I’ve talked to patients who woke up from a comma, they remember conversations that were being said while they were in the comma. So be careful what you say while you think they aren’t listening. I had a couple of people tell me it felt like one really long dream.
Disorienting. Literally couldn’t remember who or where i was for a few minutes. Felt super groggy, like i was severely hungover but without the nausea or pounding headache. My first thought, for some reason, was “I’m in Colorado?”, then i realized it was a hospital but didn’t know why i was there
edit: I’m in Mississippi, and unless my parents drove thru it when i was little kid I’ve never been to CO
When my dad and I visited my aunt, who had been in a coma for three months, she shared her experiences during that time. She described walking in a dark tunnel, with a very bright light at the end. Most of the time, she felt scared and trapped in an unending loop of nightmares.
I wouldn’t call it a Coma but I did get hit by a truck while riding my motorcycle, I woke up 3 days later in the hospital very disoriented and confused. I didn’t see anybody immediately so I kind of started yelling because I thought I might be having a bad dream? 😂 it took probably 4 hours for everything to come back and work properly but I couldn’t remember what happened.
It’s not like it is in the movies. It’s violent, it’s scary, it’s ugly. An intoxicated driver put me into an 11.5 day coma in the ICU. I lost about 40 pounds in that time from atrophy. I woke up angry, violent, bruised, bloody, irrational, and fragile, which is not unusual. Traumatic Brain injury, broken sternum, skull, shoulder, etc. I haven’t been able to taste or smell a thing in 12+ yrs. Kinda messed up the whole momentum of my life up until that point as well as causing new, additional stress & heartache.
Since then, things have gotten much better. I discovered music composition therapy while in recovery though. I gave many years to writing music since. If you’re interested, the album 9fm, by artist 9fm is the music that I made during recovery. Silver lining, I guess. But, the coma experience was ugly. Not at all like we’ve been led to believe.
I just got out a 3 day coma from a few back to back seizures a week ago.
Everything felt odd and off , I felt like I recognized everyone at the hospital or knew them. I felt like it was a dream and couldn’t didn’t wanna eat, but was very thirsty. My head hurts, and my thoughts were just off.
Never been in a coma but I’ve had seizures that have put me out for a couple of days. For me it was a total blank. I remember absolutely nothing and there is a two day hole in my memory. Woke up in the ICU with my head wired up to an EEG machine. 10/10 do not recommend
I’m thinking that it was a bit of a slow process where i gradually started to become aware of my surrounding. I knew that I was in the hospital and I sort of knew what had happened but didn’t know the full extent of what procedures I had done until I was aware for a bit of time. Like, I knew that I had a trache but it wasn’t until I was transferred to a Skilled Nursing Facility that I noticed that I had a feeding tube- I discovered that when the night shift nurse came in to give me my night meds and she flushed my feeding tube and I asked her “what’s that, is that a feeding tube!? How did I not know about that!?”I don’t really recall much of my first few days at the SNF, but the CNAs who stuck around for a bit said that I was pretty out of it and that they were scared to touch me since I was missing the right side of my skull. I was in a medically induced coma for two weeks following brain surgery after a hemmorhaggic stroke
My husband saw me, his sister and brother in law standing next to him. He was in bed at a hospital. He thought he had passed away and we were at his funeral. He couldn’t talk at first. But he could write. He was super confused and the previous 14 days were a total blank.
It’s just like falling asleep and waking up; I promise, it’ll be peace when you wake up… music would be good. Stand back when they wake up. It’s unsettling and scary and they’ll have questions.
I have seizures; I am very familiar – cold compresses. Cold anything. Cold water. Talk – sometimes, when I have seizures, I can begin to hear as I wake up from them. My heart extends to whoever made this post.
I was in a medically induced coma for 2 weeks. It was just blackness and nothingness. After waking up I was weak lost about 80lbs,confused and had really bad hallucinations for multiple days. Took months of physical therapy and counseling to get back to normal definitely do not recommend it.
My bf was in a coma for over a week from being shot in the head. The dr’s weren’t sure if he would remember anything or how much it affected his brain function. It’s hard to talk after being intubated. He could barely make any sound with his voice and his handwriting was gibberish. He was so angry and literally couldn’t get any words out. Turns out one of his vocal cords was paralyzed from the tube. He could barely talk for a while. He ended up having surgery later on and his voice is fine now. He says he doesn’t remember anything from being in a coma which is so crazy because when the meds were low you could see his eyes open and wanting to get words out but he couldn’t.
It’s interesting to read other people’s accounts because I can’t really relate to them. I was only in a very short coma so maybe that plays into it, or maybe there are other factors, but for me it didn’t feel any different than waking up after being put under for surgery. I was gone and then I was back again, nothing in between.
My dad was in a coma for a little over a week. When he woke up he was totally out of it. He managed to say “I was to see my wife” and then Spent then next hour just drooling all over himself and looking like he was drunk. Once he finally got through it he basically said that it was just a really deep sleep. He was aware of nothing while he was out. He remembered being at the lake sitting on the shore and his next memory was waking up in the hospital. In between there was nothing and when he woke up he felt completely “out of it.”
I was in a coma for weeks as a result of meningoencephalitis when I was 8. As I was coming out of it, it felt like (what I now know) the worst hangover of my life. Headache and all, which checks out given the diagnosis. There was no dreaming, I didn’t hear anything going on around me, it was just a long, dark, deep sleep. I had to relearn how to do almost all motor skills, but damn, muscle memory is an incredible thing and I recovered really well.
I got hit hard by the early alpha-wave of covid19. In March-April 2020, I spent 38 days in Hospital (16 of those days in ICU on a Ventilator. If you want to read my last long write up including Lung X-rays you can find it here
The thing about being on a Ventilator is that they have to give you heavy-sedatives,.. which gives you “ICU Nightmares” (non-stop vivid hallucinations).. and I had those for 16 days straight.
Waking up from it, thankfully I don’t remember much of that. They don’t take you off the Ventilator until you can maintain breathing and oxygen levels on your own. If you can do that, they remove the ventilator and then stop giving you heavy sedatives and it takes a few hours for the heavy sedatives to wear off.
For me.. I remember them asking me orientation questions (What’s your Name?.. Do you know where you are?.. Do you know why you’re here ?).. I remember at first answering that I was in a Veterinary (animal) clinic,. which was clearly wrong. Then I thought I was in a Hospital another town away,. so close but still wrong. Then I finally answered correctly to all 3 questions.
When I woke up I couldn’t walk or talk. I had lost 12lbs being horizontal in ICU for so long and I had some bad shakes in my hands, so I couldnt’ really do anything with my smartphone. Took a few days to get to a point where I could communicate with people and do simple things on my own (such as pushing the “Nurse Call” button on my bed).
Even after all that, I still had 4 tubes in me (catheter, 3-port neck IV, nasal feeding tube and nasal oxygen line) .. so it took a while to get all those pulled out.
It was a pretty surreal experience. It’s weird to feel like you basically got “completely rebooted”. It also reminds me of that old phrase “You never know how strong you can be until being strong is your only choice”.
Was in a coma for just over a month and it was just day by day to see if I would survive or not, it took me around 2/3 weeks to fully wake up and it was not a pleasant experience. A lot of the time i thought the nurses were harming me when in reality they were changing my tubes and altering my trachea etc.. I had a lot of what I know now were dreams but i look back on them more as memories as they felt so real at the time. I also had a lot of sort of spiritual experiences like being able to look at younger versions of myself which was very very strange. I was delirious at the time due to meds,illness but I still remember being stood on a balcony with the drs/nurses discussing how i hope they can make me better, this didn’t happen of course but even now looking back it feels real. If anyone has a specific question I don’t mind answering as it is a surreal experience and people ask me about it alot.
I was recently in a coma, from high sodium. Left me with extremely severe amnesia of both kind. Amnesia was so bad after coma that I didn’t even remember my parents :'( so it was like starting life all over again at that point.
I was in a coma for 3-4 days. It felt like no time had passed. I was very confused when I woke up. Groggy. Making jokes about the most random things. Apparently I was very responsive to my friends and family around me while in my coma. I’m now dealing with the aftermath of said coma — 6 years later.
My stepdad was in a 9 day coma when he was 16. He reported surprise at his mom being beside his bed, as if he’d woken up as normal, except his mom’s there? He was in fact in a hospital and disoriented.
I was in a medically induced coma for a few days while having encephalitis and it felt like I was being abducted by aliens. I remember lots of lights and medical stuff so my brain connected it with aliens I guess. Prior to being placed in the coma I recall fighting with the workers. I woke up heavily bruised from all this. Thankfully, they did a spinal tap on me while I was under or unconscious in some way so I have no memory of that particular bruise.
I was in a coma for 12 days after falling off my friends pick up truck while goofing around after high school one day. Fell off and hit my head on the street. I was pretty fortunate it wasn’t worse. I don’t remember much about waking up, maybe seeing some blurry figures across the room and then being confused and emotional for a while. Most of my memories around that time of life our little fuzzy even for a couple years after that now that I think back. But I lost a lot of weight and it’s a good story to tell at parties. My friends were great supporters of my recovery.
I just remember the dream I had, and thinking that was life and somehow me waking up was like having that life? Woke up in the ICU and couldn’t really remember why I was in this foreign place. I was admitted before I went into a coma and when I had woken up had no real recollection of the past however many days. I remember it taking a while though. No idea how long it took, but just sort of adjusting to the light, opening my eyes, and kind of gathering my thoughts felt like it took a while before I talked to anyone. When I did it was in real short sentences and I remember everyone being really slow with me. I also remember I THINK I woke up in this like different room, then getting moved somewhere but I can’t really remember. I wanna say that whole day was me waking up and sort of getting used to just keeping my eyes open and slowly talking to nurses and figuring out what was going on.
waking up from the coma felt like coming back from the dead but with none of the drama I expected.. just confusion, weakness, and a lot of “what year is it” moments. It took a while for my brain to catch up to reality.
This happened over thirty years ago, so I don’t remember much about waking up except I was restrained to a bed in the hospital.
My medical records indicate that I had a Glasgow coma scale of 7 for about two weeks.
The nurse said the if I got out of bed and fell he would be responsible.
When I woke up I could not talk without stuttering and I was partially paralyzed.
While I was in a civilian hospital, for about two weeks, I was just in bed.
I don’t remember doing anything except that my mom came to visit me and pushed me around in a wheelchair for a little while and it was difficult sitting upright because my side hurt and I was not strong enough to sit up.
After some time, I was air lifted to an Army hospital where I did physical therapy for a few months.
I’ve been in two comas in two years. One for 3 days and the second for nine days. With the first coma, I regained full consciousness as they were removing my central line, so weird pulling on my neck as I was opening my eyes. The nurse asked if I knew what happened, and I said, “Um, I collapsed in a laundromat?” And she just said, “No.” And left the room. The second coma, I don’t remember waking up per se, but I was 24 hours conscious on the ventilator, and let me tell you, that is a nightmare and a half. You are constantly choking but have to relax because it’s not going to stop… Anyway, during the coma, both times, it was nothing but blackness. Like a blink, and suddenly I’m in a hospital bed…
I spent about 7 weeks at the end of 2021 in ICU. I had perforated diverticulitis. After the first 2 surgeries of removing my guts, I went into septic shock and caught pneumonia. My organs started failing. I spent 14 days in a medically induced coma. I was on a ventilator and had a feeding tube down my nose. It’s a long story.
I have a lot of memories that were real to me, but they never actually happened. I thought I had been living on a house boat for a long time. I thought my ex-wife adopted a set of twins from Australia. I remember a stranger living in the air ducts that was trying to poison me. I thought I had become a local sports TV news guy that got away with cussing a shit load. Strangers could walk on the walls and ceilings, but I could not. I thought I was in a jail hospital because of plagiarism charges. I also remember dying in a house fire and a separate incident where I drowned while on a DART bus. Those are just some examples.
When I woke up, It took me days to realize I had a colostomy. It honestly took me months to sort out what really happened and what didn’t. Also, months before I could actually walk again. Maybe septic shock had a lot to do with fucked up memories, but I was also heavily medicated. I have tons of those memories noted on my “Notes” app on my phone.
Anyway, I am very thankful to the doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
Hands down the most strange thing I’ve ever went through, had no idea why I was even in the ICU in the first place, didn’t know where the fuck I was (I was actually convinced I was lying in my living room at my house) and just overall unable to process what was going on, it took me nearly a week of being told by doctors and family members what had happened to me before I finally comprehended the timeframe of everything.
On another note, the hallucinations I would experience during the coma when my sedation was lifted slightly were the most terrifying thing I have and hopefully ever will experience, just real horrible shit with no clue what was happening, was 90% sure I was actually dead and that this was some sort of purgatory, probably a result of being on a ventilator and pumped with copious amounts of drugs to keep me alive. I still haven’t fully processed everything.
I could hear people around me but had no control over my body or voice. It felt like wakening from a deep sleep but there are all kinds of machines connected.
My husband was in a coma for 5 weeks. He says it was an unending series of truly terrible nightmares the whole time. Lots of different bizarre plot lines, but all with the common theme that he had to do or achieve something or else he was going to die/be killed. So each scenario was a ‘fighting for your life’ scenario.
In the last one, he was smashing down walls to escape from monsters, and when he smashed down the last wall before he woke up, he smashed a wall that lead into his ICU room. He said he looked around and saw himself there and heard a voice in his head say something like “This is reality. All of your problems are in this room.” And then the nightmares stopped and he was waking up.
But waking up was not just a one off event. It was waking up lots of times, being confused, having us talk and try to explain to him what was happening, and then falling back sleep, waking up again, until finally he was more conscious and understood more of what was going on and remembered what we’d told him about where he was and why he was there. Then he had to spend another 3 weeks conscious, on the ventilator, before the ventilation was finally able to be removed. Completely unable to move, unable to talk.
He was never alone for the whole 5 week coma, but he doesn’t remember seeing or hearing anything except his nightmares during that time. We sang to him, we talked to him, we played his favourite music, gave him massages, washed him, moved his limbs, lay our heads next to his on his pillow… He wasn’t ever aware of any of it.
He has PTSD from the whole experience, as well as a number of other health complications, but he’s alive!
While I was never in a coma, my cousin was after getting hit by a car while riding his bike. After he woke up he started trying to sleep with my sister, so…
I was in an induced coma for a month after being in a car accident involving a landscaping truck (this is funny to me, since I’m a Latino)
It was super odd waking up. I remember being in the coma and living my normal every day life, those would quickly turn to nightmarish horrors. I had visions of me and my friends being randomly gunned down, my mother being assaulted, me in a wheelchair begging for help)
My mother was next to me, and told me what had happened, next thing I knew I couldn’t lift my arms or my legs(atrophy), saw a reflection of myself on something metal, and freaked the fuck out when I saw about 30 or 40 staples across my head. Next few weeks was nauseating, I had no motor control or understanding of anything. It was downright awful. Next came the sciatic nerve and hip pain, followed by endless sleepless nights.
I was in a coma for around 3 weeks. I had something called a Colloid Cyst in the third ventricle of my brain. In a nutshell, the cyst blocked the fluid in my brain from draining and at one point it got so big that my migraines caused seizures. Basically my brain was getting crushed by the pressure build up of brain fluid.
I’m not sure if it was medically induced or a bit of both, but I remember waking up and asking how long I was out. They said 3 weeks. All I remember before that was waking up the night it happened with an insanely bad migraine and then getting rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. I was around 12 when this happened.
I had short term memory loss for a day or so, and had to practice walking. Took me about 2 days to be able to walk without help.
I don’t think I could describe waking up from a coma because all my memories from that moment are really just from what my family told me. I apparently met Darth Vader and his storm troopers while at the hospital.
Shout out to Dr. Handler at CO children’s hospital (he was the surgeon who saved my life).
For me, it was like turning on and off a light switch. One moment I was driving, the next moment I was in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. I couldn’t make sense of anything and my head hurt. I was confused and suspicious and a little angry. I knew I wanted to leave immediately. I had no destination in mind. I couldn’t quite make my body do anything helpful. I almost fell out of bed. It was unpleasant and frightening.
I was told I was dead for several minutes before getting to the hospital, while being cut out of the vehicle. It’s not possible to be sure how long I was dead. I’m still haunted by the lack of anything resembling an afterlife or the near death experiences you read about. It was just non-existence. It makes me wonder if those other stories are just lies or fictions people have written for themselves to escape the void. Maybe there’s a difference between traumatic brain injury coma and others. It’s been almost twenty years and there are still moments when the world blinks out for a few moments or becomes kind of different and I think I might still be in a coma. It’s hard to describe.
My Friend got into a four-wheeler accident and was induced into a coma for 12 days due to brain swelling and injuries. He told me he kept having the same dream of waking up, showering, dressing in the same clothes, seeing the same people, and saying the same things. He then said, towards the end, he started freaking out because he realized he was repeating the same day over and over and that panic forced him to wake up.
I was in a coma for three days, I don’t remember a lot but my chest was hurting a lot, I asked “is my chest hurting because I have pneumonia?” And the doctor said with an ironic voice “a pneumonia!?” It turns out I was on CPR for 13 minutes, I don’t remember anything from the two days previous.
Depends on how you define coma, but I lost consciousness because of a vasovagal response during an examination. I went into cardiac arrest and had to be revived. I was gone for a few minutes.
It was exactly like being sedated when doing surgery. I didn’t notice anything until I woke up. No dreams or anything. It was like pressing pause when playing music, and then resuming it.
I was in a coma in the ICU for 3 days. I had a 20% survival rate but woke up.
Right before I woke up, I saw 2 of my friends in a white room in front of large windows on either side of them. One was sitting and the other leaning against the wall. When I became conscious, they were in those exact positions but the room was a mint green hospital room and there were no windows near them.
After I woke up, I was quickly handed my phone to call my parents. I couldn’t figure out my motor functions to put in my passcode. I remembered my passcode without issue, I just struggled connecting my thought to my actions. I was in the hospital for 15 more days, physical therapy for 2 months and I had to walk w a walker for 3 months. I’m grateful to be alive and often wonder about that white room I saw before I woke up.
Mine was 17yrs ago and it was a medically induced coma after being hit on my bike and suffering severe head trauma and severe TBI. With that part said, I was in a state of post traumatic amnesia for 3wks that I have zero recollection. My wife said I was a child like version of myself (I was 34yrs old).
After 3 weeks of that, I “awakened” in the middle of the day and was lucid and relatively clear headed. I saw my brother and wife and instantly asked where I was and a breakdown of the situation, without realizing a month had passed.
Definitely no lights or visions or anything from during the coma.
My sister went into 2 comas after a bad car accident when she was 19, both were for a few days. One was induced and one wasn’t. She said she didn’t really come to and start forming memories again until she’d been out of the coma for well over a week, even though she was up and talking (and pulling out her lines and trying to stand up and leave lol) at that point. She had a severe brain injury so maybe it’s different if you’re in a coma for other reasons maybe you’ll remember waking up but she completely lost a few weeks of time from both before and after her crash. I’m honestly glad she didn’t remember the time she was in rough shape, it was hard to see her scared like that.
I imagine it was like how when I had surgery I was already mid conversation with the nurse when I came out of the anesthesia. My body was awake but my brain was not recording. Freaky feeling.
Medically induced coma for 2 weeks. On life support. Very bad accident, doctor said I’d be blind but I’m not, I do have some brain damage, not as smart as I was, I lose focus and stutter. It sucks. But honestly it felt like I was asleep for a night. After the doctor told me how long it was, it was shocking. Couldn’t stand or walk because I was lying down for two weeks. My throat was sore and couldn’t really talk because the tube down my throat.
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Good question
I’ve talked to patients who woke up from a comma, they remember conversations that were being said while they were in the comma. So be careful what you say while you think they aren’t listening. I had a couple of people tell me it felt like one really long dream.
Edit: I realize my spelling and I’m leaving it!
Disorienting. Literally couldn’t remember who or where i was for a few minutes. Felt super groggy, like i was severely hungover but without the nausea or pounding headache. My first thought, for some reason, was “I’m in Colorado?”, then i realized it was a hospital but didn’t know why i was there
edit: I’m in Mississippi, and unless my parents drove thru it when i was little kid I’ve never been to CO
Probably the same as it still is at the time they woke up
I don’t know. But I imagine it’s like watching the ending credits of Oppenheimer.
When my dad and I visited my aunt, who had been in a coma for three months, she shared her experiences during that time. She described walking in a dark tunnel, with a very bright light at the end. Most of the time, she felt scared and trapped in an unending loop of nightmares.
I wouldn’t call it a Coma but I did get hit by a truck while riding my motorcycle, I woke up 3 days later in the hospital very disoriented and confused. I didn’t see anybody immediately so I kind of started yelling because I thought I might be having a bad dream? 😂 it took probably 4 hours for everything to come back and work properly but I couldn’t remember what happened.
One long deep sleep I guess
It’s not like it is in the movies. It’s violent, it’s scary, it’s ugly. An intoxicated driver put me into an 11.5 day coma in the ICU. I lost about 40 pounds in that time from atrophy. I woke up angry, violent, bruised, bloody, irrational, and fragile, which is not unusual. Traumatic Brain injury, broken sternum, skull, shoulder, etc. I haven’t been able to taste or smell a thing in 12+ yrs. Kinda messed up the whole momentum of my life up until that point as well as causing new, additional stress & heartache.
Since then, things have gotten much better. I discovered music composition therapy while in recovery though. I gave many years to writing music since. If you’re interested, the album 9fm, by artist 9fm is the music that I made during recovery. Silver lining, I guess. But, the coma experience was ugly. Not at all like we’ve been led to believe.
I didn’t know where or why I was where I was. Huge chunks of memory missing as I was recovering
I just got out a 3 day coma from a few back to back seizures a week ago.
Everything felt odd and off , I felt like I recognized everyone at the hospital or knew them. I felt like it was a dream and couldn’t didn’t wanna eat, but was very thirsty. My head hurts, and my thoughts were just off.
I was really, really confused and groggy and in quite a lot of pain. But I was supposed to be dead so it felt like a big win at the time.
Never been in a coma but I’ve had seizures that have put me out for a couple of days. For me it was a total blank. I remember absolutely nothing and there is a two day hole in my memory. Woke up in the ICU with my head wired up to an EEG machine. 10/10 do not recommend
I’m thinking that it was a bit of a slow process where i gradually started to become aware of my surrounding. I knew that I was in the hospital and I sort of knew what had happened but didn’t know the full extent of what procedures I had done until I was aware for a bit of time. Like, I knew that I had a trache but it wasn’t until I was transferred to a Skilled Nursing Facility that I noticed that I had a feeding tube- I discovered that when the night shift nurse came in to give me my night meds and she flushed my feeding tube and I asked her “what’s that, is that a feeding tube!? How did I not know about that!?”I don’t really recall much of my first few days at the SNF, but the CNAs who stuck around for a bit said that I was pretty out of it and that they were scared to touch me since I was missing the right side of my skull. I was in a medically induced coma for two weeks following brain surgery after a hemmorhaggic stroke
My husband saw me, his sister and brother in law standing next to him. He was in bed at a hospital. He thought he had passed away and we were at his funeral. He couldn’t talk at first. But he could write. He was super confused and the previous 14 days were a total blank.
It’s just like falling asleep and waking up; I promise, it’ll be peace when you wake up… music would be good. Stand back when they wake up. It’s unsettling and scary and they’ll have questions.
I have seizures; I am very familiar – cold compresses. Cold anything. Cold water. Talk – sometimes, when I have seizures, I can begin to hear as I wake up from them. My heart extends to whoever made this post.
I was in a medically induced coma for 2 weeks. It was just blackness and nothingness. After waking up I was weak lost about 80lbs,confused and had really bad hallucinations for multiple days. Took months of physical therapy and counseling to get back to normal definitely do not recommend it.
I had crazy ESP power after 5 years in a coma
I could see my nurses house on fire just by touching her
Then I could see that my doctors mom who he thought died in the holocaust was still alive.
Later I helped track down a serial killer.
Lastly. I found out about a politicians evil intent to start WW3 , but luckily I put an end to that
My bf was in a coma for over a week from being shot in the head. The dr’s weren’t sure if he would remember anything or how much it affected his brain function. It’s hard to talk after being intubated. He could barely make any sound with his voice and his handwriting was gibberish. He was so angry and literally couldn’t get any words out. Turns out one of his vocal cords was paralyzed from the tube. He could barely talk for a while. He ended up having surgery later on and his voice is fine now. He says he doesn’t remember anything from being in a coma which is so crazy because when the meds were low you could see his eyes open and wanting to get words out but he couldn’t.
It’s interesting to read other people’s accounts because I can’t really relate to them. I was only in a very short coma so maybe that plays into it, or maybe there are other factors, but for me it didn’t feel any different than waking up after being put under for surgery. I was gone and then I was back again, nothing in between.
Surreal & disorienting.
My dad was in a coma for a little over a week. When he woke up he was totally out of it. He managed to say “I was to see my wife” and then Spent then next hour just drooling all over himself and looking like he was drunk. Once he finally got through it he basically said that it was just a really deep sleep. He was aware of nothing while he was out. He remembered being at the lake sitting on the shore and his next memory was waking up in the hospital. In between there was nothing and when he woke up he felt completely “out of it.”
I was in a coma for weeks as a result of meningoencephalitis when I was 8. As I was coming out of it, it felt like (what I now know) the worst hangover of my life. Headache and all, which checks out given the diagnosis. There was no dreaming, I didn’t hear anything going on around me, it was just a long, dark, deep sleep. I had to relearn how to do almost all motor skills, but damn, muscle memory is an incredible thing and I recovered really well.
All I know is I’m never staring at a lamp again…
I got hit hard by the early alpha-wave of covid19. In March-April 2020, I spent 38 days in Hospital (16 of those days in ICU on a Ventilator. If you want to read my last long write up including Lung X-rays you can find it here
The thing about being on a Ventilator is that they have to give you heavy-sedatives,.. which gives you “ICU Nightmares” (non-stop vivid hallucinations).. and I had those for 16 days straight.
Waking up from it, thankfully I don’t remember much of that. They don’t take you off the Ventilator until you can maintain breathing and oxygen levels on your own. If you can do that, they remove the ventilator and then stop giving you heavy sedatives and it takes a few hours for the heavy sedatives to wear off.
For me.. I remember them asking me orientation questions (What’s your Name?.. Do you know where you are?.. Do you know why you’re here ?).. I remember at first answering that I was in a Veterinary (animal) clinic,. which was clearly wrong. Then I thought I was in a Hospital another town away,. so close but still wrong. Then I finally answered correctly to all 3 questions.
When I woke up I couldn’t walk or talk. I had lost 12lbs being horizontal in ICU for so long and I had some bad shakes in my hands, so I couldnt’ really do anything with my smartphone. Took a few days to get to a point where I could communicate with people and do simple things on my own (such as pushing the “Nurse Call” button on my bed).
Even after all that, I still had 4 tubes in me (catheter, 3-port neck IV, nasal feeding tube and nasal oxygen line) .. so it took a while to get all those pulled out.
It was a pretty surreal experience. It’s weird to feel like you basically got “completely rebooted”. It also reminds me of that old phrase “You never know how strong you can be until being strong is your only choice”.
Oh man, i went into a food coma last night… woke up at 5 am with cotton mouth and couldn’t go back to sleep.
Was in a coma for just over a month and it was just day by day to see if I would survive or not, it took me around 2/3 weeks to fully wake up and it was not a pleasant experience. A lot of the time i thought the nurses were harming me when in reality they were changing my tubes and altering my trachea etc.. I had a lot of what I know now were dreams but i look back on them more as memories as they felt so real at the time. I also had a lot of sort of spiritual experiences like being able to look at younger versions of myself which was very very strange. I was delirious at the time due to meds,illness but I still remember being stood on a balcony with the drs/nurses discussing how i hope they can make me better, this didn’t happen of course but even now looking back it feels real. If anyone has a specific question I don’t mind answering as it is a surreal experience and people ask me about it alot.
I was recently in a coma, from high sodium. Left me with extremely severe amnesia of both kind. Amnesia was so bad after coma that I didn’t even remember my parents :'( so it was like starting life all over again at that point.
I was in a coma for 3-4 days. It felt like no time had passed. I was very confused when I woke up. Groggy. Making jokes about the most random things. Apparently I was very responsive to my friends and family around me while in my coma. I’m now dealing with the aftermath of said coma — 6 years later.
The second I woke up the state wanted money. For like everything. Need less to say I did a sudoku
My stepdad was in a 9 day coma when he was 16. He reported surprise at his mom being beside his bed, as if he’d woken up as normal, except his mom’s there? He was in fact in a hospital and disoriented.
I was in a medically induced coma for a few days while having encephalitis and it felt like I was being abducted by aliens. I remember lots of lights and medical stuff so my brain connected it with aliens I guess. Prior to being placed in the coma I recall fighting with the workers. I woke up heavily bruised from all this. Thankfully, they did a spinal tap on me while I was under or unconscious in some way so I have no memory of that particular bruise.
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I was in a coma for 12 days after falling off my friends pick up truck while goofing around after high school one day. Fell off and hit my head on the street. I was pretty fortunate it wasn’t worse. I don’t remember much about waking up, maybe seeing some blurry figures across the room and then being confused and emotional for a while. Most of my memories around that time of life our little fuzzy even for a couple years after that now that I think back. But I lost a lot of weight and it’s a good story to tell at parties. My friends were great supporters of my recovery.
I just remember the dream I had, and thinking that was life and somehow me waking up was like having that life? Woke up in the ICU and couldn’t really remember why I was in this foreign place. I was admitted before I went into a coma and when I had woken up had no real recollection of the past however many days. I remember it taking a while though. No idea how long it took, but just sort of adjusting to the light, opening my eyes, and kind of gathering my thoughts felt like it took a while before I talked to anyone. When I did it was in real short sentences and I remember everyone being really slow with me. I also remember I THINK I woke up in this like different room, then getting moved somewhere but I can’t really remember. I wanna say that whole day was me waking up and sort of getting used to just keeping my eyes open and slowly talking to nurses and figuring out what was going on.
waking up from the coma felt like coming back from the dead but with none of the drama I expected.. just confusion, weakness, and a lot of “what year is it” moments. It took a while for my brain to catch up to reality.
My coma was caused by a car accident.
This happened over thirty years ago, so I don’t remember much about waking up except I was restrained to a bed in the hospital.
My medical records indicate that I had a Glasgow coma scale of 7 for about two weeks.
The nurse said the if I got out of bed and fell he would be responsible.
When I woke up I could not talk without stuttering and I was partially paralyzed.
While I was in a civilian hospital, for about two weeks, I was just in bed.
I don’t remember doing anything except that my mom came to visit me and pushed me around in a wheelchair for a little while and it was difficult sitting upright because my side hurt and I was not strong enough to sit up.
After some time, I was air lifted to an Army hospital where I did physical therapy for a few months.
I’ve been in two comas in two years. One for 3 days and the second for nine days. With the first coma, I regained full consciousness as they were removing my central line, so weird pulling on my neck as I was opening my eyes. The nurse asked if I knew what happened, and I said, “Um, I collapsed in a laundromat?” And she just said, “No.” And left the room. The second coma, I don’t remember waking up per se, but I was 24 hours conscious on the ventilator, and let me tell you, that is a nightmare and a half. You are constantly choking but have to relax because it’s not going to stop… Anyway, during the coma, both times, it was nothing but blackness. Like a blink, and suddenly I’m in a hospital bed…
I spent about 7 weeks at the end of 2021 in ICU. I had perforated diverticulitis. After the first 2 surgeries of removing my guts, I went into septic shock and caught pneumonia. My organs started failing. I spent 14 days in a medically induced coma. I was on a ventilator and had a feeding tube down my nose. It’s a long story.
I have a lot of memories that were real to me, but they never actually happened. I thought I had been living on a house boat for a long time. I thought my ex-wife adopted a set of twins from Australia. I remember a stranger living in the air ducts that was trying to poison me. I thought I had become a local sports TV news guy that got away with cussing a shit load. Strangers could walk on the walls and ceilings, but I could not. I thought I was in a jail hospital because of plagiarism charges. I also remember dying in a house fire and a separate incident where I drowned while on a DART bus. Those are just some examples.
When I woke up, It took me days to realize I had a colostomy. It honestly took me months to sort out what really happened and what didn’t. Also, months before I could actually walk again. Maybe septic shock had a lot to do with fucked up memories, but I was also heavily medicated. I have tons of those memories noted on my “Notes” app on my phone.
Anyway, I am very thankful to the doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
Omg you had 4 tube’s in your neck?!?!
“Suddenly, i was awake”
Hands down the most strange thing I’ve ever went through, had no idea why I was even in the ICU in the first place, didn’t know where the fuck I was (I was actually convinced I was lying in my living room at my house) and just overall unable to process what was going on, it took me nearly a week of being told by doctors and family members what had happened to me before I finally comprehended the timeframe of everything.
On another note, the hallucinations I would experience during the coma when my sedation was lifted slightly were the most terrifying thing I have and hopefully ever will experience, just real horrible shit with no clue what was happening, was 90% sure I was actually dead and that this was some sort of purgatory, probably a result of being on a ventilator and pumped with copious amounts of drugs to keep me alive. I still haven’t fully processed everything.
I could hear people around me but had no control over my body or voice. It felt like wakening from a deep sleep but there are all kinds of machines connected.
It was terrifying. I have PTSD from the experience.
My husband was in a coma for 5 weeks. He says it was an unending series of truly terrible nightmares the whole time. Lots of different bizarre plot lines, but all with the common theme that he had to do or achieve something or else he was going to die/be killed. So each scenario was a ‘fighting for your life’ scenario.
In the last one, he was smashing down walls to escape from monsters, and when he smashed down the last wall before he woke up, he smashed a wall that lead into his ICU room. He said he looked around and saw himself there and heard a voice in his head say something like “This is reality. All of your problems are in this room.” And then the nightmares stopped and he was waking up.
But waking up was not just a one off event. It was waking up lots of times, being confused, having us talk and try to explain to him what was happening, and then falling back sleep, waking up again, until finally he was more conscious and understood more of what was going on and remembered what we’d told him about where he was and why he was there. Then he had to spend another 3 weeks conscious, on the ventilator, before the ventilation was finally able to be removed. Completely unable to move, unable to talk.
He was never alone for the whole 5 week coma, but he doesn’t remember seeing or hearing anything except his nightmares during that time. We sang to him, we talked to him, we played his favourite music, gave him massages, washed him, moved his limbs, lay our heads next to his on his pillow… He wasn’t ever aware of any of it.
He has PTSD from the whole experience, as well as a number of other health complications, but he’s alive!
While I was never in a coma, my cousin was after getting hit by a car while riding his bike. After he woke up he started trying to sleep with my sister, so…
I was in an induced coma for a month after being in a car accident involving a landscaping truck (this is funny to me, since I’m a Latino)
It was super odd waking up. I remember being in the coma and living my normal every day life, those would quickly turn to nightmarish horrors. I had visions of me and my friends being randomly gunned down, my mother being assaulted, me in a wheelchair begging for help)
My mother was next to me, and told me what had happened, next thing I knew I couldn’t lift my arms or my legs(atrophy), saw a reflection of myself on something metal, and freaked the fuck out when I saw about 30 or 40 staples across my head. Next few weeks was nauseating, I had no motor control or understanding of anything. It was downright awful. Next came the sciatic nerve and hip pain, followed by endless sleepless nights.
I was 12, 31 now, it was all awful.
I was in a coma for around 3 weeks. I had something called a Colloid Cyst in the third ventricle of my brain. In a nutshell, the cyst blocked the fluid in my brain from draining and at one point it got so big that my migraines caused seizures. Basically my brain was getting crushed by the pressure build up of brain fluid.
I’m not sure if it was medically induced or a bit of both, but I remember waking up and asking how long I was out. They said 3 weeks. All I remember before that was waking up the night it happened with an insanely bad migraine and then getting rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. I was around 12 when this happened.
I had short term memory loss for a day or so, and had to practice walking. Took me about 2 days to be able to walk without help.
I don’t think I could describe waking up from a coma because all my memories from that moment are really just from what my family told me. I apparently met Darth Vader and his storm troopers while at the hospital.
Shout out to Dr. Handler at CO children’s hospital (he was the surgeon who saved my life).
Didn’t know who I was for awhile but my mom bought me icecream and toys
For me, it was like turning on and off a light switch. One moment I was driving, the next moment I was in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. I couldn’t make sense of anything and my head hurt. I was confused and suspicious and a little angry. I knew I wanted to leave immediately. I had no destination in mind. I couldn’t quite make my body do anything helpful. I almost fell out of bed. It was unpleasant and frightening.
I was told I was dead for several minutes before getting to the hospital, while being cut out of the vehicle. It’s not possible to be sure how long I was dead. I’m still haunted by the lack of anything resembling an afterlife or the near death experiences you read about. It was just non-existence. It makes me wonder if those other stories are just lies or fictions people have written for themselves to escape the void. Maybe there’s a difference between traumatic brain injury coma and others. It’s been almost twenty years and there are still moments when the world blinks out for a few moments or becomes kind of different and I think I might still be in a coma. It’s hard to describe.
Very disorienting, I was in a coma for 3 weeks but it took another 2 or 3 to really wake up.
My Friend got into a four-wheeler accident and was induced into a coma for 12 days due to brain swelling and injuries. He told me he kept having the same dream of waking up, showering, dressing in the same clothes, seeing the same people, and saying the same things. He then said, towards the end, he started freaking out because he realized he was repeating the same day over and over and that panic forced him to wake up.
I was in a coma for three days, I don’t remember a lot but my chest was hurting a lot, I asked “is my chest hurting because I have pneumonia?” And the doctor said with an ironic voice “a pneumonia!?” It turns out I was on CPR for 13 minutes, I don’t remember anything from the two days previous.
Depends on how you define coma, but I lost consciousness because of a vasovagal response during an examination. I went into cardiac arrest and had to be revived. I was gone for a few minutes.
It was exactly like being sedated when doing surgery. I didn’t notice anything until I woke up. No dreams or anything. It was like pressing pause when playing music, and then resuming it.
I was in a coma in the ICU for 3 days. I had a 20% survival rate but woke up.
Right before I woke up, I saw 2 of my friends in a white room in front of large windows on either side of them. One was sitting and the other leaning against the wall. When I became conscious, they were in those exact positions but the room was a mint green hospital room and there were no windows near them.
After I woke up, I was quickly handed my phone to call my parents. I couldn’t figure out my motor functions to put in my passcode. I remembered my passcode without issue, I just struggled connecting my thought to my actions. I was in the hospital for 15 more days, physical therapy for 2 months and I had to walk w a walker for 3 months. I’m grateful to be alive and often wonder about that white room I saw before I woke up.
Mine was 17yrs ago and it was a medically induced coma after being hit on my bike and suffering severe head trauma and severe TBI. With that part said, I was in a state of post traumatic amnesia for 3wks that I have zero recollection. My wife said I was a child like version of myself (I was 34yrs old).
After 3 weeks of that, I “awakened” in the middle of the day and was lucid and relatively clear headed. I saw my brother and wife and instantly asked where I was and a breakdown of the situation, without realizing a month had passed.
Definitely no lights or visions or anything from during the coma.
My sister went into 2 comas after a bad car accident when she was 19, both were for a few days. One was induced and one wasn’t. She said she didn’t really come to and start forming memories again until she’d been out of the coma for well over a week, even though she was up and talking (and pulling out her lines and trying to stand up and leave lol) at that point. She had a severe brain injury so maybe it’s different if you’re in a coma for other reasons maybe you’ll remember waking up but she completely lost a few weeks of time from both before and after her crash. I’m honestly glad she didn’t remember the time she was in rough shape, it was hard to see her scared like that.
I imagine it was like how when I had surgery I was already mid conversation with the nurse when I came out of the anesthesia. My body was awake but my brain was not recording. Freaky feeling.
Before I opened my eyes I thought I was home but nope, hospital. Was out for 4 days and kinda trippy but I handled it fine.
I had weird dreams
Medically induced coma for 2 weeks. On life support. Very bad accident, doctor said I’d be blind but I’m not, I do have some brain damage, not as smart as I was, I lose focus and stutter. It sucks. But honestly it felt like I was asleep for a night. After the doctor told me how long it was, it was shocking. Couldn’t stand or walk because I was lying down for two weeks. My throat was sore and couldn’t really talk because the tube down my throat.
Read Jinwoo Chong’s I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU—this is the premise!