The Resurrection of Tommy’s Mind

I went to visit my old high school friend this weekend, and we had a nice chat. Very pleasant. Let me tell you why that’s so extraordinary.

I got a phone call two years ago informing me that this friend--we’ll call him Tommy--had suffered some mysterious heart failure and had been reduced to an idiot. There had been no oxygen to his brain for eight minutes, the doctors calculated. That he was alive was amazing, they said. Severe brain damage was almost a certainty, they warned.

I refused to imagine it. Your mind is too important to admit that it is vulnerable. Your arm is your arm; lose one, and you’ll do OK. But your mind is you.

I just wanted to stay away, but his stepmother called back a day or two later. “The doctor wants him to be surrounded by things familiar to him, and you’re one of the things,” she said. “It may jog him a little. It could do him some good.”

I wish he had been in a coma, but he wasn’t. He, an extremely quick-witted man, was lying there like an utterly helpless baby. He needed none of the machines--his body functions were strong--but something was terribly wrong. His eyes wandered about the room as if surveying a blank horizon. His muscles moved in twitches and jerks; no one seemed to be in charge of them. He was being fed Jello, but he accepted it with no expression. He was feeding, not eating. Occasionally, he seemed to smile, but maybe it was just random muscle movement. I couldn’t be sure.

I kept wondering what everyone must wonder: Is there anyone there? Can he hear us? Maybe he is still Tommy but trapped inside a brain that won’t let him say, “Don’t go, I’m in here. I’m still in here.” Or is he a body with a gutted mind and worse than dead? The doctor didn’t know. “We just have to wait,” he said.

Tommy was like that for a week. Three months later, he was back to writing and playing the saxophone, although occasionally blundering at both. His doctors told him it was a miracle. Now, two years later, Tommy is by his own estimate 95% recovered. His doctors can find no brain damage, no heart damage. In some ways, his memory is more vivid than before, he said.

So I asked him for the first time whether there really had been anyone behind those blank eyes. What did he see or hear or think or dream or imagine? In the emergency room, where it had taken an extraordinarily long time to restart his heart, he had been “dead” for several minutes. Had he been aware of anything?

No, he said. Total blankness. He doesn’t remember anything until he started to come out of it a week later.

“The first thing I remember was my doctor, who I knew socially, looking over me, and he said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And I said, ‘Aren’t you Jewish?’ And it cracked everybody up: ‘Obviously, he’s processing something here.’ It was like Great Moments in Medicine. They were applauding. And I remember saying it. I was lying on a bed. I was disoriented, obviously. And foggy.”

Was it like waking up in the morning?

“Yeah, it was like that. I knew where I was. I didn’t know what had happened. It was about three or four days before I could carry on any conversation at all. I could talk, but it didn’t make any sense. I’d be talking to someone about something that would be unrelated to anything. I would just kind of ramble. It seemed like I was being lucid at the time.

“My speech was reasonably articulate, I understand, but I couldn’t put thoughts together. No abstract thinking at all. I could say, ‘Turn the television off’ or ‘How ya doin’?’ I could recognize people. But I couldn’t really engender any real thoughts of any kind. Verbalizing was no problem, but the thoughts were jumbled.

“It wasn’t like being drunk. It was like being in no state that I’ve ever been in before. I’ve been drunk before, and I’ve been tired or drugged or under nitrous oxide that they give you in the dentist’s office. It wasn’t ethereal. It seemed very normal.”

Could you understand what people were saying?

“Sometimes, then I’d lose it. My attention span was really narrow. They’d start talking, then all of a sudden my mind would wander into something else. But I recognized almost everybody.

“I watched television. Soaps were still dull and commercials were still invasive, so I knew I hadn’t entirely lost my mind. I still hated television, so I knew that there was some hope.”

But, he said, there still is absolutely no memory of the week between his heart failure and his awakening. Even the week before his heart failure has been blotted from his memory.

“Everybody asks whether you had any out-of-body experiences. I wrote about this whole episode, and I got calls from people who knew people or who were people that had been dead for a short time and had been revived and had seen themselves above the table watching the doctors work on them.

“Maybe I’m not imaginative enough. I don’t remember any of that. It was like the screen was dark. People get disappointed when you tell them you didn’t have any out-of-body experiences. The idea of it being a total abyss once you kick off, people don’t like it.

“I really think that it’s probably best for you not to remember, you know? I really do. There’s probably an emotional reason for me not to remember that.”

I will always remember, however. Despite those blank eyes, despite the smothering hopelessness of the odds, there was a mind alive way back in there.

I don’t know what that implies, theologically or medically. To me it merely means that regardless of what side of those eyes you’re on, you’d better not give up for a long, long time. You just can’t know what’s at stake.