by Rusty Scribes
We’ve all experienced it. You visit a friend’s house you haven’t seen in a while. The conversation is good. Drinks and snacks are shared but then comes that moment of dread. Out come the photo albums or the IPAD and you’re stuck there for an hour or more pretending to enjoy the snapshots of their kids or grandkids in various activities. You feign interest but that just makes it worse. You try to change the subject but it just goes on and on and on. They won’t stop. Finally, you make up a reason why you need to leave. That usually works but it sure didn’t for a lifelong bachelor out of Concord named Thomas Wiley.
According to a Concord EMT, they were called by a family member to a residence on 2nd Street who dialed 911 after their guest had passed out while looking at family photos on an IPAD.
“He appeared to be enjoy looking at the photos of our grandkids”, the homeowner explained. “He nodded and smiled but suddenly just passed out after about 45 minutes. When the EMTs got here, they thought he had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke.”
The EMT told the Dragonfly Report that once the doctors in the ICU ran their tests, they discovered he was experiencing what’s known as hypo-stimulation induced coma.
“The brain, starved of any stimulating input can enter a state of deep irreversible hibernation,” he explained. “The neural pathways begin to atrophy from disuse and the person simply fades away and dies as what happened to Mr. Wiley,” he continued.
We asked Dr. Bashard, a neurologist at the nearby John Muir Medical Center, how common hypo-stimulation induced coma is:
“It’s much more prevalent than you might think. With the advent of digital photography, families literally have thousands of images to bore their guests with. My colleagues and I have begun to call this phenomenon the grandparental paradox. The joy a grandparent feels from the photos, directly correlates to the amount of boredom a visitor may feel. Unfortunately, in some cases this can lead to hypo-stimulation induced coma and in the worst-case scenario, death.”
Dr. Bashard advises people to limit their photo sharing with guests to perhaps three to five photos and if the guest responds to photos with “adorable” more than once, it’s time to put an end to it.
Let us not forget Thomas Wiley, a lifelong bachelor who by all accounts was living a rich and full life, until they opened that IPAD.