By Craig P. Dixon, southcoast247.com correspondent Social Commentary 128
September 19, 2007
Some years ago, when I was young and dumb, I used to tell people that I feared nothing. At the time, I tipped the scales at 185 pounds and walked with the swagger of a kid who'd never gotten the shit kicked out of him. Never gotten into a serious car accident. And rarely had to face rejection.
Of course, I was mostly ignorant. I was scared of a lot of things and just too dumb to admit it. Then, 4 dudes stomped in my head in Providence. Never had I felt so entirely helpless, but I had little time to be afraid. And I kissed a telephone pole with my truck. But I feared the consequences of that accident far more than the crash itself. As for rejection… we'll just say that I'm well acquainted with it. So that's no big deal anymore.
Point of it all is: Our fears usually change with age and experience. However, one fear has remained constant for most of my 27 storied years. And that's being mistaken for dead.
I was six or seven when I was first acquainted with the "mistaken for dead" phenomena in a Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not book that originally belonged to my father. Inside were numerous tales about people lying in state that'd suddenly "woken from the dead" and went on to live twenty or so years. There were detailed sketches of a device with a bell used to alert passersby of a prematurely interned corpse.
Even then, my little mind was imagining people buried alive. Waking in the casket beneath the dirt. Tearing the fingernails from their fingertips as they frantically tried to dig through the wood, before finally succumbing to suffocation or fright. I was horrified.
When I was sixteen or so, I decided cremation would be the way to go to avoid this macabre end. But, this conjured images of a prematurely cremated human squealing as the flames made quick work of the mortal flesh.
HELLLLLLLLLLLP!
But I managed to wave that all away. Such things are the stuff of Hollywood and fantasy. In this technologically advanced age of medicine, there's simply no chance that someone would be mistaken for dead. Premature embalming, for example, just couldn't happen.
Then I read this story on Saturday, about a Venezuelan man by the name of Carlos Camejo. Carlos had been involved in a serious highway accident and declared dead at the scene. They bagged him and sent him off to the morgue for autopsy.
On the slab, doctors began to cut open his face when they noticed something amiss. The "dead" man was bleeding. Conscious now, he began screaming.
The doctors quickly stitched up Mr. Camejo. They moved him to the corridor. His wife, who'd been called in to identify her husband's body, found him there. Very upset, but very much alive.
If anything can be gained from Mr. Camejo's experience, it's this. Never go to Venezuela.
Some years ago, when I was young and dumb, I used to tell people that I feared nothing. At the time, I tipped the scales at 185 pounds and walked with the swagger of a kid who'd never gotten the shit kicked out of him. Never gotten into a serious car accident. And rarely had to face rejection.
