After I Woke Up From A Coma, I Found Myself Fixating On My Weight

Waking up from a coma is not like it looks in the movies. You don’t magically rise, change into your matching sweatsuit and trot out as Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” pulsates from the hospital speakers.

My own experience was less camp and more horror. Thanks to a houseguest that overstayed its visit (COVID), I was placed in a medically induced coma due to lung failure and put on the most extreme form of life support, called ECMO, in March 2020. Luckily, as a comedian, I was able to find some dark humor in all of it.

When I regained cognizance months later, I was alone in a hospital room due to the no-visitor protocol, paralyzed head to toe, and voiceless as a result of the ventilator. I had to learn how to walk, talk, eat, drink and go to the bathroom again — like a toddler but with voting rights.

Four years later, I primarily use a wheelchair and am on oxygen 24/7. Besides navigating this lifestyle that I involuntarily acquired like some type of Bath & Body Works cucumber melon lotion regift, I had other work cut out for me too. I had to adopt new ideologies about my body.

While paralyzed in the hospital for half a year, I was in the “between place,” a connector to my before- and post-COVID body. I still held the patriarchal indoctrinations of this purgatory in my subconscious. People sent me clothes while I was there. As I was learning how to walk again, all I could focus on was the smaller size they gave me. It meant not only did I lose weight, but I was perceived as “skinnier.”

As the Liko machine, essentially robot arms holding a hammock, lifted my shaking, disabled, paralyzed corpse to be weighed, I saw the number go down. I was on a feeding tube and yet elated by the digits on the scale. I finally reached my goal weight.

I could fit into the smallest patient gown and squeeze into the tiniest adult diapers. Did I just win womanhood!? The more I physically disappeared from this realm, the more compliments I got. This reward system came to an abrupt halt when I came home and was able to eat real food again. Between actual calories, my uncountable number of medications, being on oxygen and in a wheelchair, I gained everything back and then some.

But what happens when that flesh costume you’ve been programmed to loathe saves your life?

I have had a severe “glow-down,” according to Eurocentric standards. Chunks of my hair have fallen out a la Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie. Machines and nasal cannulas have made my nose bigger, allowing me to add “witchy vibe” to my social media brand deals! My skin is a jump scare due to the ICU, which has resulted in me taking to TikTok to learn about snail mucin from a Gen Alpha.

Alas, I am now proficient in mollusks’ anal glands. My muscle is equivalent to an expired tapioca ball at the bottom of a boba tea. I have to mourn what happened to me, but with the body neutrality movement, I feel less anxious about my body’s changes.

Body neutrality — a less preachy version of body positivity — started around 2015. Its main principle is to not center your appearance; your value is not indicative of your pant size. In an interview by the Cleveland Clinic, psychologist Susan Albers said, “Telling people to love their bodies when they truly don’t can teach people to further suppress their feelings. Suppressing emotions is linked with higher levels of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and sometimes, in the extreme, suicide.” I can’t gaslight myself like a boyfriend trying to convince you those late-night texts are from his mom.

Radical self-adoration is not an option for me as I am dealing with decades of toxic beauty standards and the current state of being chronically ill. I can’t ignore the nasty comments people (97% men and 3% women, with “wifey, mommy, {+ Bible verse}” in their bio) say about my appearance on social media. To which I say kindly, please wash your face with pond water and use fire ants as cleanser (not endorsed by Gen Alpha skin-fluencers). I try to focus on my body thanks to the body neutrality movement and new philosophies for its function instead of its aesthetic, which is freeing.

Unfollowing all heavily photoshopped and contrived social media accounts has also helped. They’re not aspirational or inspirational but rather forms of digital torture. Whether it’s that personified green juice supermodel hawking their latest supplements and finding out they’ve secretly had lipo tip to tail, or seeing that the nepo-baby content creator’s biggest stressor is scheduling a blowout at Drybar — you start to realize it’s not even out of reach but simply not real.

One of the most defiant disruptors of this “flawless model” narrative was in 2006 when Padma Lakshmi appeared on “Top Chef.” All that was discussed in the media was her 7-inch scar. Her choice to show it off unapologetically blew my kid mind. She stood her ground and made the viewer uncomfortable instead of holding that feeling herself.

After that paradigm shift, almost 20 years later, I woke up from a coma with fresh scars all over my body and wasn’t afraid of them, and I wasn’t worried it would take tokens out of my self-worth jar.

Though I am now abysmal at playing hide-and-seek because my oxygen cord drops a pin to my exact longitude and latitude, at least my disability has given me a new outlook. For example, skinny does not equate to healthy. When I was at my thinnest, I was quite literally dying.

Let those comments about your frame, whether negative or positive, slide off your back, and slap some K-Y Jelly on if it’ll help. People’s opinions are not the authority on your wellness; you know how you feel. The obsession with getting an eight-pack becomes a nonessential worker in your brain’s office when you’re this sick. You can corporeally shrink and expand, but you deserve harmony either way. That “goal weight” can crush you. I obtained it when I was on death’s bed and it didn’t mean anything. Now, I choose to be happy that my body kept me alive.