“Manel, the man who spent 35 years in a coma after a fall: ‘I fell asleep at 22 and woke up at 58,” reads the headline of El Mundo in a story last Tuesday. Not only they have published it, but practically all the generalist media in Spain. For some, Manel Monteagudo is someone who “claims” to have spent those 35 years in a coma, while others take the story for granted.
Elaine Esposito, from Illinois, holds the Guinness World Record as the longest-serving person in a coma, 37 years, after which she died. Munira Abdulla, from the United Arab Emirates, would have awakened after 27 years of coma in 2019 starring in an unprecedented feat. Manel, born in the town of Noia, La Coruña, would then be the (until today) unknown protagonist of one of the greatest rarities in the history of medicine.
Manel, the man who spent 35 years in a coma after a fall: “I fell asleep at 22 and woke up at 58” https://t.co/alVRsJscWa pic.twitter.com/cCKUwubQSg
– THE WORLD (@elmundoes) November 10, 2021
Wake up and start writing books
There is more data that has led to the ubiquitous suspicion of netizens. Manel would not have awakened now, but in 2014, and it would take six years of rehabilitation in which, as a poet, he has written three books, between 2019 and 2021 and some “Poetic Reflections” from 2015, barely a year after his awakening. His appearances in the press, however, began in the last two years, where he anticipates the imminent publication of a memoir. No trace in the mainstream media of this unusual phenomenon in Galicia between 2014 and 2019.
Manel, who fell into his coma in 1979, just turned 22 in a work-related accident as a naval electrician in Iraq, technically married after the mishap. Monteagudo told EFE that, at a time when living together without a marriage contract was “more complicated”, getting married was the way that Conchi found to be able to take care of him at home, for which “he brought a priest.” When he woke up in 2014, when he had been in a coma for 35 years, he found that he had two daughters, one in their 20s and the other in their 30s. “It’s easier to tell than to live it,” he acknowledges.
To top it off, many believe they have found credible proof of their bad faith in an answer. already deleted in the article in El Mundo unsigned, although the same comment remains intact in other media that put the origin of the interview in “agencies”. Among the reasons why Monteagudo thought the Spain in which he had awakened three decades later seemed a fiction would be that our country had won the 2010 World Cup. He then asked if the others were lame since “We always stayed in rooms!” However, in the years of his youth in which he was conscious, either there was no system of quarters and eighths (it was a league system) or Spain was eliminated in the first phase. The myth of always losing in the quarterfinals comes from subsequent World Cups and Euro Cups.
In all fairness, memories are very treacherous, and this misunderstanding may not be the result of a plot, but simply a false memory implemented in some way.
On the coma that becomes a “practically vegetable” state
🗓🛌 Manel Monteagudo is 35 years old in a coma, from 79 to 2014. Hoxe is in #AReview To tell how you found your current life, and you can choose all of your story here 👉 https://t.co/Wgx73MYdmq pic.twitter.com/iTfo4nMDaF
– TVG (@TVGalicia) November 10, 2021
We have contacted the City Council of Noia, a municipality of 14,000 inhabitants. None of the three people we have spoken with knew the story of Manel Monteagudo. Although rare, the ignorance is plausible, since this is only his hometown and the poet affirms in interviews that his wife moved him to live in Vigo after the accident. In Noia they affirm that the news has caught them new, that they are being bombarded with questions from journalists and that they are corroborating the surprising biography.
Monteagudo (who, from promotional interviews he gave for one of his previous publications, may actually be called José Manuel Blanco Castro) affirms when asked that he was “in a coma”, although at other times he refers to his state as ” asleep”. In the author’s file for July 2021 on the website of the Association of Writers and Writers in Lingua Galega, he states that he was “Practically vegetable” for 35 years, until “in 2014 he was discharged.” Coma is “a state of complete unconsciousness without opening the eyes”, while a vegetative state is a state “of complete unconsciousness with some opening of the eyes and periods of wakefulness and sleep.”
In another interview with La Voz de Galicia in December 2019, he told more about his condition: on February 28, 1978 “he was admitted to an Iraqi hospital in a coma, in which he remained for 64 days. Partially recovered, but with sequelae ”, he returned to Spain and was admitted to the Sanatorio Modelo in A Coruña for 16 months. “Subsequently, remained bedridden at home for another 14 months”. He says that his stage in Spain was lived “practically vegetable”, and repeats the same story that circulates these days, that “he does not remember having married, or having two daughters, and it is to them that he attributes the merit of having survived.”
Onda Cero claims to have been able to speak with a neighbor from the town of Noia, who says the following: “I am 33 years old. Since I can remember [Manel] He has led a normal life in his house by my side. We have had a cordial relationship, of neighbors, for 30-odd years. Now this story has come out and it has impacted us all. It is a small neighborhood and we all live very close. History does not have much history. “The radio has also spoken with Monteagudo. When asked about the birth of his daughters, he said:” out of respect for my wife, I cannot talk about that issue. “When asked if someone else can corroborate his story, his response has been: “frankly, no one but me can confirm.”