Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
Speaker 1: from House Stuff Works dot com. This episode is sponsored
Speaker 1: by go daddy dot com, the world's largest web host
Speaker 1: and domain name registrar, with domains as low as a
Speaker 1: dollar ninety nine and hosting for less than five dollars
Speaker 1: a month. In a promo code stuff ten at checkout
Speaker 1: and save ten percent off your entire order. Get your
Speaker 1: piece of the Internet at go daddy dot com. Hello
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, I'm Chuck. The
Speaker 1: red light is on. We have one of those now
Speaker 1: we need one? Now, Yeah, we totally do. It's usually
Speaker 1: just a you know, we hear our producer Jerry President
Speaker 1: button right, and then we know to go. You just
Speaker 1: start talking like talking monkeys. It's like a German the
Speaker 1: German train system. It's very efficient. Yes, it is Chuck, Chuck.
Speaker 1: As you know, it's been in all together rotten day
Speaker 1: so far, right, Yeah, hasn't been our best And what
Speaker 1: is it like three in the afternoon? Yeah, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so um, luckily it'll be over soon enough. And it's Friday. Um,
Speaker 1: I am even worse than I was before, because rather
Speaker 1: than getting my usual fresca, I got a diet cherry
Speaker 1: coke by accident. And you know, all respect to the
Speaker 1: Coke Cold company, they've done really well for themselves, but
Speaker 1: diet cherry coke is atrocious. I like that you're suffering
Speaker 1: through it anyway rather than I opened it. You know,
Speaker 1: I gotta I've gotta make do. But um, honorable. You know,
Speaker 1: as bad as our day has been, right, yeah, I
Speaker 1: can tell you somebody whose day was even Worse's how's
Speaker 1: that first segue? I actually just set up the setup
Speaker 1: for the podcast. So what do you think you're blowing
Speaker 1: my mind? Um? There's this woman named Patricia white Bull
Speaker 1: and she was a co cheaty Indian from outside of Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. And back when she was a lovely young
Speaker 1: twenty eight, she was giving birth to her fourth child,
Speaker 1: son named Mark, and uh, she was giving birth via
Speaker 1: C section, and there are complications in the surgery and uh,
Speaker 1: Mrs white Bull uh developed a blood clot in her
Speaker 1: lung and it actually cut off oxygen to her brain
Speaker 1: and she laughs into a coma. Okay, so comas actually happened.
Speaker 1: They can happen fairly frequently. They're not uncommon, but Mrs
Speaker 1: white Bull's type of coma actually very rare. She was
Speaker 1: in a coma for sixteen years, which is that's really
Speaker 1: that's a long time to be in a coma. So, um,
Speaker 1: there are other people out there like her. Um, have
Speaker 1: you heard of Sunny von Buelow reversal of fortune? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she's been in a coma for nineteen years, uh huh.
Speaker 1: And a couple of years back, actually she was moved
Speaker 1: from this very very expensive um care facility to a
Speaker 1: slightly less expensive when it was estimated that her family
Speaker 1: is spending about half a million dollars on her care,
Speaker 1: as well as hairstylists and ran chairs and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: finally had to say we gotta move you. Mall Um.
Speaker 1: Was she in the coma from the attempted murder? Yes? Really,
Speaker 1: allegedly by her husband, Claus von Bull, who recently passed away. Correct, Actually, um,
Speaker 1: it was she who passed away. Okay, she did, um,
Speaker 1: And this is actually kind of common. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: how she passed away, but people in comas sometimes passed
Speaker 1: away from pneumonia or something like that. It's their their
Speaker 1: bodies not functioning very well, so they can succumb to
Speaker 1: things like that. Well, apologies for not being up on
Speaker 1: my von Buelow history. Hey, same here, Pale. It's okay.
Speaker 1: Things move pretty fast in this crazy world of ours.
Speaker 1: So back to Mrs white Bowl. Um, while Mrs von
Speaker 1: Bulow never woke up, Mrs white Bull actually did after
Speaker 1: sixteen years. This is amazing. This is exceedingly rare, rareer
Speaker 1: than a sixteen plus your coma is waking up from
Speaker 1: a sixteen plus your comma. Basically, Um, she woke up
Speaker 1: one day while her one of her caregivers was adjusting
Speaker 1: the sheets on her bed, and she lifted her head
Speaker 1: and shouted, don't do that, and scared. I imagine the
Speaker 1: daylights out of this woman. Yeah. Uh and uh. After that,
Speaker 1: she was writing notes to her family. She called her
Speaker 1: mother to say, marry Christmas has happened in December. Um,
Speaker 1: And within like a month she was at a mall.
Speaker 1: She wanted to see, you know, how the world had changed.
Speaker 1: So she went to them all. She went to them all.
Speaker 1: It's actually a pretty good place to start, right because
Speaker 1: I mean back when she fell into a coma, Reagan
Speaker 1: had just started his second term right right. Um there,
Speaker 1: just I think about how much the world changed between
Speaker 1: kidding and she woke up just in time to get
Speaker 1: nervous for Y two k Yeah you know good? Yeah? Wow,
Speaker 1: that's awesome, isn't that? It's kind of an uplifting story.
Speaker 1: We could end it right here and I would be happy.
Speaker 1: Probably I would too, actually, but we're not. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you want to talk about combas that I think I
Speaker 1: take it from that solicitation. Yes, all right, well chuck,
Speaker 1: let me start, because I haven't spoken enough so far.
Speaker 1: I agree. I you're just gonna kick it off with
Speaker 1: Coma comes from the Greek word coma appropriately enough, with
Speaker 1: a with a K. That's the big distinction. And that
Speaker 1: word is to sleep in the Greek dialect um. And
Speaker 1: that's actually pretty misleading, isn't it. It is because when
Speaker 1: you're sleep, you can wake up, and if you're in
Speaker 1: a coma, you're not waking up. You don't respond to
Speaker 1: stimuli like you know, site or motor function stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can sit there and shot all day at
Speaker 1: a comma patient. They're not waking up, right. Um. They
Speaker 1: also don't respond respond to pain stimuli. Um. There there's
Speaker 1: they're just basically out right, but the brain functions part
Speaker 1: of it does, right, Okay, So, um, we should probably
Speaker 1: talk about the brain. To understand that coma, you kind
Speaker 1: of have to have a minor understanding of the brain, right,
Speaker 1: major understanding, major understanding. Exactly. Um. So we've got basically
Speaker 1: three parts, yes, that that work to make us these
Speaker 1: you know, talking monkeys that we are. Right. Um, You've
Speaker 1: got the cerebrum cerebellum in the brains to him, uh,
Speaker 1: and they communicate with one another, So you're cerebrum. That's
Speaker 1: your higher brain. Yeah, that's controls things like emotion, memory, intelligence, personality, context. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's what most people think of when they think of
Speaker 1: the brain. All that good stuff is in there, and
Speaker 1: it's the largest part. Two. And then you've got the cerebellum,
Speaker 1: which is in charge of balance movements, also very important.
Speaker 1: And then the most ancient part of the brain, um
Speaker 1: evolutionarily speaking, is the brain stem. Right, this is like
Speaker 1: the basic part of the brain that controls like, um, breathing,
Speaker 1: blood pressure, bowel movements. Actually, yeah exactly. So, Um, you
Speaker 1: put all these together and you've got us intelligent, reasoning,
Speaker 1: pooping humans, wrapping skull around it and some skin and
Speaker 1: you've got a human exactly. Um. And all these things
Speaker 1: have to kind of communicate with one another, and they
Speaker 1: do so through the thalamus um and they send chemical
Speaker 1: signals to one another. UM that makes your lungs um
Speaker 1: inflate and deflate and makes you think this person is
Speaker 1: making fun of me, or they're after me or something. Um.
Speaker 1: There there's all this stuff combined, as you said, makes
Speaker 1: us this way. If they stopped talking to one another,
Speaker 1: you got yourself an altered state of consciousness exactly. And
Speaker 1: there's quite a few of those. Yeah, you want to
Speaker 1: talk about some of the other altered states. Uh, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a vegetative state that a lot of people, um
Speaker 1: get confused with comma. It's not exactly the same thing, uh.
Speaker 1: And a vegislative state is actually a type of coma um,
Speaker 1: but you're generally awake but unresponsive, so your eyes can
Speaker 1: be open, but you're still unresponsive. It is generally confused
Speaker 1: with with coma because it usually comes after a coma.
Speaker 1: Correct um. These people like Mrs white Bowl and Mrs
Speaker 1: von Buelow, who are in comas for dozens of years
Speaker 1: or tens of years, um, we're uh in a vegetative
Speaker 1: state after X amount of time. So if you're in
Speaker 1: a coma and you go into a vegetative state, you're
Speaker 1: probably in a lot of trouble. You're probably not going
Speaker 1: to come out of it. Um. You you some part
Speaker 1: of your brain stem responds to stimuli, stimuli like maybe
Speaker 1: a sound. So all of a sudden, your eyes um,
Speaker 1: which are no longer coordinated, so they're kind of lolling around,
Speaker 1: but both in the same direction towards the sound, but
Speaker 1: there's no awareness of it. You're not you're not using
Speaker 1: any of your higher brain function to figure out what
Speaker 1: the sound is. It's just like a basic response. Right.
Speaker 1: Your eyes can move, I believe that they could be
Speaker 1: like yawning, even you can yawn, that kind of thing, blinking.
Speaker 1: And the one real hallmark of a vegetative state is
Speaker 1: people in it have sleep cycles. So so you know,
Speaker 1: during the day they're diurnal. Still during the day they
Speaker 1: will you know, blink or their eyes a lull about
Speaker 1: in their head or there, they'll turn their their head
Speaker 1: towards something, um. And then at night they're not doing that,
Speaker 1: they're sleeping. In a coma, you're just you just appear
Speaker 1: to be sleeping the whole time. So that's one. There's
Speaker 1: another one that is one of my particular favorite altered
Speaker 1: states of conscious stupor that actually scared me. Apparently, if
Speaker 1: you are whacked out of your skull on drugs and
Speaker 1: you're in a stupor, you're like one or two steps
Speaker 1: away from Coma's host. It's all the same process is
Speaker 1: going on. It's just I guess to a slightly different degree.
Speaker 1: But that's alarming, you know, So watch out, buddy, I'm
Speaker 1: watching out. But I distracted. You know, I know which
Speaker 1: one you were going to talk about. You just like
Speaker 1: to say stupor um. The one I like the most
Speaker 1: is locked in syndrome. Yeah. I can't believe I just
Speaker 1: said that. The the one I liked the most, the
Speaker 1: one you find what's fascinating, Thank you, Chuck. Locked in
Speaker 1: syndrome UM is basically where you're, uh, you can move
Speaker 1: your higher brain is or you can't move. You're totally
Speaker 1: aware though your higher brain is functioning. You are literally
Speaker 1: locked into your body um and basically the only thing
Speaker 1: you can move are your eyes typically and uh, that's
Speaker 1: like Jean Dominique Bobie from the Diamond Bell in the Butterfly,
Speaker 1: which is a great movie. We were just talking with Jerry,
Speaker 1: our producer beforehand. We've both seen the film. It's really, really,
Speaker 1: really great. But you have not because you're too busy
Speaker 1: watching Magnet Pion. Yeah I have. I know enough about
Speaker 1: the story when it came out, you know, I listen
Speaker 1: to NPR and then talked about that like seven Days
Speaker 1: in a Row. I think it's really good. But the
Speaker 1: guy because he could move his eyes and he had
Speaker 1: a computer software system that he could type with it.
Speaker 1: But he he and he wrote a book in his
Speaker 1: in this locked in state. Yes, right, and um he
Speaker 1: typed every single letter of this book by looking at
Speaker 1: the by choosing like a keyboard, right or from from
Speaker 1: like a computer screen keyboard. I believe that's what happened.
Speaker 1: That's nuts. But I mean imagine that. Imagine being locked
Speaker 1: in and knowing exactly what was going on, and I'm
Speaker 1: very frustrating. Imagine it's very much like the Metallica video one,
Speaker 1: except that guy could move right, which was from the
Speaker 1: film Johnny got his gun. I think, thank you, Wow,
Speaker 1: very nice my fountain of film knowledge today. So those
Speaker 1: are a couple of other altered states of consciousness in
Speaker 1: case you're interested. If not, you should have fast forward
Speaker 1: it to to the last one minute and a half maybe two. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're back to coma again. Okay, so somebody falls
Speaker 1: into a coma. How how does this happen? What are
Speaker 1: some of the ways you can become coma tope? Well,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of ways. Um. One way is from
Speaker 1: brain injury, obviously. UM, if you have severe head trauma,
Speaker 1: you can get an impact that actually makes your brain
Speaker 1: move within your skull. And uh, and now that if
Speaker 1: your brain actually hit your skull, that's what a concussion is, correct,
Speaker 1: I believe so. But something more severe than that can
Speaker 1: cause uh, nerve blood vessels and nerve fibers to swell up,
Speaker 1: and that can potentially cut off the flow of blood
Speaker 1: and therefore oxygen to the brain. And that's when you're
Speaker 1: in trouble. You want your skull to be stationary at
Speaker 1: all times, or you want your brain to be stationary
Speaker 1: at all times in your skull. Yes, it's just not
Speaker 1: good when it slaps around in there. No, it's not. So.
Speaker 1: You can also become comatast if you have diabetes, right, diabetes,
Speaker 1: certain diseases like meningitis can make it happen. Drug overdose
Speaker 1: can make it happen. Yeah, although I believe you told
Speaker 1: me that they don't even know exactly how that happens.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it happens. I couldn't find out
Speaker 1: what leads to it. The way I took it was
Speaker 1: that there is a m It slows your response, um it.
Speaker 1: Maybe it slows the oxygen to your brain, or the
Speaker 1: flow of oxygen your brain, or it just relaxes muscles
Speaker 1: that need to be working. I don't know. That's literally
Speaker 1: off the top of my head, right. I sense a
Speaker 1: neurosurgeon email in the near future to climbs up for us, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we want to. But yeah, there are there are
Speaker 1: plenty of ways that you can slip into a coma,
Speaker 1: And actually you can slip into a coma. You can
Speaker 1: go through stages of altered consciousness and then end up
Speaker 1: coma toast, which is the granddaddy worst one of all,
Speaker 1: although I don't know, lockdan is probably worse. But it
Speaker 1: can't happen gradually, that's a good point. Or it can
Speaker 1: happen very quickly, like you know, through a major concussion,
Speaker 1: through a car accident or something like that if you've
Speaker 1: slipped into a diabetic coma, that would happen gradually usually
Speaker 1: right exactly, you might get feverish and uh dizzy and lethargic,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden you're in a coma,
Speaker 1: which is frightening. It is do you have diabetes? Me? Neither?
Speaker 1: I might one day, though I think my father got
Speaker 1: it later in his life. Is a genetic I don't know.
Speaker 1: I sense another letter from a personal type clear that
Speaker 1: at this point we could just start asking questions we
Speaker 1: read do do like a twenty minute reader mail segment.
Speaker 1: You just correcting ourselves every time. It's a good idea,
Speaker 1: all right, So what do you do if you're in
Speaker 1: a coma? I mean, here, let me just say one
Speaker 1: thing real quick. After researching comas, you know how when
Speaker 1: you have a heart attack, your your heart actually isn't stopped.
Speaker 1: It's it's gone out of its rhythmic beat. So when
Speaker 1: you are zapped, right when they when they hit you
Speaker 1: with the paddles, what they're doing is actually stopping your
Speaker 1: heart to give it a chance to restart. With a coma,
Speaker 1: it seems like the pattern of of um of discussion
Speaker 1: between the different parts of your brain that make you
Speaker 1: conscious and aware. Um, they it's been interrupted, but we
Speaker 1: don't know how to zap it back into place exactly.
Speaker 1: It's a good way to say it, but you know,
Speaker 1: I mean you still have to care for these people, exactly.
Speaker 1: You can't just say, well, you know, we don't really
Speaker 1: know how to do anything to make you better. There
Speaker 1: are some ways drug overdose, Uh, if you keep if
Speaker 1: you sustain someone's life processes, they can come out after
Speaker 1: the drug begins to wear off, or same with alcohol poison. Uh,
Speaker 1: diabetic coma that can be treated. Yeah, but once they
Speaker 1: like from a major brain injury, you may be in
Speaker 1: big trouble or stroke. Sure. I think the first thing
Speaker 1: that has to happen is a doctor has to determine
Speaker 1: whether or not you're actually in a coma. That's the
Speaker 1: first step. Yeah, how do they do that? Well, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of um, a couple of scales they use
Speaker 1: to determine your level of alertness. And one is from Glasgow.
Speaker 1: It's called the Glasgow Coma scale. Is that how it
Speaker 1: said it? There's no accent associated with it. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna try my Scottish accent. And then there's the Rancho
Speaker 1: los Amigos scale. No, I'm not going to do that either,
Speaker 1: all right, We're gonna remain respectful in this one. And
Speaker 1: basically the doctors use these two scales and there's varying
Speaker 1: test of responsiveness with your eyes, verbal responses, motor responses
Speaker 1: to various stimuli and so um they do this to determine.
Speaker 1: They use both of these scales actually, uh to to
Speaker 1: basically gauge how alert you are and whether or not
Speaker 1: you're in fact in a comma. So is it like
Speaker 1: they just clap loudly next to your ears and command
Speaker 1: you to sit up or something like that, I would
Speaker 1: say so. I mean they use um like do your
Speaker 1: eyes open when someone speaks to you? Uh, do yours?
Speaker 1: Do your eyes open when there's pain involved? So there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of little ways that they can check. And yeah,
Speaker 1: they I guess they want to determine whether you're in
Speaker 1: a coma or whether you're just you know, resting your
Speaker 1: eyes or playing possum because of what comes after that, right,
Speaker 1: And they while they assign your score an arrange from
Speaker 1: three to fifteen, three e being a very deep coma
Speaker 1: and fifteen being uh less right now, right, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: about fourteen. But yeah, alright, so we've established you're in
Speaker 1: a coma. It's awful your three right, all right, so
Speaker 1: you are just completely dead to the world, but you're
Speaker 1: still alive amazingly right. That would be comatose and unresponsive
Speaker 1: is the official classification of that's deep of a comma. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're in there. Um, if you're in a car injury,
Speaker 1: what they're going to do. They're gonna tree ours, your symptoms,
Speaker 1: your problems. So if you're in a car record something
Speaker 1: you have injuries from that, they're gonna, you know, control
Speaker 1: the bleeding that kind of thing. They want to stabilize
Speaker 1: everything else first not first, but you know once you're
Speaker 1: once you're stable though, um, and you're still in a coma,
Speaker 1: they you can't care for yourself any longer. So they
Speaker 1: it's kind of like they're going to poke around and
Speaker 1: determine what the causes. Maybe they'll use in e g.
Speaker 1: Electro and cephalography right or m r I or f
Speaker 1: m r I, which is basically an m r I
Speaker 1: for the brain, or CT scan which is computed tomography
Speaker 1: right now. They they'll use all these things to basically
Speaker 1: either look inside and e g actually is basically, um,
Speaker 1: kind of like cooking into your electrical system and checking out,
Speaker 1: you know what, how the impulses are doing right, and
Speaker 1: they'll diagnose, you know, maybe what caused the coma, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So once once you once you're stabilized
Speaker 1: diagnosed in a coma, you know, you've you've been given
Speaker 1: the scale rating, um, and you're in for the long haul. Clearly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're gonna basically use machines to care for you,
Speaker 1: like feeding tubes. Um. Oftentimes somebody in a prolonged coma
Speaker 1: or vegetative state. Uh, they'll perform a tricky otomy so
Speaker 1: they don't have to innovate you um because after a
Speaker 1: while the innovation too. But imagine gets real, you know,
Speaker 1: uncomfortable that actually so much so that you you would
Speaker 1: prefer a hole of the throat. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: let me it's a little aside. One of my best friends,
Speaker 1: guy named Jen's Baty, in sixth grade, Uh, his mom
Speaker 1: started choking h in a restaurant and actually had an
Speaker 1: emergency trackeotomy with a stake knife and a pain performed
Speaker 1: on her. Yeah, there was a doctor there who did it,
Speaker 1: and he just went he was breathing. Again. That's the
Speaker 1: worst case scenario right there. And so he used to
Speaker 1: have this little scar and still I'm sure still does.
Speaker 1: But it was crazy. Guys. The only person I ever
Speaker 1: knew who had an emergency trade. I thought that was
Speaker 1: something just you know, you get on the er. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it happens, It happens. Uh. So back to comas, another
Speaker 1: thing that that is often done is a physical therapy
Speaker 1: just to keep the muscles moving. Um, they'll they'll, you know,
Speaker 1: the nurses will move the patient to prevent bed swords
Speaker 1: and then move the muscles, flex the legs to keep
Speaker 1: you know, atrophy from setting in. Or if you're uma therman,
Speaker 1: you can do a really focused you know, um regime
Speaker 1: right within an eight hour period and you'll be walking again. Right. Yeah. So, um,
Speaker 1: how we need to bring this down a little bit,
Speaker 1: don't we? I think so? Yeah, because searching it, it's
Speaker 1: when you really get a grasp on comas, in the
Speaker 1: peculiar nature of them and just the fact that we
Speaker 1: have no way to bring somebody out of a coma.
Speaker 1: It's kind of heartbreaking to think that their families out
Speaker 1: there who would go to the hospital every day or
Speaker 1: every week and yeah, and you hope because there's people
Speaker 1: like Patricia White Bull who sit up all of a
Speaker 1: sudden and there you have it. You know, somebody can
Speaker 1: come out of a long comma. It's that's rough true.
Speaker 1: I've got a study for you that might encourage you
Speaker 1: a bit. I'd love to hear it, just from two
Speaker 1: thousand six. It's from Dr Adrian Owen of Cambridge University
Speaker 1: and neuroscientists, and he's trying to determine a consciousness meter
Speaker 1: for people in comas and vegetative states. So what he
Speaker 1: does is he hooks a normal, healthy person up to
Speaker 1: uh an f m R I machine, which I know
Speaker 1: you understand how that works right, Well, it basically it's
Speaker 1: it it uses magnet magnetic imaging to see through the
Speaker 1: skull um and basically it's watching the brain. It is
Speaker 1: watching the electrical activit being in the brain. So if
Speaker 1: you know the the prefrontal cortex lights up when you
Speaker 1: tell somebody to you know, um, and when somebody sees
Speaker 1: a bunny, you'll know that the prefrontal cortex is involved
Speaker 1: in and taking cuteness into context or something. Well, that's
Speaker 1: I'm impressed. So he'll hook up a healthy person and
Speaker 1: then someone in a come our vegetative state and asked
Speaker 1: him to do something like, imagine playing a game of tennis.
Speaker 1: I believes what he is on this one woman, and
Speaker 1: he found that, um, the brain activity was really similar
Speaker 1: for both of these people, which led him to believe that, uh,
Speaker 1: there may be a lot more brain activity going on
Speaker 1: and some of these different states of mind. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that pretty much flatly contradicts our understanding of vegetative states. True,
Speaker 1: but it also this was one one person. I believe
Speaker 1: that it was successful in and I'm sure there's been
Speaker 1: subsequent studies since. But he himself said that, you know,
Speaker 1: we need to keep studying this kind of thing before
Speaker 1: we make any determinations. Yeah, yeah, we need to basically
Speaker 1: figure out how to bring people out of comas. Right,
Speaker 1: but it does happen. You can come out of a coma. No,
Speaker 1: you totally can't. You can't bring someone out of a coma.
Speaker 1: But I think they said that who score a three
Speaker 1: or four on the on the scale within the first
Speaker 1: twenty four hours are likely to either die or remain
Speaker 1: in the vegetative state, So that's no good. And but
Speaker 1: on the other side, who score between eleven and fifteen
Speaker 1: are likely to make a good recovery. So well it
Speaker 1: makes sense. I mean, if you can, you know, shake
Speaker 1: somebody's hand when they tell you to, right, you're probably
Speaker 1: gonna make it. But apparently it's his first twenty four
Speaker 1: hours are really telling. Yeah, I would imagine. So, so
Speaker 1: that's that's comas. Huh. That's my understanding of Comma, the
Speaker 1: great medical mystery that still remains one day maybe I hope.
Speaker 1: So all right, chilling, uh, Chuck, do you want to
Speaker 1: do listener mail? Yeah, let's do listener mail. And I'm
Speaker 1: starting to separate listener mail into different categories good cream
Speaker 1: from the rest of the crop, as exactly the men
Speaker 1: from the boys, well, just more like a good way
Speaker 1: to woman from the girls. Shut it. Um. So, first
Speaker 1: of all, we've decided to change this one part to
Speaker 1: stuff we should know. This is instead of corrections a
Speaker 1: lot of times are not in actual correction, but something
Speaker 1: a listener has added that we did not realize. And
Speaker 1: there's stuff we should have known, stuff we should have known.
Speaker 1: We can call it that, but that that actually came
Speaker 1: from Brian Smith of California suggested we call it that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're actively following our listeners commands at this point. So, Brian,
Speaker 1: we appreciate the title there, and we're gonna use that now.
Speaker 1: So something we did miss in the body armor episode.
Speaker 1: We talked about a lot of kinds of body armor,
Speaker 1: which was good, but we failed to mention one new,
Speaker 1: very awesome one called dragon skin armor. And apparently these
Speaker 1: are a little small, overlapping ceramic disks, sort of like
Speaker 1: the medieval scale mail. And um, it's just a modern
Speaker 1: version essentially, and it's more effective from repeated hits from
Speaker 1: a bullet. So a lot quite a few people sent
Speaker 1: this in. Michael Schivitz, retired naval officer or I don't
Speaker 1: know about officer, retired U S. Navy, Reno Marino or
Speaker 1: Renee Marino from Brooklyn, and Devin Montess in California. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure we missed a few others, but yeah, we
Speaker 1: actually got a lot of mail about the dragon skills.
Speaker 1: And I say, I find it comforting to know that
Speaker 1: we're advancing light years now, right, And I have one
Speaker 1: more quick one, and this is uh apropos to our
Speaker 1: topic today of commas, John mull Queen. It's a doctor
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts. And John wrote in and said I thought
Speaker 1: it would never happen. But I heard a mistake on
Speaker 1: stuff you should know, uh exorcism. Apparently you said this
Speaker 1: is not me. You said that someone with epilepsy. You
Speaker 1: could throw somebody in an MRI machine and look at
Speaker 1: the parts of the brain and see that someone is epileptic.
Speaker 1: And John says that, actually you would not see epilepsy
Speaker 1: in an MRI. I caesars are diagnosed with an E
Speaker 1: E G machine, which is what we just spoke about,
Speaker 1: So we appreciate that correction. Yeah, thank you. Is he from?
Speaker 1: Is he from Farmington Framing hand? You know it's from
Speaker 1: Gardner mass Well x x o O to all of
Speaker 1: our listeners who sent mail, and you two can send mail.
Speaker 1: You can send it to uh stuff podcast at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. I gotta tell you there's plenty
Speaker 1: more information on comas in the great article on the
Speaker 1: site called how comas work. Just type those three little
Speaker 1: words into our handy search bar and of course how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready, are you