Yes. I, too,
had a tough time accepting that comatose patients can hear us because, like
many others, I was fooled by movies into believing that coma = a state of being
sort of dead.
But
then, in the first year, just before allowing us to start clinical rotations at
the hospital, the school gave an instructional class on bedside manners and
etiquette.
It
was stressed, over and over, that we must greet the patients, introduce
ourselves, and give them an overview of what it is that we’d be doing next.
For
example, ‘Good Morning, Mr. Potter! I’m Shreya, your respiratory
therapist for today. I’ll take a quick listen to your lungs and then draw a bit
of blood to see where we stand on that oxygen this morning. I’ll talk you
through it, okay? Let’s get started’
It
was emphasized that the etiquette remains the same across all patients —
conscious or unconscious, sedated or comatose.
Why?
you may ask. Precisely because several comatose patients have been reported to
be able to hear us and hence, as a general rule, all of
them deserve to be forewarned about any poking and prodding they’d be a
recipient to.
The
guest lecturer, a Physician himself, continued to share a related incident to
drive his point home.
He
told us that once, while in the room of a comatose patient, he let his usual
‘serious doctor’ guard down while writing new orders to tell his colleague that
he couldn’t find his wallet anywhere. He was upset because he thought he’d lost
it and replacing all the cards in the wallet was going to be a lot of work.
He
had since forgotten all about the conversation.
A
few weeks later, while in the company of the same patient, who had now woken up
from the deep slumber, he was asked this —
