The Comatose Man

It could be a man's biggest nightmare, and most of us are equally unprepared to face it. I recently read about an IIT professor who went into coma months ago, if he can sit again in the future, it'll be termed recovery. I won't explain how he reached such a state, the reasons were trivial, needless to say the perpetrators deserve a consumer rights lawsuit, but it was a mere excuse to enter an vegetable-like existence.

Imagine, being able to think maybe even as much as about the courses you last taught, being able to sense the fundamentals, hearing your mother speak to you in loving words as if you were the little child again, but having no control on you body, being piped on for food, water, even air. It's imprisonment. Being imprisoned in your own body, and there is nothing you can do to end it, and you think and you remember and you hallucinate. You cry for yourself, you cry for your mother, and you wait for the misery to end. You've heard the doctors give up on you, and the nurses treat you like a carcass. You flutter, like a caged bird, but you realize the cage is real, and there is no one who can open it. You see things, you hear things, you wish to say something, you remember people you wish to meet and greet, you wish to go somewhere, you just want to change the channel on the TV, you want to tell your mother not to cry, you want to tell the nurse to pull the plug, but you can't. Imagine a life, where just sitting up is an achievement, and bed sores are pending anxieties. You can only lay in bed, wait, watch, and let others decide your destiny.

Makes me want to thank the almighty for a mind, a tongue, for a set of limbs all of which currently function, for a society, for the ability to go places, see things, do things, listen, taste, feel, and talk about them. We take everything for granted and moan for more, till we realize everything we already have are gifts in themselves.