a minor complaint

 14 years ago today, I was lying in a coma in OHSU.  They did a good job on fixing me; the car wreck I had been in had banged me up pretty badly.  The coma part of it lasted about ten days, I guess, but the period of semi-comatose – ness lasts for seven seeks or so.  I finally really "woke up" months later in what turned out to be the third hospital I had been in.

It was mid June, by then, and the car wreck had been in April.

The minor complaint I have is this:

It’s a not-uncommon plot device on TV to have some character in a coma and for him or her to have any sort of neato interactions with God or their deceased relatives or some fantasy life with their co-workers in a completely different setting.  NOTHING like that hapened for me.

I don’t know where I was; I had no sense of "me" or indeed, any senses at all, really.  The last day I remembered, after hitting my head very hard in the wreck, was ten days before the wreck, and all together, as near as I could figure, I lost 45 days.

I dunno where I was, but I certainly wasn’t in a hospital, and I didn’t feel any pain, and time went by without me.  I do feel sort of resentful, you know, that I didn’t have some grand illusion while I was in the coma.

Most of the scars from that experience are hidden away when I’m dressed; in long shorts, anyway; my left thigh got kind of mangled, but most everything is hidden away when I’m dressed.

One thing thats not hidden is the scar in my throat from the tracheotemomy (or however it’s spelled- the breathing tube down my throat because of the collasped lung(s)).  OHSU was the Trauma hospital that treated me right after the car accident; fortunately, the bridge I crashed on was only a few miles from OHSU.  Given the brain injury, they wanted to move me to the RIO (REO?) unit at Good Sam hospital where they specialized in that kind of injury/recovery.  There wasn’t any space open immeadiately, so I’m told that I was moved to a nursing unit somewhere else, and that that day, I apparently got so upset that I tore out all the wires and tubes stuck into me and "became aggitated".  I guess I did a number on the throat thing; there’s a pretty noticible scar there.  Most of the time, people don’t say anything about it; it’s not ugly ugly, but it ain’t all that prety either, but when I worked at the Zoo, kids were not all that shy about saying "what happened to you!?"

I got used to it; besides, it doesn’t bug ME.

That’s where some of the scars came from, I guess – there’s a pair of them where some things were stuck into me just below my ribs.  I remember when they pulled those feeding tubes out, that kind of slithery feeling, but I don’t remember doing it myself a month before.

That, I’m glad I have no memmories of.

But the other thing – no fantasy life while I was away in Coma-ville, that makes me feel like I lost something.

You know, besides the 45 days of time lost and the years of recovery.

*****