Body And Mind
Tonight, I ended up watching a programme entitled "The Man Who Slept for 19 Years" on Channel 4.
It was a programme to do with reality of people waking from comas, of brain damage, of how it was nothing like a Hollywood movie. Okay, so that last part is never a revelation, but it was saddening to see just how slow the process to recovery can be, if there is any.
Terry Willis, the man who 'slept' for 19 years after a car crash is the remarkable lynchpin in this documentary. For those years his mother never gave up on him, even though the doctors said he was in a vegetative state, and that his apparent limited engagement with the world was merely instinctive reflexes.[1] One day, however, he spoke. Tests revealed that he'd always had the capacity to speak but the brain had only now 'switched' it on. He may still have a "distorted awareness" of his environment and a short-term memory that means he has to be introduced to the adult daughter he only recalls as a baby, but he can engage in conversation after nearly 2 decades of being a lost cause.
The programme also showed other people who've suffered from brain damage but ''woke up" (I think, I missed a few minutes here and there). One example was a teenage girl who was in the early processes of relearning everything - walking, talking, basic movement etc.
There was also another heartbreaking story. The man who appeared to have lost the ability to love his wife and kid, but the mother, his childhood sweetheart, refused to split her family up. He couldn't hold a job because of he could no longer control violent impulses so well, and impulses to say the cruellest of things, that slowly drove their friends away. She had no one to talk to, and she had always talked to him before. The pain was obvious in her eyes, but she seemed determined not to leave him, or let him leave, taking care of him because of the good man she had known before.
As again, the reality is much stranger and complicated than the fiction, the myths.
[1] Imagine that. Eyes open and apparently looking around, but often there's nothing behind them.
Also, I could have got any of this wrong, due to my lack of attention span, so on the off-off-chance anyone else watched it, feel free to correct me.
It was a programme to do with reality of people waking from comas, of brain damage, of how it was nothing like a Hollywood movie. Okay, so that last part is never a revelation, but it was saddening to see just how slow the process to recovery can be, if there is any.
Terry Willis, the man who 'slept' for 19 years after a car crash is the remarkable lynchpin in this documentary. For those years his mother never gave up on him, even though the doctors said he was in a vegetative state, and that his apparent limited engagement with the world was merely instinctive reflexes.[1] One day, however, he spoke. Tests revealed that he'd always had the capacity to speak but the brain had only now 'switched' it on. He may still have a "distorted awareness" of his environment and a short-term memory that means he has to be introduced to the adult daughter he only recalls as a baby, but he can engage in conversation after nearly 2 decades of being a lost cause.
The programme also showed other people who've suffered from brain damage but ''woke up" (I think, I missed a few minutes here and there). One example was a teenage girl who was in the early processes of relearning everything - walking, talking, basic movement etc.
There was also another heartbreaking story. The man who appeared to have lost the ability to love his wife and kid, but the mother, his childhood sweetheart, refused to split her family up. He couldn't hold a job because of he could no longer control violent impulses so well, and impulses to say the cruellest of things, that slowly drove their friends away. She had no one to talk to, and she had always talked to him before. The pain was obvious in her eyes, but she seemed determined not to leave him, or let him leave, taking care of him because of the good man she had known before.
As again, the reality is much stranger and complicated than the fiction, the myths.
[1] Imagine that. Eyes open and apparently looking around, but often there's nothing behind them.
Also, I could have got any of this wrong, due to my lack of attention span, so on the off-off-chance anyone else watched it, feel free to correct me.