Imagine Waking Up
Only to find that the whole world had changed. A Polish man did just that. He went into a coma following an accident 19 years ago. When he woke from the coma recently, communism had fallen and Poland had become a market-based economy.
WARSAW (Reuters) – A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.
Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.
"It was Gertruda that saved me, and I'll never forget it," Grzebski told news channel TVN24.
"For 19 years Mrs Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections," Super Express reported Dr Boguslaw Poniatowski as saying.
"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.
"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."
Well, Mr. Grzebski at least you got a better surprise than the fictional Rip Van Winkle did after his 20 year nap:
It was with some difficulty he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog, that looked like Wolf, was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed—“My very dog,” sighed poor Rip, “has forgotten me!”
He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame Van Winkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned. This desolateness overcame all his connubial fears—he called loudly for his wife and children—the lonely chambers rung for a moment with his voice, and then all again was silence.
World news | Gaius June 2, 2007
By daveinboca, June 2, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
“there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere” sounds like the normal situation in a workers’ paradise. Just let the victims of academicide weave their magic nostrums in the USA with a John-Boy Edwards or Algorhythm tax-the-air-we-breathe as POTUS===or even the Hilarious Socialist===and we can all reverse history and be back in the happy past when Uncle Joe was our pal.
By sharon, June 2, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
I couldn’t help but think about the contrast between this man’s spouse and Terri Schiavo’s.