Fortunately, this miraculous awakening took place in Poland. Had the 65-year-old former railway worker pulled out of his nearly two-decades long sleep somewhere in, say, San Francisco, there’s a chance he might have caught some of last night’s Democratic candidate debate—at which point I think he would have opted for the coma.
Much like Chris Dodd.
But as luck would have it—and unlike the Democratic presidential hopefuls, who seem to believe they’re running against Nixon in ‘72—Jan Grzebska has actually moved forward in time:
A railway worker who emerged from a 19-year coma woke to a radically altered Poland and thinks “the world is prettier now” than it was under communism, his wife said Sunday.
Gertruda Grzebska, 63, said that for years she fed her husband Jan carefully with a spoon and moved his body to prevent bed sores.
“For 19 years he did not move or say anything,” Grzebska told The Associated Press by phone. “He tried to say things but it couldn’t be understood. Sometimes we pretended we understood.”
“Now he spends his days sitting in a wheelchair and last weekend we took him out for a walk in his wheelchair,” she said.
“He was so amazed to see the colorful streets, the goods,” she said. “He says the world is prettier now” than it was 19 years ago, when Poland was still under communist rule.
“I could not talk or do anything, now it’s much better,” Jan Grzebski, 65, told in TVN24 Television in a weak but clear voice, lying in bed at his home in the northern city of Dzialdowo.
“I wake up at 7 a.m. and I watch TV,” he said, smiling slightly.
Wojciech Pstragowski, a rehabilitation specialist, said Grzebski was shocked at the changes in Poland —especially its stores: “He remembered shelves filled with mustard and vinegar only” under communism. Poland shed communism in 1989 and has developed democracy and a market economy.
Sure. But under communism, the literacy rate was 100%, and, as Michael Moore hopes to point out in an upcoming documentary, mustard and vinegar are the “champagne and caviar of condiments. If you can’t get your hands on a tub of mayo.”
Despite doctors’ predictions that he would not live, his wife never gave up hope and took care of him at home.
“I would fly into a rage every time someone would say that people like him should be euthanized, so they don’t suffer,” she told local daily Gazeta Dzialdowska. “I believed Janek would recover,” she said, using an affectionate version of his name.
“This is my great reward for all the care, faith and love,” she told the AP, weeping.
A recently-paroled Jack Kevorkian could not be reached for comment.
Okay, that’s not exactly true. I just didn’t bother calling him. Guy gives me the creeps, if you want the truth.
Nineteen year coma ?…. Does that make him overqualified for a senate seat ?
It must be amazing to wake up and find the drab grimness of that age gone, as if overnight.
Plus, he probably feels refreshed.
Oh, this is such bullshit. This kind of Fristing is exactly why Poles have no chance of holding the U.S. Senate in 2008. People are sick of this kind of anti-abortion anti-euthenasia godbaggging Christofascism. This guy should have had death with dignity when it could have done him some good. Now just look at him – he has to struggle with the indignities of capitalism, non-plastic cars, and decent shoes.
/s
The Blogging RINOs
I was going to say that this is why the Polish Republican party is on the ropes, but Al beat me to it.
Oops. Dan already posted on this.
Fantastic.
Don’t feel bad, Jeff. I spent two hours chasing a bug so subtle, it appears I’m only the second person in the world to encounter it.
Ah, IBM.
People often say that we should euthanize people in comas because they’re “suffering.”
Except that they’re usually not. The caretakers might be having a hard time, but if you’re in a coma or a persistent vegetative state, you’re not suffering.
Besides, on House, the good doctor induced a migraine in a coma patient, and he could tell that the guy had a migraine because the extra fancy scanner thingy said the guy had one.
Whether he was actually in pain was not addressed.
At any rate, I am always suspicious of those who want to kill the merely inconvenient “for their own good.” Nine times out of ten, they just don’t want to be burdened by the fact of their existence.
I, for one, plan on enjoying my coma.
Sad when a prison pallor improves one’s look.
Jeff’s post was better.
In fairness to Kevorkian, didn’t he help kill people who, you know, asked him to, which is kinda different from offing some schmuck in a coma?
Sure. But that gets in the way of my punchline, Sigivald.
Don’t make me work when I don’t have to, please.
You can’t call a guy in a coma a schmuck, can you? It seems somehow . . . indelicate.
In fairness to Kevorkian, didn’t he help kill people who, you know, asked him to, which is kinda different from offing some schmuck in a coma?
Kevorkian is a first-class ghoul. He doesn’t assist suicide out of mercy or compassion, he does it because he gets off on offing people.
That was pretty much my impression of him too. He always seemed just a hair short of bursting out in giggles when he would talk about one of his “assisted” “suicides.” Especially if the
victimclient wasn’t terminally ill or in significant pain.I have met Kevorkian (and shook his hand). At first glance, he seems like someone’s harmless little grandfather. However, after talking to him for a little bit, he seemed creepier by the second. The only way to describe his “paintings” is macabre.