Will Gabrielle Giffords return to politics? Why is that player such a pussy and can't just walk it off? Why does that soldier think he deserves a Purple Heart for a bump on his head? Why does that boxer talk funny? Where's my shoe? All these questions and more will not be answered. I just want to reset your expectations about the walking wounded.
7 Facts About Head Injuries that Hollywood Almost Got Right
Most humor writers rely on a form of situational irony to get the point across to the reader. Indeed that is the forum of great philosophers called Cracked.com. In turn, fiction writers rely on an unspoken agreement with their audience that a suspension of belief is required. Viewers though do not always get the memo. They're here to watch stuff and not get all caught up in details like reading unless it's followed by something of onomatopoeic value. This approach to life may all be well and fine when picking softdrinks, clothes, and romantic partners, but decisions on long term health care are not ones that should be influenced by seeing Uma Thurman will herself to move her big toe.
Coma in Hollywood is the ultimate failure of plot device. TV and movies give us the “sleeping beauty” version of coma that features a healthy, tanned individual with muscle tone. Now by tanned I don't mean like they just came back from a Caribbean vacation. I mean they don't look like that sandwich you bought from the gas station that's been laying under fluorescent lights for the last 17 days. Never mind the lack of feeding tubes, monitors, catheters, and the occasional ventilator. The audience wants to believe that all is OK and that losing consciousness is just like sleeping. The fact is though, the longer that you're in one, medically induced or otherwise, the less likely you are to be much more than drooling meat sack when you wake up. On the plus side, you're going to lose a lot of weight. The down side being that most of it will be muscle mass. There's an excellent chance that you'll lose a few IQ points as well.
The medical industry literally has a detailed character description for the taking, and writers piss it away every time. On that it should be explained that there are two types of brain injury. There is the obvious Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and the not-so-obvious, Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), each having it's own list of causes. For those two types of brain injury, medical professionals also have a means of grading them that clearly fiction writers tend to overlook. The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) was created to assess the status of the central nervous system on a spectrum. The Ranchos Los Amigos Scale (RAS) was developed as a way to gauge cognitive and behavioral presentations of patients as they emerge from coma. A patient scoring at the top of both scales would be considered perfectly normal; at the bottom, dead. If the dead person scores higher, run.
You see it's all right here in the charts. There was no injury, they're just stupid.
Fortunately I'm here to help you separate the bullshit. Having been there myself gives me license to bitch. The last thing on my mind when I woke up wasn't so much about “Who's next?” as it was, “Where the fuck am I?”, “Where's the bathroom?”, and “What's wrong with my legs?” in that order. It is a tremendous exercise in humility having petite Asian women that you did not hire pick you up off the floor and hold your junk so you can pee in a bottle in the middle of a dimly lit room. It's like being black-out drunk, but horrifyingly sober. So congratulations! You now have a head injury. Let's see some what you can expect.
The Dead Zone: your head hurts for a reason.
The television show, The Dead Zone itself was one starring Anthony Michael Hall based on the character played by Christopher 'freakin' Walken based on a book written by Stephen King where our hero wakes after a six year coma to find the world he knew is no longer available, which in reality can happen after just a couple days of calling in sick to work. The injury itself causes our hero's brain (Walken's, not Hall's) to remap itself around the injured areas with a side of awakening precognitive abilities.
In reality these dead zones are caused by Axonal Shear, which is the term used to describe the severing of nerve fibers in the brain. The inside of your brain case is much different from the outside, and unlike the TV series, is full of points. Your brain being really just a big ball of fat with some fibers running through it tears against these points during an injury and scar tissue begins to form around the severed neurons creating 'dead zones'. Your brain eventually remaps around these areas in order to transmit, store, and retrieve information. The term for this is neuroplasticity, which probably was King's first choice of title for the book.
Ewwww, it's all bruised.
28 Days Later and The Walking Dead: you will have to learn to walk again.
These are the same programs and I will treat them as such. Atlanta, London, they're both places I haven't been and both have had governments that the United States once beat into submission so yep, they're the same. In those places we find our unshaven hero waking up alone in a barricaded hospital room slightly confused to find a post-apocalyptic scene has unfolded around them. Determined, he makes his way back home and witness' varying degrees of horror on the way, one by one collecting the shattered pieces of his past.
Though this may sound like your typical Sunday morning, sans the taste of weed and hooker spit in your mouth from the night before, this guy wasn't even sleeping off that much. I mean at the very least he should have woken in puddle of his own urine since the catheter was not an issue, and trust me, they are. Beyond that he would have been zombie chow since muscular atrophy in the legs would have been the worst possible thing to need therapy for in a zombie apocalypse. Muscular atrophy is the same reason that astronauts on extended trips to space exercise furiously and still experience muscle loss. Sedentary jobs have similar effects so you might want to get out of that chair.
Because even Tom Hanks could beat your ass.
Resident Evil I and II: multiple bouts of unconsciousness are a bad thing.
OK she wasn't in a 'coma' per se, but she did lose consciousness in both movies, and it's Milla Jovovich, naked. We cannot have a serious conversation about brain injuries without a naked Milla Jovovich. End of argument.
It was more of a concussion really in the first, though both bouts of unconsciousness were chemically induced. Regardless, any loss of consciousness can be bad. The more times you lose consciousness in your life, the worse off you are, such as with Second Impact Syndrome. Generally your doctor would not recommend such instances more than once every 18 months as the cumulative effect can result in long-term neurologic and functional deficits, kind of like most any retired boxer, or in other emotional disturbances such as with Ernest Hemingway. Sure she's hot now, but soon all of her children will be named Alice and she'll be found running through the streets of Pamplona.
He died as he lived.
[50 First Dates: you will have issues remembering things.
Though in the movie Drew Barrymore is given a fictionalized form of anterograde amnesia, she still functions as a normal part of everyday society despite the fact that she is unable to form new memories. Daily her family relives her birthday until Adam Sandler steps in and decides to brutalize her with the truth of her condition, daily. Trust me when I say that you will be the first person to remember it when you have memory issues. The last thing you want is for some well meaning soul (pronounced, asshole) to continually remind you of it.
This is the type of person that isn't allowed outside unescorted. Sure the movie may seem cute and romantic, but the fact that Adam Sandler has to get his game on daily for this woman makes him more the type to opt for a windowless van than cheeky video tapes.
Remember me?
Hard to Kill: you may have some anger issues.
This is the cliched meeting our hero in lying a coma for several years, alone in a hospital bed with a building sense of pending doom. We meet the henchmen followed by some harrowing escape. They did get the reality of the situation right in that you will need something to facilitate your mobility such as a wheel chair or in this case, a bed with wheels on it while you're in the hospital because really you're going to need it unless you would like to develop an intimate relationship with the floor. They did miss that you get a cadre of therapists that will help you redevelop everything from learning to swallow your food and talk, to controlling the urge to snap the neck of every ass-clown you meet. Unfortunately people are going to piss you off by the shear fact that they are trying to be helpful meaning family, friends, and healthcare providers. Maybe Hollywood got that last part right and Steven Seagal just had something to fixate on. It really makes me want to know what was written on the note that he sent Kelly LeBrock to Chinatown with. It was for his “herbs and needles,” I'm sure.
Roid-rage: it does a revenge good.
Rocky II: this will not make your relationship stronger.
Here we find the stereotypical down and out boxer working to get back into the ring against his wife's wishes when she goes into labor and falls into a coma. Rocky, being the loving husband stays by her side, refusing to see the baby until she wakes up so they can meet him together...awe. Her eyes flutter. They stare lovingly into each other and in her drug induced haze, consents to his re-entering the ring.
Divorce rates among couples where one spouse has incurred a head injury are reported to be as high as 78%, significantly higher than the general population. This has much to do with the strain such injuries place on a relationship because the person emerging from the injury is not always the same person they were before. In reality she would have probably woken up confused and very agitated, but considering that she's cool with his decision, her first act was probably to go change diapers, and for the fact that she folded faster than Superman on laundry day suggests that she was either already beaten, or it was the equivalent of her saying, 'fine'.
Don't make me tell you again.
Kill Bill Vol. I: your last employer may not be happy to see you.
Again with the cliched meeting our hero in lying a coma for several years, alone in a hospital bed with a villain thoughtful enough to have called ahead for an orchestra to play an ominous tune as they enter the hall. We're so used to seeing it as a plot device that we naturally expect to see some dramatic turn of events the moment our hero wakes up. A quick closeup of the eye suddenly opening and , BAM! Someone needs to restock cans of Whoop-Ass on isle five. A few scenes later and they're back on their game without having spent a single montage on physical, or even vocational rehabilitation.
The truth of the matter is that returning to your previous line of work will be difficult, at best. If your job requires learning new information or you are a student, you might want to consider a new field. I'd recommend something that doesn't involve much math or learning a new language, because you're going to have enough difficulty speaking your native language as it is.
Now try it just like I said it, “booobsza”.
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