Comas – it turns out – are shockingly misunderstood. |
At the start of the Pandemic we began to wonder why so many Covid patients were being placed into medically-induced comas and what, if anything, they might experience.
According to most doctors, the event should be an utter blank in their lives. But we discovered that coma survivors have a very different story to tell. Most doctors will explain that by placing a dangerously ill patient into a coma, their bodies have a chance to rest and recuperate, allowing the medications and Nature to do their job. But we discovered that nothing could be further from the truth. No one can safely say just how many people each year across the globe will be sedated to coma levels. In the USA alone, annually around six million people will find themselves in an Intensive Care Unit, many of whom will be sedated to varying degrees of unconsciousness. In the developed world, virtually everyone can expect at least one ICU stay in their lives. This book effects every single one of them. But we discovered that comas are more often than not entirely unnecessary and that there are safer and kinder ways of treating all manner of critically ill patients because, it turns out, more than 80% of ICU and coma survivors go on to suffer lasting cognitive and physical harm. A very large number die within coma or soon after. Those coma survivors who can get anyone to listen will find their accounts from the deepest levels of unconsciousness – the alternate realities and alternate lives – dismissed out of hand. Nobody ever explains to them what they have just witnessed as few doctors appear to comprehend due to the almost total lack of follow-up for ICU survivors. Patients are universally dismissed with a diagnosis of delirium and told to put it all down to false memories and hallucinations, or they are given a diagnosis of early onset dementia and written off as lost. Has the medical profession got it entirely wrong when they truly believe that deep sedation gives the patient the best chance of recovery? Are they missing something vital? In short, the answer is Yes. Comas – it turns out – are shockingly misunderstood. In the course of researching this book, we have met some of the finest and kindest people imaginable – the type of people who restore one's faith in Humanity... The coma survivors who told us things they've never told their closest friends or family, all in the hope of showing other survivors that they are not suffering alone. They did not go insane. We have also met the most compassionate and caring of medical professionals who have shared with us their journeys and their awakenings to the dangerous reality of deep sedation. Thanks to them, we can show how current ICU procedures are going disastrously wrong, and point to tried and tested protocols that are kinder in the short-term to patients and their families, which lead to reduced workloads for nursing staff, reduced costs and better outcomes. If the advice in this book were to be heeded, those that undergo critical care in future will have a greater chance of surviving the ICU death-trap. Alan & Beverley Pearce, Aquitaine, France, July 2022 |
Anybody wishing to see for themselves the damage done to those that survive ICU only need to visit the Health Unlocked forum (above) where survivors daily post the most heartrending questions in their desperate search for answers. Most want to know if they are suffering alone? Have they gone insane? And, more optimistically, when might they ever get better? Does one ever get better?
I have no idea how I'll get my brain back to normal. I'm constantly tired and have big problems communicating.
My girlfriend was in a medically-induced coma for ten days. Since waking up, she doesn't remember anything and refers back to people fifteen or twenty years ago. Will her memory ever come back?
My husband came out of a fifteen-day coma almost a week ago. Now he just won't respond. Is he ever going to wake up?
This makes for painful reading when, every day, we receive updates from the forum in our mailbox. It is also unsettling to see just how many survivors share amongst themselves the simplified explanations for events within coma, seeing them in terms of conscious happenings such as hallucinations or delirium, even when they were most likely deep in coma with their brains off-line.
Whatever they do remember are just coma dreams or false memories, often conjured up in the very instant of wakefulness as the mind's way of filling in blanks. None of it was real. And none of this could be further from the truth.
When it comes to cognitive and physical harm after coma, the depth of their illness – not the sedatives and lack of mobility – are most often seen as the most likely cause and, given that they were so critically ill, such complications appear a foregone conclusion.
Now that we know different – that these distressing events are invariably the result of the critical care they received – each post becomes even more heart-breaking and our desire to open eyes becomes more imperative by the day.
Whatever they do remember are just coma dreams or false memories, often conjured up in the very instant of wakefulness as the mind's way of filling in blanks. None of it was real. And none of this could be further from the truth.
When it comes to cognitive and physical harm after coma, the depth of their illness – not the sedatives and lack of mobility – are most often seen as the most likely cause and, given that they were so critically ill, such complications appear a foregone conclusion.
Now that we know different – that these distressing events are invariably the result of the critical care they received – each post becomes even more heart-breaking and our desire to open eyes becomes more imperative by the day.