly in our conversation. Another topic that came up frequently was my coma-dream. I know that's a subject that often fascinates people. It would me, too, if it hadn't happened to me.

I thought I would be nervous, but apart from my usual ADHD-related nervous energy, I was fine. In fact, it was a lot of fun. Who doesn't like to talk about themselves?

It will be interesting to read his interview when it comes out. He's requested that I send him some photos, and I've sent him the first batch--the few pics taken while I was in the coma, plus the photo of me beside the graffiti that read, HOPE. I have to go through more so Simon's editor can pick the best.

And speaking of hope, I hope he mentions the plight of patients like me who are covertly aware, but are dismissed as hopeless vegetables. Somebody has to speak for them, because they certainly can't. The closest any have come was when they were lucky enough to be included in a covert cognition study. Scott Routley was asked by Dr. Adrian Owen if he was in pain. He answered no, using Dr. Owen's tennis/navigating familiar locations technique. Sadly, Scott died without ever regaining full consciousness. But before that, he gave hope that similar patients will someday be able to participate in their own care.

And I'm glad to know he wasn't in pain.

Minimally conscious...and it wasn't even morning

This photo was taken at All Saints Healthcare on the day the evaluation I refer to was written.

On Friday I went on an exhausting and frustrating wild goose chase through the sprawling Kaiser Permanente Panorama City Hospital campus in an attempt to request my hospital records. The complex has undergone extensive building and reorganizing, so I kept being routed to the wrong buildings. My mother figured out that I had been to all but one of them. This was complicated by my previous odyssey to obtain my hospital and nursing home records. Then, too, I was redirected repeatedly and incorrectly. When I was sent to the place where I eventually wound up requesting the records, I headed right out again because it was the same office where I had been misdirected the first time. That was eight months ago, however, and now it was the correct location. After I finally found the right office that time, I had to wait a few days to receive the records on a DVD. When I picked them up, at a cost of $15, I didn't check them right away because I only needed them for when was ready to started writing my memoir.

Eventually, I promised to send a copy to Dr. Adrian Owen to help him understand my case. As I previously mentioned, I'm going to be helping him by answering some questions about my covert cognition experience as he writes a book for the popular market. Unfortunately, when I fed the DVD into my computer, I found that I had been given the records from my 2014 Legionnaires' disease hospitalization. I don't think the fact that they were both legionella cases had anything to do with it, as rare as this bacterial infection may be. She just gave me the records from the second hospitalization in 2013, when I returned to the hospital from All Saints Healthcare, the nursing home Kaiser had transferred me to only six days before. I was back at the hospital to stop the bleeding from my gastric tube. She had also included the records from my 2014 hospitalization sequel, Legionnaires' Disease: The Revenge. Thus, the literal run-around...again. Now I'm going to have to pay that $15 fee again. Yeah, that's not fair, but it's not worth arguing about. I need those records!

The other odd thing is that the records were missing two days from my short stay at All Saints. I'm missing the day before I awoke and the day of my awakening. The first missing day is exactly two years ago today. Tomorrow is the the second anniversary of Coma Day--the day of my awakening. That's gone too.

Yup, the two most important days are missing. I'm awaiting a callback from All Saints to see if they have the records. But reviewing the records I do have gave me a bit of shock. It says that I was opening my eyes and responding to simple commands five days before Coma Day. That means that I was at that point in a minimally conscious state. That's not the surprising part; I suspected as much. However, my loved ones would've liked to have known that the doctors were now saying that my altered mental status was improving. They could see that for themselves, but until then my doctors had always pooh-poohed their observations of my increasing awareness. Indeed, the doctor who wrote these notes told Keith that I wasn't the same patient described in my medical records. In her notes, she deemed my rehab potential to be fair. That's a whole lot better than the previous predictions that I would at best be left a hopeless vegetable. This change in evaluation is due to the fact that people in minimally conscious states are far more likely to effect a full recovery. You know, like I have. I wish my loved ones had known that!

What other surprises await in the records from those two days?

Donating my brain to science while I'm still alive

Dr. Adrian Owen, wearing an EEG cap, probably much like the one I wore when an EEG was performed on me during my coma.

While I am an organ donor, I'm quite that dedicated to the cause. I do occasionally use my brain as something more than a counterbalance to my nose, which is still somewhat prominent, despite my nose job. But I will be answering Dr. Adrian Owen's questions about the things I experienced in my my brain while I was covertly aware during my coma. It will be for his upcoming book as he comes to the relevant chapters.

This week, I realized that Dr. Adrian Owen had finally responded to the email I had sent him detailing my coma experience, at his request. It had languished in my Junk folder for a few days until I noticed it. He had been so wrapped up in his book that he hadn't gotten a chance to respond. As as writer, I can completely understand that. Anyway, here's the backstory: I had sent him a tweet when the Skeptical Inquirer article came out because I thought he and the Owen lab would be interested in the article, since it refers to their work extensively. The Owen Lab website does an excellent job of presenting media and journal links. In fact, much of the information in, "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," was gleaned from article and media links on their website. When my article is made available in the Skeptical Inquirer archive, I would be surprised if they didn't add that to their library, as well.

I also suspected that Dr. Owen would be curious about my case, since it's rare that patients in my situation recover so fully. And how many of them are also writers who can articulate their experience well? Indeed, I had sent an email when the article was accepted. But for whatever reason, I never received a response, not even in my Junk folder. It's possible that's where my email wound up, as well, amidst the ads for penis enlargement miracles and urgent correspondence regarding unknown benefactors in Kenya.

At any rate, he told me that parts of my experience were similar to other cases he has seen. That's fascinating to know...tell me more! I had also offered to send him a copy of my medical records while I was in the hospital (I have a copy to aid my memoir), and he's asked to see it to help him understand my case better. (I can't wait to hear his insights!) He queried me, as well, about the closest big city to where I live. Los Angeles, I told him. Ever heard of it? I think he inquired because he might ask me to get some tests. Is it too much to hope that it might be a fMRI, like I discussed in the article? I love the idea that I might be contributing something to science! I wanted to grow up to be a scientist, and this is the next best thing.

I'm afraid I may have come off sounding a bit like a fangirl in my response because of his groundbreaking work in a field I now feel passionate about. To me, he is a rock star of covert cognition research. Indeed, Dr. Owen plays guitar, and he used to be a member of a rock band called, You Jump First. Okay, I will, but I did urge him to write a popular science book about covert cognition eventually. To advance the science, you also have to increase knowledge of it for those potentially one-in-five patients with disorders of conscious who have covert cognition. You can't help them if no one even considers that they might be still "in there."

In every interview of Kate Bainbridge I've read, she's commented about how lucky she was that Dr. Owen scanned her and saw those sparks of consciousness as she reacted to pictures of her family. Dr. Owen was fortunate, too, because that discovery set him on his current career path. But luckiest of all are the covertly conscious who will someday be helped by Dr. Owen and his fellow researchers in the growing field of covert cognition research.

Someday, perhaps, the covertly aware won't be shoved into the Junk folder of humanity.

The Diving Bell and the Salmon

I'm currently reading, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique Bauby, in part because I'm preparing to write my own memoir. I have to admit that memoirs haven't been one of my favorite genres, though I have read a few. If I knew I was going to have a memoir-bait experience, I would've prepared better.

Like I did when I was a kid choosing subjects for a book report, I've naturally been picking up memoirs on subjects that I would've been interested in anyway. I don't care how popular Eat, Pray, Love was, I'm not reading that spiritual drivel.

At any rate, there's a reason why Mr. Bauby's book was an international bestseller. I'm enjoying it on a literary level, the way fiction has always drawn me into its web. In a recent chapter, he wrote about the way he integrated what was going on around him in the hospital into his own version of a coma-dream. The ICU was transformed into a surreal bar, his IVs a tube from which alcohol poured forth into his mouth.

That anecdote powerfully reminded me of the "Hi-C" being fed into my mouth through a tube in my coma-dream. In fact, the "tube" was actually a citrus-flavored swab being used to clean my teeth. I couldn't understand why Keith kept telling me not to bite down. How else was I supposed to suck on the tube? Mr. Bauby also likened his recurring dream segments to a soap opera, just as I have. When you're in a coma, you have a lot of time to kill.

Recently, Joella posted a video on my Facebook timeline from a bubbly and intelligent 18 year old with cystic fibrosis named Claire Wineland. It's titled, "What It's Like To Be In A Coma." Actually, that isn't quite correct. It's really about what it was like to be in her coma, which was medically induced after a surgical procedure went awry. But her experience does share a number of elements with mine, as well as Mr. Bauby's and other accounts by people who have posted their coma experiences online. Her brain also transformed what was going on around her into dream-logic versions in her coma-dream. Like me, she interacted with people in the real world, engaging in conversations only she could hear. She dreamed of Alaska because her doctors packed her with ice, like a soda in a cooler, to lower her temperature. My doctors did the same to me. They left me uncovered in a frigid room, as well, since they thought I was incapable of feeling chilled. This is why not one but two recurring threads of my coma-dream involved ice cream.

When you read medical information about comas, it always talks about the coma victims losing awareness of their surroundings. Yet, brain trauma organizations advise the loved ones of those with disorders of consciousness to talk to the patients because of the many accounts from recovered survivors who have reported that they heard what was being spoken to them. What gives?

Well, in science you can't credit anecdotal evidence.The brain trauma organizations are giving advice based on experience, but it's still not empirical, scientifically confirmed, evidence. Furthermore, the official sources are citing what has always been accepted knowledge and practice. Doctors on the community hospital frontlines play the odds, which state that people in my situation are most often basket cases. Just as my dermatomyositis was pooh-poohed for some time because it was a rare zebra of a disease, my chances of recovery from the strokes and coma were discounted when they saw all those white spots on my MRI and I remained unable to respond. Doctors don't want to give false hope to loved ones, so in some instances, they instead spread false despair.

Ah, but there is plenty of empirical evidence of covert cognition, you say. Isn't that what you've been going on about since the beginning of your recovery blog? What about the scores of peer-reviewed studies published by Dr. Adrian Owen and the Owen lab?

Though the Owen lab is far from alone in the growing field of covert cognition research, these findings have yet to penetrate to the level of the average neurological practitioner. Indeed, my neurologist hadn't even heard of their work. I'm also afraid that the medical establishment hasn't fully absorbed the finding of the Owen lab, Dr. Owen's earlier work at Cambridge University, and Steven Laureys' Coma Science Group in Belgium. The finding fall too far outside of long-accepted knowledge and practice.

Think about how long it took before H. Pylori was accepted as the cause of ulcers. It was discovered by Australian doctors in 1982 and later confirmed by British researchers. Perhaps, when it comes to covert cognition research, American doctors are still scratching their head over those crazy finding by British, Canadian, and Belgian ferners. Vegetables communicating by playing tennis in their heads? Ridiculous! Dead salmon placed in an fMRI machine show activity, too [that's a real argument I've read based on a test anomaly]. But could even live salmon repeatedly and correctly answer biographical questions, or anything at all?

Locked-in hope

Tooling around the Owen Lab's website, I learned that Dr. Adrian Owen and his colleagues at the Brain and Mind Institute have developed a portable device that allows communication with people suffering from complete locked-in syndrome. Here's the NewScientist story: Portable mind-reader gives voice to locked-in people.

I didn't suffer from locked-in syndrome, but I think Kate Bainbridge did at one point. She refers to being aware, yet unable to communicate. I, on the other hand, was only semi-conscious. That's why stimuli from around me only leaked into my coma-dream, as I call my near-death experience.

Still, this is an exciting advance. The Owen Lab is also working on ways to detect covert cognition with EEGs. I received an EEG, though all it could detect was that I wasn't brain dead. You may have surmised this by the fact that I'm writing this. At any rate, I wish them luck in their further endeavors as they seek to help people like Kate Bainbridge and me.