10 things that would send me (back) into a coma.
A short shopping list of my worst heebie-jeebie-inducing Bushtucker Trials.
I’m ancient: almost 33 years of age.
So this ‘send into a coma’ trend is probably already old hat to the hardcore youth. Its first appearance seems to be around December 2022; halcyon late stage Covid and pre-cracked skull days.
Not exactly a current trend then… but let’s linger on this cultural meme phenom for a moment.
As you can plainly see, it’s not actually funny. Unless, perhaps, your entire existence has been habitually spent online since you were old enough to play Fruit Ninja on your mum’s phone. This is latter day Gen Z-ers’ bread and butter.
The general point of this coma trend is to list stuff that would overwhelm or shock a Victorian child into a fictional coma. Basically, it’s funny because they must be thick as pig shit and have no life experience beyond the edge of their village; candles were high-tech to those plebs. LOL!
I assume the irony is completely lost on the modern day agoraphobic spotty dweebs posting these memes from suburbia in their £500 gaming chairs with ring light attachments. I digress.
The crux of it all is that EDM or Nando’s or fidget spinners would induce a stupor beyond recovery for Tiny Tim and his C19th pals.
But wait! The human brain is malleable beyond comprehension. It’s fragile, fallible and spectacularly spongey. It dumbfounds me and intrigues me in equal measure. So Victorian Tiny Tim would most likely adapt, survive and thrive in our (almost) leech-free world of modern medicine and robot vacuums.
Anyway, enough eulogising of the very brain that’s telling these fingers to type these words, here are those 10 things that scare the life out of me post-IRL-coma:
#1. Bleeps.
When you lie in Critical Care for five days, awake, beeps and bleeps are everywhere. Are they good or bad? Who knows.
A steady, metronomic bleep for a pulse?
Good?
A solid, continuous, flat drone?
Dead.
Anyway, I thought I was mentally over the bleeps and beeps of hospital. Then I had a shooting sensation down my spine when I first heard this Lola Young song on the radio.
Granted, it is a bop.
#2. Tubes.
For about 18 months, after my discharge from KCH, I was terrified of hospitals — as this list makes plain.
Until you wake up in a sterile room with nasal tubes and catheters worming their way into your head and your unmentionables, you really don’t think about the actual sensation of these things leaving your body. How they feel when they’re in situ, and what it’s like when they’re yanked out. Well, safe to say I now know.
Hard pass. No thanks.
A recent episode of Taskmaster (not some ER-based docu-drama) sparked the same spinal reaction as Lola. It was a silly, non-medical, literal hosepipe task with Reece Shearsmith wearing a stupid fake nose. But my brain hated it.
#3. Sans helmet cyclists.
Only a Grade A numpty wouldn’t wear a helmet.
And I’ll judge you spectacularly harshly if you don’t.
#4. Costa.
After my out-of-body experience at the M5 services (Frankley), the smell and sound and branding of Costa has indelibly seared itself upon my cerebrum. It all started in the corridors of KCH, but that service station is where it really announced itself.
Oh, and their flat whites are way too big.
#5. A very specific shade of green.
If I were a smidge more tinhat conspiratorial, waking up to these limey robotic arms dangling over me would have me thinking I was aboard a UFO and about to undergo some deeply unpleasant experiments.
Unlike Tom DeLonge, I don’t really believe in aliens. But these metallic limbs did give me some nasty heebie-jeebies. They still do.
#6. McDonald’s pulpy cardboard drink carriers.
Sometime after waking from the coma I needed to pop to the little boys’ room to do my ablutions. But I wasn’t allowed out of my primary nurse’s sight for my own good. Instead of a loo seat and a locked door, they offered me a cardboard tray and politely offered to step just the other side of the threshold to my room, with a clear line of sight/smell/sound.
Suffice to say I did not pass the stool. I suffer from pub urinal stage fright at the best of times, so this episode did slightly reassure me I was still the same guy post-brain surgery.
Anyway, those McDonald’s cup holders are made of the same cardboard. Not exactly where you want your mind wandering as you tuck into that Big Mac.
#7. Fluorescent lighting.
This one really goes hand-in-hand with those zesty robolimbs. For a few days on the ward I had spectacular summertime views overlooking the trees of Ruskin Park.
But in these wards they don’t point the patient’s eyes towards the beauty of nature, all the heads point inwards so the matrons and nurses can keep their eyes on our vitals. It’s a high-tech Panopticon for comatose headcases.
That osmosis of 19 days of fluorescent light drip, drip, dripping into my noggin, and my pasty skin, has made me more acutely aware of the seasons than ever.
For a year or so post-TBI I would experience heavy onset fatigue akin to all the bright white bulbs in a multi-storey car park shutting off in stichomythic waves. Like I was powering down.
#8. Train travel.
I feel sick for about an hour before every train journey. It might have a complicated, difficult to conceptualise name, but let’s just call a spade a spade: anxiety.
My cod psychology links this unexplainable fear response to the endless hours I spent leaning against the floor to ceiling window of my hospital room, watching the commuter trains stream in and out of Denmark Hill station, plotting my escape from the third floor loony bin.
The fact it was a doomed to fail hair-brained scheme — making a break for it in a breezy hospital gown with no phone or wallet, and a tube dangling from my nose — never crossed my single track mind.
#9. Surgeons in face masks.
This needs no further discourse, surely?
#10. This exact photo.
And finally, the photo that I spent hour after hour smiling at and crying over during those weird days awake on the ward.
The woman I love and the dog I adore, in our garden, just before we set off for a wedding full of our friends. My life distilled into a little A5 photo. It filled me with hopeless hope for the future and terrified me that those days were gone.
For a while I thought they were gone. And then we recreated it a few months ago, in the same outfits (with an extra dog), ahead of another wedding full of our friends where I’d be Best Man and Holly would be Chief of Schedule, and all would be good once again.
More on that next time.
Notes:
I’ve started writing about alcohol free craft beer on a separate Substack. You can read the first couple of articles here, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I don’t know if I’m very good at using the algorithm to get my ‘content’ seen by more TBI heads. Maybe I need to stop talking about dead trends and write an op-ed on brain injury and The Traitors?
On that front, I have a silly draft of TBI-themed dad cap slogans which will appeal to virtually no one. Let me know if you want to see them.
Release the hats!