Fermanagh footballer Mark McGovern awoke this week after slipping into a coma during a match in the US in June. Here, former coma patients, and the husband of a woman who never woke up, talk about their experiences
THERESA SHARKEY had been in a coma for three weeks when her life support was switched off. After suffering a brain haemorrhage and another major bleed during surgery, medics advised her family that there was no chance of survival. But then she awoke.
“My husband and children were going to make me an organ donor,” she says. “They went up in the morning to sign over, and I had taken up breath on my own.” There was despair at the medics’ mistake but, Sharkey adds, everyone agreed it was a miracle.
The last thing she remembers was watching TV on Valentine’s night 17 years ago. Sharkey, then 42, was rushed to hospital by her husband Jim. When her eyes opened again, there was only confusion.
“I didn’t know where I was. My mother and my husband were with me and I assumed they came to take me home. But it was nearly a year before I could do that. I had to learn to walk and talk again. I was like a child.” The recovery process was long and arduous, her memory slowly improving over a six-month stay at Beaumont Hospital and another four months at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, in Dún Laoghaire.
“I can remember things that happened to me many, many years ago and not remember yesterday. That happened a few hours ago.”
Sharkey retained vision in one eye and her speech can sometimes cause her a problem, but an out-of-body experience left the biggest impact. Seeing herself from a corner of the room, her dead father appearing to her in a tunnel, changed Sharkey’s outlook.
“I’m much more positive now. I look at the good side of everything. The only way is up.”
NOT EVERYONE WHO comes that close to death is met with a comforting experience. For Bronagh, being in a coma felt like one long dream from which she couldn’t wake.
Following a fire in April 2004, the then 27-year-old was rushed to hospital with severe burns on 60 per cent of her body. Adrenaline masked the pain, but Bronagh went into spasms and began slipping out of consciousness. Medics covered her in gel and filled her with fluid to stop the heat from burning her muscles and organs. They removed dead tissue while covering damaged areas with healthy skin and slicing her limbs open to relieve pressure as she ballooned in size. Doctors told her mother, Valerie, her chances of surviving were less than 50 per cent.
“When she came out of theatre, they said they were going to keep her asleep for a few weeks,” says Valerie.
Bronagh would be induced into a coma and fed nutrients so her body could rest, sparing her the pain and lessening the chance of a critical infection developing.
The last thing Bronagh remembers is being carted away on a hospital bed, asking her uncle, Tom, if she was going to die and hearing the reassuring words, “You’re grand.”
Then darkness took over, immersing her in an alternate reality of drug-lord doctors, prostitute nurses and shadowy presences.
“It was like one long nightmare, where I was roaming around my head, always running, always trying to wake up. Most of the time I was pinching myself really hard or punching my face. It was as real as everyday life, yet so loaded with symbolism that for a long time afterwards it felt like more than just a dream, like a time away in some other place.”
The coma lasted 18 days. Valerie, a nurse, kept vigil: she would talk to Bronagh as if she were awake and direct the medical staff to make sure they were doing their jobs properly.
“I was just in prayer mode the whole time, trying to be positive and trying to put my trust in the care,” says Valerie. “I didn’t really sleep for that first month.” Then Bronagh’s eyes stirred. She awoke with a smile, asking for her two children, apologising for any worry she’d caused.
At first, there was no sense of wondering what she had missed out on. “There was so much to take in that the only thing I could do was focus on getting better, quickly, so I could get back out there. Hospital life is a separate reality. I was numb to everything else.”
Bronagh, now 34, is sitting alongside Valerie in her kitchen in Delgany, Co Wicklow, piecing their recollections together, sharing previously unspoken titbits about their perspectives from either side of the coma. The same Nick Drake CD that soothed her through the recovery process is playing in the background. Pulling up a sleeve to reveal one of the burns she has been left with, Bronagh says the injuries were so painful that, for a long time, she couldn’t move. Learning to sit up and walk again would take months.
Bronagh’s physiotherapist forced her to target daily and weekly goals. Having spent so much time gazing out the window, she was determined to be one of those people zipping past the hospital in a car, oblivious to those inside dreaming of freedom.
Yet when the time finally came to go home, adjusting to the outside world was difficult.
For the first three months, Bronagh felt so alive that elation poured out of her. She would stay up all night painting and listening to music before taking the kids swimming in the sea at seven in the morning.
Then came the comedown.
She started researching near-death experiences. Other people had found God, direction and meaning in the face of death. Yet if there was any significance to her own ordeal, she couldn’t make sense of it, and that troubled her. “These people had seen the light and I hadn’t.” Her cousin Chris, by comparison, had a “great time” while in a coma after collapsing from heat exhaustion in Australia. Having dreamt of winning a car and flying aircraft, he woke up to be told that his wife was pregnant, news that had already filtered through during the coma.
Bronagh recognised one of the nurses – “her manner, her voice, everything” – from the nightmare after waking, but struggled to understand what it meant, if anything. Seven years later, she is no closer to an answer, but recognises that she tried to make up for lost time by living faster.
“I think I was still running, like I was in my dream, and I couldn’t maintain that. It’s not high and low any more, but I don’t think I allowed myself any time to recover emotionally from that experience. So my advice to anyone recovering from a coma is rest. Seriously, chill out. I’m still dealing with it, I think, even now.”
THERE IS NO adequate medical explanation for what’s happening within the brain during a coma, says Dr Aisling Ryan, consultant neurologist at Cork University Hospital.
“There are fascinating stories that patients describe after a coma, like out-of-body experiences involving tunnels and light. But more commonly people have no recollection of what happened to them at all, even in the following weeks or months.”
Normally there is a familiar pattern of brainwave activity that can be measured during sleep, Ryan says, but during a coma those EEG patterns are much more difficult to interpret.
“I think it is a mystery in many ways as to what’s going on. If it comes down to what’s happening in someone’s reticular activating system , why is it that at some point it switches back on? The biology of consciousness, what makes us awake and fully interactive, is not fully understood.”
Padraic Keane spent 19 years by his wife’s side as she lay in a coma. He never accepted what medics told him: that she was severely brain-damaged and stood no chance of improvement.
In June 1983 Agnes Keane was seven-and-a-half months into her first pregnancy. Her feet had swollen and she was advised to rest in Galway Regional Hospital, where she experienced convulsive fits due to pre-eclampsia, a condition that causes high blood pressure during pregnancy. A Caesarean section delivered twin girls, and afterwards Agnes was given an epidural anaesthetic, following which she slipped into a coma.
“For the first week or so, they told me she would be fine,” says Keane, now 52 years old. “I’ll never forget the doctor telling me, ‘I’ll make this little girl well.’ Then I was told, ‘She’ll live for 20 years like this. Put her in a home and forget about her.’ I said, ‘I’m staying with her. She walked in here and she’ll walk out.’ ”
Keane’s dedication filtered out unwanted advice: to find someone else, to sue the hospital, to stop trying to be a hero, to let her go. “I didn’t want money. I didn’t want headlines. All I wanted was Agnes. I would have gone through anything to get her better and to defend her. In the early years the medics would say, ‘If she gets sick, what do you think about not treating her?’ I said, ‘I don’t even want to see her nose running. You’ve no right to let her go.’ ”
With the help of his parents, Keane could go to work, raise the twins and visit Agnes up to three times a day, becoming adept at caring for her.
Though he had no more faith than any other 25-year-old, he was determined to see a miracle. In the first year, he took Agnes, in a stretcher and an ambulance, to Lourdes, “just in hope, to see what would happen”.
Her health deteriorated on the first night. People gathered ominously by the bedside, but again Keane didn’t accept this could be the end. He found himself praying to God, saying: “‘If you don’t take her, I’ll mind her.’ And every year we went back. That was our holiday. That was the only time we could be a family together.”
There were questions from the twins as they grew older – “birthdays, communions, confirmations, we all cried” – but the trips away helped the girls to better understand their mother’s condition, while the sight of people healing strengthened Keane’s faith and hope.
Sitting in a darkened bar in Oranmore, Co Galway, he reaches into his shirt pocket and produces old photographs capturing what those years meant to him. It’s the first time Keane has spoken about it publicly and when recalling moments that would make anyone crumble, he shows remarkable composure. He credits Sr de Lourdes and Fr Louis Naughton, both of whom he met in Lourdes, with lifesaving guidance.
“I think I got stronger for it,” he says quietly. “But if you bottle it, it will kill you.” There was plenty of anger. One day in church he wanted to tell God, “You don’t have the balls to make her well, and you don’t have the balls to take her.” When the media reported that Keane was living in “blind hope”, he was incensed.
“The only person who’s blind is the one who says that,” he says. “I knew exactly what I was doing. I loved her with my heart and soul. I still do. Maybe I was keeping her alive for myself as well. I didn’t want to let her go and I was afraid to face death. But I’m not sorry for one second. If I could take another 20 years, I would.”
Agnes passed away in 2002. Her health had worsened after the tube used to feed her began slipping out. Keane agreed to a settlement for damages with the Western Health Board in 2008 over the circumstances that led to Agnes’s coma. It didn’t bring any closure, and in a way there will never be any, he says, but he urges anyone going through a similar experience to stay positive.
“If you have any inkling of faith at all, even the smallest bit – mind it. If you never believed in God, that’s no harm. It doesn’t matter what religion you are. Just believe in something and never give in. Miracles do happen. Maybe my miracle was that I was able to live with her for 19 years. But don’t listen to anyone who says there’s no hope. Thank God for giving me the strength to do what I had to do and my daughters for allowing me to do it.”
The names of Bronagh and her family have been changed for legal reasons
