She woke up considerably older than when she had gone to sleep. Her brother, twelve years her junior, was a fifteen year old ninth grader when she had drifted off that night. He was twenty-two when he announced his engagement, just four days before she awoke. Their already distant sibling relationship dissolved during those intervening years.
Six months after she awoke, she was in my clinic office, tears welling in her eyes.
“In some sense, it was like being born, you know? I mean, uh, I woke up in a different world, where nothing was familiar.”
Her lower lip quivered. She stopped for a moment, as if she were going to cry, but got hold of herself and continued.
“My parents both died while I was asleep. They were cremated. Nobody was there to look after them.”
She continued referring to her seven-year absence as a period of being asleep, in spite of my subtle but frequent reminders that she had been in a coma.
It wasn’t just a matter of semantics. If thirty years of psychiatry taught me anything, it was that blame finds a comfortable home in one’s psyche and expresses itself through language. While it was true that she woke up, it wasn’t from a nap. I was certain it was from stress-induced coma.
(I’m just playing around here. Mystery, intrigue, confusion; they’re all my tools.)
