Coma Ecru

28 Days Later. Great movie, huh? Gave the zombie genre the shot of reanimation fluid it needed. And I'm not even going to get into the whole "it's not really a zombie movie because the infected aren't dead" argument. It's a fucking zombie movie, zip it. And it's a pretty good movie. I'll never be the world's biggest Cillian Murphy fan, and the movie perhaps had one too many scenes in common with it's many predecessors (i.e. Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Comet, etc.) But I liked it enough to buy it on DVD. The fact that the version I purchased was a discounted version on a double bill with Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes for $5 in the Wal-Mart bargain bin has nothing to do with anything.

But the whole backstory for Jim's character damn near ruined the whole thing for me. For those who haven't seen the film (or don't remember) Jim was a London bicycle courier who was hit by a car and thrown into a coma. He awakens 28 days later to discover that the human race has damn near been obliterated by a virus which turns its hosts into homicidal rage machines. Jim, upon waking, looks to be in desperate need of a sponge bath and probably smells like warm cheese. The fact that Murphy was willing to be shot full frontal, soggy whipper included, still doesn't make me like him, although it did fiercely increase my desire to brush my teeth. Anyway, Jimmy gets up out of bed, unhooks himself from a couple of wires and walks out of the hospital into the abandoned streets of London. And that, my friends, is bullshit.

Now if I kind of squint, I can sort of make out what looks like a life support system laying on the table beside him there. Who took it out and why? Would anyone really have bothered to go to the trouble of removing it once the panic had taken over? It's not a quick process. It's not a tube that just sticks in your mouth and blows air down your throat like a reverse vacuum cleaner. That's not even the oxygen apparatus: that's the nasogastric tube that goes all the way down your throat and into your stomach, feeding you while you're unconscious. It presses down on your vocal chords as well, rendering you incapable of speech for a short while after removal. So yeah, all that wandering about screaming "HELLO!" at the top of his lungs? Not possible.

Also not possible:

When you're in a coma for any amount of time, whether it's 28 hours or 28 days, your muscles begin to rapidly atrophy. Simply put, you cannot fucking walk at all, anywhere, without assistance, period. Your legs become useless strings of rotted rubber. There is no way in Hell that Jim could have stood up on his own, let alone run at top speed down the street less than an hour later from a flaming, pissed off infected person. Jim, by all rights, shouldn't even have been able to sit up. Because guess what? The muscles in your neck atrophy too, and holding up your own head is like trying to balance a bowling ball on the tip of a pencil.

I've never seen a movie that accurately portrayed what it's like to be in a coma. Not even Kill Bill Vol. 1, although Uma Thurman's legs crumpling uselessly beneath her when she attempted to stand up was pretty close. The Dead Zone's Johnny Smith was perhaps the closest a film ever got to an honest depiction, showing the tubes, the physical therapy and the limp that Christopher Walken affected through the entire movie. But most of the time, we see a peacefully sleeping and fastidiously groomed actor in a hospital bed, crisp white pillowcase cradling their heads which are somehow miraculously full of clean, untangled hair.

Bull.
Shit.

Movies want you to think that comas look like this:

When they actually look more like this:

Comas are not romantic or restful or glamorous. Not even the actual coma part. At least mine wasn't. I could hear the nurses talking about me, the doctors forecasting my condition, my mom telling me I'd be okay. I really didn't give a shit. I was aware, but totally unconcerned. And then I woke up. And immediately wished I hadn't.

You cannot bathe when you're hooked up to a life support system with tubes down your throat and up your ass and snaking out of your naughty bits, draining pee and shit from your body into plastic bags that hang by the side of your bed and which everyone can see. Your hair gets snarled and greasy. Your legs and armpits go unshaved and undeoderanted for days on end. You stink. And if you're lucky enough to be in a coma during high summer (as I was) you will reek. You won't be able to sleep because you're covered in your own stink and rancid sweat. You will have bruises all over you from the IV needles, puncture wounds in your neck and possibly a lovely pair of bloodied eyeballs from ruptured blood vessels in your irises. You spend your days in a fog of narcotics, which isn't as blissful as it sounds. You hallucinate. I personally mistook my night nurse - who innocently came in to check my blood pressure - for a giant mosquito, complete with proboscis. When they finally took my tube out, they fucking yanked it out, pulling me up off the bed. I saw the ribbed plastic tube come out of me, covered with brown stomach fluid. I was still on heavy drugs and for a moment I believed they were yanking my spinal cord out through my mouth. Then it was out and I thought the worst was over.

I'll spare you the details of the physical therapy, the constant spitting-up of fluid and phlegm from my polluted lungs, the inability to wipe my own ass and having to have a nurse do it for me. Yeah, that was great. Wonder why they never show that in a movie?