Out With Lanterns Looking For Myself

Out With Lanterns Looking For Myself By Clara Teo Imagine one day, you’re heading to bed as usual, but not being able to wake up the next morning. Evidently, you’re in a state of unconsciousness and dead to what’s going on around you. Your mind is trapped in a hidden world that only you know, living a different life and hopelessly fighting to communicate with the outside world. On October 2011, this is what happened to Faye when she slipped into a Myxedema coma during her sleep that lasted up to six months due to severe hypothyroidism at the age of 14. She prefers to go with the term ‘phase’ over the clinical term that most of us are more familiar with – Coma. She is now 23 years old, pursuing her Bachelor’s Degree in psychology while chasing after her dream as a makeup artist. Nine years have passed since the incident. But Faye was never comfortable enough to open her heart to people about her past without breaking a tear. However, this time around, she sees it as an opportunity to break through and comes to terms with her struggles to recover. As she began, she took a few deep breathes to calm her emotions, glanced down at a slow pace while her fingers entwined onto her iced matcha latte in her hands, and said: “Even though I was in a coma, I could still subconsciously felt pain, I could hear soft voices of the doctors discussing on my case around me.” Just like Natalie from the movie “Isn’t It Romantic”, she got knocked out consciousness during a subway robbery and woke up to finding herself in an alternate universe. Faye was completely unaware that she was in a coma, everything in her ‘dream’ was so realistic she mistakenly believed she was living her everyday life the whole time. “But there were a few moments that made me question the dimension I was living in, things just weren’t making sense,” Faye responded. “It’s kind of like being stuck in a dream state where you have vivid dreams and nightmares.” All the weird vision and dreams that go on in your head is connected to what is happening around you. When she was pushed around the hospital to run CT