Did you happen to catch the recent news story about the young Belgium man who was “comatose” for twenty-three years before “awakening”. It turns out the only “awakening” was in the people surrounding him who finally realized the young man was conscious and aware for all of those torturous twenty-three years. He just couldn’t tell them.
Of course it’s sobering to imagine being trapped in your body for all that time, unable to communicate or tell anyone what you were thinking. But I can’t help but wonder, how did the people who cared for him treat him during those twenty-three years? Did they treat him as a person or an object? How does the information that he can hear and comprehend change their approach to caregiving?
Hopefully, his caregivers have no regrets, now that they know he was cognizant all along. I think there’s a lesson here for all of us-those we provide care for may realize a lot more than we think they do, in spite of disease and infirmity, and our interactions with them should always respect their personhood.
