Do you think people in comas can hear

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 —

Refer: Shreya Thacker