One Blink Meant She Was Still In There

The story

Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard, a scientist and mother, was overwhelmed by a bacterial infection so severe that she was clinically dead, then locked in a body that could not answer. Doctors feared she would not recover as herself.

She blinked. That blink was a no to the idea that her life was over. She lost her fingers. She kept her will to return to ordinary rooms: a kitchen, a school staircase, a child’s hand.

What happened next

Months later she was home. She cooked. She climbed the steps to her son Daniel’s classroom while he held her hand. She later wrote that crisis is common even when the medical details are rare, and that sitting beside someone in difficulty is not small.

A lesson you can use this week

If someone you love is silent in a hospital bed, stay. Presence is a kind of medicine that does not show up on a chart and still changes the room.

Sources

The Guardian, “Look into my eyes: one woman’s journey from coma to consciousness,” May 27, 2018.