Cancer patient describes moment he 'woke up in hospital unable to move or speak'

A 25-year-old cancer patient has described the moment he woke up in hospital unable to move or speak.

Posting his story on Reddit under a medical AMA, he wrote: "I woke up in hospital unable to move or speak and with no idea where I was".

He said he was trying to restart his life after being diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer which nearly killed him a year ago.

The man, posting as ‘Hocico_reddit’, said he had undergone massive rehabilitation training and intensive care psychosis.

He writes: "One day I started coughing up blood and was feeling very dizzy. I got to the hospital with a friend, which is the last thing I remember. They found the cancer in my lung, notified my family, and operated me the same day in an attempt to save my life.

"About a week after I was woken up (this would then be about a month after I blacked out), an oncologist, the surgeon who performed my operation, another doctor, two nurses, and my family sat down around my bed and I was told that I had cancer.

"At the time, I was not really able to understand what it meant. I knew that this day was going to be the first day I would try to eat yogurt (all my food was through my nose in a tube), and my surgeon had said a sentence, "you have to go from yogurt to steak", meaning that was all I had to worry about. So when the "you have cancer" conversation was given to me, a month after it was given to my family, all I was saying out loud was "From yogurt to steak. From yogurt to steak.

"I couldnt move, was because I had been out for 3 weeks, been through a big operation and on heavy drugs. My body was weak, and my brain had lost its ability to recruit my muscles.

"I could not speak because I was in a respirator. My lung capacity was between 0 and 10% at the low point. When in a respirator, no air passes by your vocal cord and then you cant make any sounds.

He goes on to describe the hallucinations he experienced while undergoing “intensive care psychosis”, he says: “It was almost only concerning death and suffering, or some kind of containment. I've hallucinated a lot of torture situations. E.g. a person who casually walked around and waited for me to die, after destroying my "blood vial" - a big glass figure with all my blood inside. She had a small glass of blood she could give me to keep me alive just a little longer to keep the torture going. Her brain was hanging out of her head, and bystanders saw me through a hole in the wall without doing anything to help me.”

His experience prompted a huge number of responses with many people sharing similar experiences.

‘Baronmad’ replied: “… my mother was complaining about stomch [sic] pains and called me to cancel our lunch we had planned to have.

“Five hours later my stepfather called and said that my mother was in operation and we should probably go to the hospital. We meet [sic] up there and a nurse told us that they had to remove her uterus and her ovarys [sic] in an emergerncy [sic] operation.

“Happily my mother is now official cancer free again.”

And ‘kalehound’ said: “I had a friend who woke up one day with blurred/double-vision (around age 22). She went to the ER and after a few tests they found out she had a brain tumor. They operated within a day or so… They told her if she had waited longer or not come in she would have died.”

Now ‘Hoccio-reddit’ has promised Reddit users he will get a tattoo saying “From yoghurt to steak” and post a photo of it on the site.