We’ve been conditioned by movies to expect someone in a coma to eventually wake up. Even if the doctors explicitly say it’s unlikely, because they don’t know the power contained in a single tear landing on someone’s face. In real life, though, this is far from the case. Usually, it’s a permanent fate, someone forever left with the lights on, but nobody home. Or maybe more accurately, with the lights off, but someone trapped in the attic.
Still, I was curious about people who have popped out of long-term comas, and the amount of time they’d missed. That first led to me discovering that a lot of articles about “the longest coma ever” are about someone who never came out of the coma. Which feels like a base misunderstanding of how people interpret that phrase. For my money, to talk about the length of a coma, you need a return to consciousness, otherwise it’s just a horrifically slow death.
To hoist ourselves out of that darkness and back to the land of the factual, however, I did manage to pull together an answer. The longest coma that someone recovered from seems to be the 29-year coma of a Canadian woman named Annie Shapiro. News of JFK’s assassination prompted a stroke, and it took 29 years before she’d regain consciousness, immediately asking her husband to turn on the long-cancelled I Love Lucy. Her husband, who was still sitting at her side after 29 years.
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She better get him one hell of a cumulative anniversary gift.