It seems that coming out of a coma after suffering a serious traumatic brain injury leads to some…unusual behaviors. A long time ago, the car in which I rode lost its rear axle, and a tractor-trailer loaded with 30 tons of charcoal barreled through the passenger door. My head caused tens of thousands of dollars to the front end of that truck.
None of the stories I have concerning my strange actions after the accident are remembered by me. These have been related to me by people who were witness to the events first hand. Here is one from what they saw:
The medical profession has a fascination with bowel movements—size, consistency, volume. As a little aside, when I was in the hospital with the blood clot back in 2016, there was a chart taped to the bathroom wall with numbers and categories for the different types of movements one could have.
I was lying in bed about a week after coming out of the coma and my patient chart had not recorded a single bowel movement. So, the nurse comes in and gives me some stool softeners or something and instructs me to tell her when I need to have a movement.
As she is walking away, I got this far-off look on my face and said, “Okay.”
She turned back. “Okay, you will tell me?”
I just stared at her.
“Or okay, you went?”
Apparently, I just looked up with this sheepish grin on my face. The nurse helped me up, and to everyone’s surprise, I had left a gift. There may have been gasps of shock, but what they told me my reaction was could only come from someone having suffered a knock on the head.
“Hmm. I wasn’t supposed to do that until I was 19.”
This whole experience teaches me something: no matter our preconceived notions about life and what is or isn’t proper, we have all crapped our pants at one point or another in our lives…mine just happened to be the bed.
