My Coma Diary - My Mind's First Week Battle After Coma - Rehab Center.
First week declared ''awake''
Twenty-five years ago, a single moment shattered my world. At fifteen, I was just a kid, navigating the familiar rhythms of school and home. Then, a bicycle ride, a busy intersection, and a sudden impact changed everything. This is the story of my coma, pieced together from the diaries my family kept during those agonizing days, interwoven with my own fragmented memories and the echoes of their stories. It's a story of fear, hope, and the enduring power of love. It's a story of survival.
"Officially declared awake," the neurologist's words echoed, cold and clinical, yet they meant nothing to me. My brain, a shattered mirror, reflected only distorted fragments of reality. I was supposed to be back, but I wasn't. I was trapped in a liminal space, a twilight zone where the familiar was alien, and the self was a stranger.
The doctors called it "emerging from a coma", but it felt more like a descent into madness. A nightmare, yes, but one where the boundaries between sleep and waking blurred, where reality itself was malleable and terrifying. I wanted to scream, to tear myself apart, to do anything to escape the suffocating horror of this new existence. If there had been a knife, a rope, anything, I would have used it. Luckely, I was stuck to my bed that forbid me from doing such.
Awake by outsiders, but not by me. I had a desperate, primal urge to shock myself back into the life I knew, the life that was now a distant, unreachable memory. I didn't recognize this place, this body, these people who called themselves my family. They were shadows, echoes, familiar yet utterly foreign.
They spoke to me, explained the accident, the weeks of unconsciousness, but their words were like whispers in a hurricane, meaningless and lost. I could see their faces, etched with worry and exhaustion, but their emotions were as incomprehensible as their words. I was a puppet, a hollow shell, and they were trying to pull the strings, but the connections were broken.
Then, one day, my mother cried. Not a quiet, tearful moment, but a raw, heart-wrenching sob that shook the room. "Johan," she choked out, "it's difficult for us too." That single, vulnerable admission, that raw human emotion, pierced the fog surrounding my mind. For the first time, I felt something, a flicker of recognition, a spark of empathy. It was a fragile connection, a thin thread tethering me to the world, but it was there. But, that connection was short lived. The fog returned, and I was adrift once more, lost in the labyrinth of my own mind.
The doctors, their voices distant and clinical, spoke of "rehabilitation," of "recovery." They moved me from the sterile, white walls of the hospital to the rehab center, in a Dutch town called Beesterszwaag. The ambulance ride, unlike the frantic, life-saving previous journey after the accident, was now a slow, deliberate journey into the unknown.
Rehab center, Beesterszwaag, the Netherlands.
Beesterszwaag. My new home, a place of broken bodies and shattered minds. They gave me a private room, a small, living space that was to be my world for an indefinite period. Time had lost its meaning, stretching and contracting in unpredictable ways.
The rehab center was a microcosm of human fragility. Children, teenagers, adults—all victims of accidents, illnesses, fates as cruel and arbitrary as mine. I remember lunch, a chaotic scene of wheelchairs and feeding tubes, of laughter and tears, of resilience and despair. I saw eighteen-year-olds being spoon-fed during lunch. I saw a six-year-old, his limbs missing, his face scarred by fire wounds, yet his spirit somehow unbroken.
There was no room for shame here, no judgment, only a shared understanding of the fragility of existence. We all shared an understanding of the road that was in front of us. The road of recovery.
My hair, grown long and unruly during my coma, hung over my eyes, a constant reminder of the time I had lost. A hairdresser came, her touch gentle, her eyes filled with a quiet compassion. As she cut away the tangled mess, I felt a strange sense of detachment, as if she were shearing the remnants of a life that was no longer mine. It was a small act of normalcy, a tiny step towards reclaiming a sense of self, but it was a step nonetheless. The feeling of the hair falling away, was a feeling of shedding the old me, but the new me was still too unknown.
Even though they immediately started every possible treatment to help me get better as soon as I arrived at the rehab center, the first week is mostly a blank space in my memory. It's like trying to remember a faded dream, where bits of reality mix with strange, unreal feelings.
I have faint memories of hands, strong but gentle, moving my arms and legs through painful exercises, each movement reminding me how much my body had changed. I can barely hear the voices of the speech therapists, their words like distant echoes, trying to put back together the broken pieces of my ability to talk. And the tiring, constant physical therapy, forcing me to relearn simple movements, as if I was a baby trying to figure out a world that felt completely foreign.
Even though these sessions are mostly lost in the fog of my recovering mind, they were the quiet, unseen battleground where my fight to come back began, showing the unwavering dedication of those who refused to let me stay lost in the maze of my own mind.
Unlock the full narrative of my coma experience. Click here to gain exclusive access to my detailed diary, where I recount every stage – from the initial trauma to the depths of unconsciousness and the arduous path to my present state.
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Disclaimer
Everything written here is based on my own account, if not otherwise stated. I am not a physician, nor do I have a medical degree. I was patient with them and by following certain and consciously not following other advice from them I found my way to become the best version of myself. I am a TBI survivor and I am sharing my experiences. From my own perspective I know what works and what not. My own perspective is always well researched and I only use products and services that have worked for me. Having said that, TBI survivorship is dependent on the individual going through TBI and therefore each case is different. One size - Fits all solutions don't exist in this space.