Wondering what to be thankful for this Thanksgiving? How about being grateful you’re not this guy.

I’ve recently been working my way through the legendary TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on Netflix’s instant streaming video feature. In one of the early first season episodes, a man lives through about 18 hours of unimaginable torture when he is paralyzed after a car crash and unable to convey to anyone that he is alive or conscious.

It’s probably the scariest episode I’ve seen yet, and it’s about 1/10,000th of the horror (in terms of literal time) experienced by the man who lived for 23 years while fully conscious but attributed to being in a fully vegetative coma. Granted, some of the horror of the episode includes the belief that he will be killed, while after a couple years, the Belgian coma man had to start believing he would just go on forever in that state.

But I’d argue that might be worse. With no one believing that you’re conscious, all you have is your own thoughts. No communication or contact with the outside world and, much more importantly, no one making any sort of effort to stimulate or entertain you. The greatest blessing you would get to interrupt this unending boredom would be scraps of overheard conversation that no one believed you could fathom.

If I ever fall into something diagnosed as a vegetative state, please get a second opinion. And leave the TV on in my room all the time, just in case.

On second thought, given the state of our modern media, better make it a series of books on tape. Whatever will be going on the next 23 years might be more torture than I want to witness.

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