After Coma: Starting a New Life
A story so incredible it sounds like fiction. But it really did happen: around the same time, two families were visited by tragic accidents. A spouse collapses, the ambulance arrives, and in both cases, doctors find themselves treating patients in persistent vegetative states. As a result of pure chance, both victims – a man and woman – occupy the same hospital room. Over a period of months, their respective spouses find themselves together on a regular basis at their partners’ bedsides. They begin to talk, sharing their experiences, building up a sense of trust, until finally they fall in love and become a couple – in the teeth of all resistance, their own, as well as society’s. Eventually, both patients awaken from their comas, but they are no longer the people they once were. They have become strangers – to themselves as well as to their loved ones. The new couple resolves to leave everything behind: both of them sell their homes and cars, contributing all of the funds they raise to the care of their former life partners. They move in together, along with their four children, risking everything on a new beginning. Realizing that the consequences of what they have experienced have been momentous for all involved, the new couple seeks out psychotherapy for themselves and for their children. To varying degrees, the children have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. All of these events transpired three years ago, yet they continue to have a powerful impact: both families have been transformed, and remain in a state of change. This film attempts depicts the results of these simultaneously tragic and touching events. How are these families coping with the new situation? Can the new couple genuinely surrender themselves to their relationship, or does a disconcerting question hover constantly in the background: do I have the right?
