between worlds -- 5/13/25
Today's selection-- from Patriot by Alexi Navalny. Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny recounts his coma after a near-fatal poisoning in 2020.
“If you imagine that coming out of a coma is more or less instantaneous, as the movies would have us believe, I have to disappoint you. I would be only too glad to say that one minute I was dying on the plane and the next I opened my eyes to find I was in a hospital and looking at my beloved wife, or at least a team of doctors peering at me anxiously. That is not what happened. Getting back to normal life took several weeks of very unpleasant and persistent visions. The whole process was like a long-drawn-out and highly realistic journey through the circles of hell. It wouldn't surprise me if that whole concept was devised by people who had been in a coma and seen the same things I did. There was an unbroken succession of hallucinations, through which I occasionally glimpsed reality. As time passed, there was more reality and less hallucinating.
“I can recall only isolated moments from the first few days. In one, I am sitting in a wheelchair and someone is shaving my face. I can't move a finger. In another, a kind person is washing my hands, seemingly a doctor. He tells me, ‘Alexei, please, say any word. I am going to write it down and show you.’
“That request was repeated day after day, and I slowly began to make sense of it. First I realized I was Alexei, then that this was an exercise the doctor wanted me to do, and that my job was to say any word. My vocal cords were intact, the trouble was that I couldn't think of any words. I tried really hard but couldn't get through to the part of my brain responsible for thinking of words. To make matters worse, I couldn't explain to the doctor that I couldn't conjure up a word, because that also called for words and I simply didn't have any in my head. Responding to simple questions from the nurse, I would nod, but recalling and saying a whole word was more than I could manage.
“I gradually began to gain a better understanding of what was going on, and even started saying things. Then I was given a pencil and asked to write something down, and my agonies began all over again: I had absolutely no idea how to write.
“I was visited by my doctor more frequently than by anybody else. He was a very famous and respected neurosurgeon from Japan, a professor. He would talk to me at great length, quietly, carefully explaining what had happened, what kind of treatment I should expect, how long I would need for rehabilitation, and when I would finally be able to see my family. I was tremendously impressed by how professional and authoritative he was. He is the first person I remember clearly after emerging from the coma. He was a great guy, good-looking if slightly balding, serious, and highly intelligent. For some reason, though, he was also incredibly sad.
The nurses told me afterward that his two-year-old son had died in an accident, run over by a car in Japan. The professor had tried to save his son's life, operated on him himself, but, tragically, the child died in his arms. During one of the professor's visits he read me a haiku he had written in memory of his son. I had never heard anything so beautiful in my life. After he left, I couldn't get those heartrending lines out of my mind and quietly wept over them for several days.
“When the professor was with me, though, I put on a brave face, not least because we were discussing a plan to get me back on my feet, which I really liked. Next week, the professor told me, I would be given new, bionic legs in place of my old ones, which I had evidently lost. After that he would perform a tricky neurosurgical operation to replace my spine. The new one would be a big improvement because it would have four gigantic mechanical tentacles attached to it, just like Doctor Octopus in the Amazing Spider-Man series. I was rapturous.
“Imagine my disappointment when I was told there was no Japanese professor, that all our talk and plans and long conversations had been one big hallucination, caused by my being given six different psychotropic drugs simultaneously. I was so stunned I demanded to see the entire hospital staff. Perhaps I had gotten some of the details mixed up and he was not a neurosurgeon but, say, a resuscitation specialist. Alas, there was no one at Charite=rny hospital-who fit the description. I gave every impression of accepting that, as the doctors and my family were telling me, I had imagined the whole thing. I did, nevertheless, devote several hours to googling famous Japanese neurosurgeons on the off chance there was one whose son had died in an accident. If there wasn't, I would have to face the fact that I had been crying my eyes out for three days over a haiku I had made up myself.
“I don't remember the first time I saw Yulia after the coma. There wasn't a moment when someone came into my ward, I opened my eyes, gazed at a beautiful woman, and thought, Oh, Yulia is here. That's so great! I wasn't recognizing anyone, and I had no understanding of what was happening around me. I just lay there, unable to concentrate. I do remember, though, that every day there was a best moment when ‘She’ materialized beside me. She knew better than anyone else just how to adjust my pillow and how to talk to me. She didn't wail, Oh, poor Alexei. She smiled and laughed, and that made me feel better.
“There was a large whiteboard on the wall opposite my bed in the intensive care unit. It had something drawn on it, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't figure out what it said. I stared at the board until suddenly I saw it had little hearts drawn on it. Some time later I noticed the number of hearts was increasing. Later still I started counting them and realized that all the time I was in intensive care, Yulia had been visiting and adding a new heart each day. Looking at it, I managed one day to write something myself, on a piece of paper Yulia had given me. When she showed it to me after I got out of the hospital, there was no text, just something like the line on a cardiogram. For a while I could.write only in a column. I learned to write properly, horizontally, a few weeks later, but for a long time afterward I was still muddling the order of letters in words.
“One day, when I had a better handle on reality and was even gradually beginning to remember a little English, I asked the nurse for a drink of water. She said she would give me water just as soon as I wrote the word down, and she held out a pen. I could remember how to say ‘water’ in English, but had no idea how to write it, no matter how hard I tried. I was beginning to get angry and again peevishly demanded water. ‘Try to write it one more time,’ the nurse said to me firmly. I scrawled over the paper, became infuriated, and in a fit of temper wrote down the word that suddenly popped up out of my subconscious ‘fuck.’ Somewhat vindictively, but more with a sense of pride, I handed the piece of paper to the nurse. She looked at me sympathetically. I had written ‘fkuc.’
“I am trying to relate my memories in sequence, but the fact is that everything was a single mosaic of fragments of reality and dreams: the Japanese professor, the paper and pen, my having no legs, the hearts on the whiteboard, my having been in a terrible accident, Yulia, being in prison.
“So there I was now, sitting on a bunk in a prison cell. The prison regulations were written on the surrounding walls, only they were not the usual sorts of rules but words from the songs of Krovostok, a famous Russian rap group. The guards were ordering me to read out the rules, that is, the lyrics, again and again, a thousand times. It was torture, and in the dream I was irate. Much later, after I had recovered my wits, I mentioned this in an interview, and the guys from Krovostok sent me a response on Twitter: ‘Lyosh, sorry for the bad trip.’
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| Navalny in 2006 |
“There was a huge television on the wall in my ward, and that presented yet another trial, only marginally less awful than my recurring delusions. As I gradually recovered my awareness, the medical staff tried everything imaginable to keep me entertained. They decided one day I might enjoy watching soccer. The trouble was that I'm not remotely interested in soccer. After some time, my colleague Leonid Volkov, who had come to visit, recognized there was a problem. ‘Why are you giving him soccer to watch? He hates it.’ The television was swiftly switched off, and although at the time I wasn't taking much in, I felt a great sense of relief.
“Yulia and Leonid tried several times to tell me what had happened. For a while they had little success. It was as if they were knocking on a shut door, behind which was my brain, which was not replying. They told me about the poisoning; about my passing out on the plane; about the hospital in Omsk, full of FSB officers; about how for a long time the regime wouldn't let me be transferred from the hospital; about the evacuation to Germany ... but I just sat there staring. They told me at length and in detail that Putin had tried to murder me while I was traveling around Siberia; that independent laboratories had confirmed I was poisoned and, moreover, with the same chemical agent the Russian secret services had used to poison the Skripals in Salisbury. And then when, yet again, they said the word ‘Novichok,’ I suddenly looked straight at them and said, ‘What the fuck? That's just so dumb!’
“Leonid says that was the moment he knew I was going to be all right.
“I gradually became more fully aware of what had happened, and remembered what had preceded it. No matter how fascinating and gripping the details of the failed attempt to murder me were, I was far more interested in how the elections in Tomsk and Novosibirsk had gone. Had we published our investigations on YouTube? Had people viewed them? Had people voted? Had we managed to beat United Russia? What percentage of the vote had our candidates received? On the night the ballots were being counted, I asked Yulia to read my
entire Twitter feed out loud. Then, with my speech slurred, I dictated messages for her to send to our colleagues.
“The election results were better than we could have hoped for. In Tomsk, nineteen of the twenty-seven candidates we supported had won, including the coordinator of our local headquarters Ksenia Fadeyeva, and her deputy, Andrei Fateyev. In Novosibirsk, twelve candidates we supported were elected deputies, and the head of our office, Sergei Boiko, was one of them.
“Even so, I didn't fully engage with reality until I was allowed to get out of bed for the first time and take a few steps on my own. I was not permitted that for a long time because I wanted to escape, and even made several attempts to do so. While I was slowly recovering my wits, I became aware there were always people standing outside my ward and watching me through the glass. They didn't look like doctors, and after I learned what had happened, it was explained to me that they were guards. One day I tried to persuade Yulia to grab their guns and help me escape. I felt an urgent need to flee. No gun was forthcoming. Next, I decided to take matters into my own hands: when I was alone, I tore off all the catheters and tubes that were attached to me, drenching the ward in blood, and tried to get up. Medics immediately rushed in and had me back in bed and reconnected in no time. I didn't give up that easily, though—I made several more breakout attempts in the following days.
“When finally, with the doctors' permission, I was able to get out of bed myself and walk very haltingly the few steps to the sink, everything genuinely came back to me. I wanted to get washed, but my hands wouldn't obey me, and then there suddenly came to mind very vividly how a few weeks before I had been trying to wash my face in the bathroom on the plane from Tomsk to Moscow. I went back to bed, lay down, stared at the ceiling, and felt absolutely wretched. I was like a frail old man, unable to walk the three meters to the sink without trouble, unable to turn on a tap. I was afraid I was going to be like that forever.”
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