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LOS ANGELES — Being in a coma doesn't seem like a state in which one would remember, but a teenage girl with cystic fibrosis recently shed light on just how aware she was.
The quirky and hilarious Claire Wineland explained in a video that she retained quite a bit from the two weeks she spent in a medically-induced coma five years ago, though many of the things she experienced were put through a filter, she said.
For example, rather than realizing she was in the hospital surrounded by ice packs, Wineland said she remembers spending hours staring at beautiful scenery in Alaska.
"There'd be like a little deer of in the corner and it would be freezing cold, but I didn't care," Wineland said in the video. "Turns out I was getting ice packed the whole time … I guess somewhere in my brain, I thought, like, 'ice, Alaska, totally makes sense!' "
Wineland also said she could hear everything that was going on, but it wasn't always in context.
One time, when her step mom and nanny were sitting at her bedside talking about something one of the nurses said, Wineland thought they were gossiping about a girl at the girls camp she thought they were all at.
Pretty much being in a coma is just like a very magnified and intense version of our own dreams.
–Claire Wineland
Wineland even connected some of her experiences while in a coma to real-life situations. She said that when she could hear her loved ones talking, she would see a beautiful, comforting place. However, when she could hear the voices of those she barely knew, she felt she was in a strange place and had no clue where she was.
"...gets me thinking a lot about how that happens in regular basis, even when we're not on crazy drugs, like how do the people that we're around and the experience that we're in influence our brain and our minds and how we see the world," Wineland said. "...pretty much being in a coma is just like a very magnified and intense version of our own dreams."
According to ABC News, Dr. Michael DeGeorgia, a neurologist from University Hospitals Case Medical Center, said people in a coma can experience post-traumatic stress disorder or other trauma, though he said a medically-induced coma is different from another coma.
Wineland experienced problems such as hallucinations after waking up and still doesn't know what was and wasn't real the week she woke up, she told ABC News.
Wineland has done several admirable things with her experiences as a cystic fibrosis patient, including starting a nonprofit organization to help others with the disease and starting a website, which includes videos such as her positive outlook on spending so much time in the hospital.
