Bizarre by Marc Dingman

Author:Marc Dingman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Withdrawn from the world

In August 2019, a 9-year-old Afghani girl named Mina witnessed a brutal stabbing in a refugee camp in Greece. Mina had already been through several very difficult years. She was injured in a bombing in Afghanistan in 2015, and her brother died in the same attack. She spent much of the next two years separated from her family while undergoing medical treatment (including multiple surgeries) to repair the damage to her leg suffered in the explosion. She still had difficulty walking and had to use a wheelchair. And when she finally returned to her family, it was not in her home but in a refugee camp, where the conditions were deplorable.

Mina had weathered all this adversity, but witnessing the stabbing seemed to be the last weight she could psychologically bear. After the violent attack, she became extremely agitated and wouldn’t calm down. She was screaming, shaking visibly, and repeatedly stating that she didn’t want to die.

Mina eventually regained her composure, but her behavior didn’t return to normal. Instead, in the days following the stabbing, she became very withdrawn to the point where she stopped talking. Then, she shut her eyes and ceased responding to the outside world. She lay in bed in what appeared to be a semi-comatose state. She swallowed when her father hand-fed her, but that was the extent of her interaction with the environment.

After about a month, Mina was sent to a hospital in Athens; upon admission to the hospital, she was still mute and nonresponsive. Her vital signs, however, were normal, as were her reflexes. Doctors tried to elicit pain to test the extent of her impaired consciousness by doing things such as pressing down hard on the bed of her fingernails or pressing their fingers inward at the side of her jaw (both common methods of testing pain reactions in unresponsive patients). When these things are done to patients in a coma, they generally do not respond at all. Mina, however, displayed a painful reaction, suggesting that she wasn’t in a coma—at least not in the typical medical definition of the word.

Nevertheless, several more months went by, and Mina remained in her sleep-like state. By the beginning of February 2020, she had been nonresponsive for over five months. Then, after an uncomplicated surgery to resolve what seemed to be an unrelated issue, Mina started to reawaken to the world. Within a week after the surgery, she opened her eyes once again. She began to develop an awareness of her environment and soon she was having conversations with her family. Mina claimed to have no memory of the six-month ordeal she had just been through.28

Mina experienced what doctors call a functional coma. She did not undergo the type of trauma, disease, or brain damage that typically leads to a coma, and doctors couldn’t find any physiological cause for her state of unresponsiveness—but by all indications it was completely involuntary.* The surgical intervention inadvertently seemed to help bring Mina out of her comatose state, yet doctors are unsure why it did.

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