The unit held 10 beds. For a week we had all ten beds filled with crainies. This is what a surgery of the brain is called cranitomy, whether for tumors, strokes, head injuries, hemorrhaging etc. All ten were comatose and show no response to any stimulation. I gave one them, a teenager, his bath and then was going to shave him. Now as I give patients bathes, I talk to them to keep them from feeling uncomfortable about being bathed. I told my patient that I would shave him next so he would look handsome for his family. I lathered his face and was fixing to shave his chin. I told him to stick his tongue under his lower lip and hold it there.

I looked up and there the other nurses were watching and listening to me. One said that she never realized how a converastion with our patients was important and that we neede the patients to talk. Well now all of the nurses were talking to their comatose patients. The hearing is the last sense to go before death. Always be careful of what you say to a person in a coma, they hear you.

We had a patient who was comatose on admission. We were to care for him until arrangements could be made to ship him home in Calif. The nurse and his doc were talking over him as they got him ready to go by plane. They said that he would be a vegetable if he lived and he would be better off if dead.

Five years later a man walked into the unit and asked to see Dr X and nurse Y. We got a hold of the doc to tell him an old patient wanted to see him. We got the 2 together. He said " I am alive and I am not a vegetable. When you said that I would be better of dead, that gave me the will to fight and to live. So here I am, your "walking vegetable". Can't you just see the faces of those two health care individuals??