Basic Trope: A character in a story recovers from a long coma as though there is no difference between a coma and sleep
- Straight: Bob comes out of a six-month coma as though he just woke up, he is immediately able to speak and sit up and no physical therapy is required.
- Exaggerated: Bob wakes up from his coma at the peak of physical fitness, able to run a marathon and deadlift a hundred pounds.
- Downplayed: Bob is shown attending physical therapy...once. In the next episode, he's fine as ever.
- Justified: Bob has a Healing Factor that works while he's unconscious and specifically restores his muscles to peak condition.
- Inverted: Bob's recovery process from his coma takes decades or even centuries to complete, yet he's still alive throughout the entire thing.
- Subverted:
- Against all odds, Bob gets up from the hospital bed proclaiming he's perfectly fine...and promptly falls on his face as his leg muscles have atrophied.
- Bob's family gets a call that he's "waking up" from his coma, and they rush to the hospital in excitement. Turns out he's only barely cognizant.
- Double Subverted:
- Or not. His leg muscles are fine; he just tripped on the carpet.
- But the next day, he's up and active.
- Parodied: Bob always knew that the Instant Coma Recovery class he took in college would come in handy someday!
- Implied: It's mentioned that Bob came out of a coma a few days ago, and we, the audience, see him walking around without issue.
- Zig Zagged: Bob wakes up perfectly fine, except that he can't use his left arm. But his legs are super-strong now, but he also has some amnesia and needs to re-learn how to blink.
- Averted: Bob's coma recovery is realistically-portrayed, with it being a slow process involving a lot of adjustment.
- Enforced: The editors don't want to waste time portraying Bob's recovery.
- Lampshaded: "Hey, weren't you just in a coma yesterday?"
- Invoked: "We spent the entire time Bob was in a coma stimulating his muscles with electric shocks, so he's suffered little-to-no atrophy and likely won't require physical therapy."
- Exploited: Bob awakens from his coma in great shape, ready to fight the Big Bad. He keeps this quiet to maintain the element of surprise because even if the Big Bad learns that he's awake, he'll still never consider Bob a threat because the Big Bad knows that Bob should require months of recovery before he's ready for a fight.
- Defied: The Big Bad knows that Bob will wake up from his coma soon, and that this trope is very much in effect, so they inject Bob with a poison that will cause his muscles to atrophy, making him require extended physical therapy to return to peak condition.
- Deconstructed: Bob's miraculous recovery causes him to become the subject of scientific study against his will, and he is experimented on to see how it was that he was able to avoid muscle atrophy while comatose.
- Reconstructed: Bob volunteers for study and endures sometimes painful experiments, but considers it worth it in the end because it led to a cure for muscle atrophy that will spare others the need for extended physical therapy upon coming out of a coma.
- Discussed: "Unlike what Hollywood has shown you, recovering from a coma is a months-long process of physical therapy. Even sitting up straight will require time."
- Conversed: "Why is it that, in movies or whatever, characters always just get up from their coma like they just woke up from a power nap and can go right on to save the world without even a second of physical therapy?"
Back to Improbably Quick Coma Recovery
