I hesitated to write about this because it involves a subordinate at my company, but it was so utterly baffling that I decided to share it here.
I work at a factory. The other day, a major accident occurred there, and one of my subordinates was caught in it. I can't go into the details, but it was a horrific accident that severed his right arm from the shoulder down. His right leg was still attached, but the doctors said recovery was impossible, leaving no choice but to amputate that as well. He was unconscious when he was rushed to the hospital by ambulance, and his condition was critical. Thanks to the medical staff, he narrowly escaped death, but he remained in a coma.
Since I am his supervisor, I accompanied him that day and ended up spending the night at the hospital. Because visitors were still barred, I was waiting outside his room, busy dealing with calls to upper management. Exhausted from the ordeal, I eventually fell asleep on a bench outside the room.
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a voice. I remember the clock pointed to three. The voice seemed to be coming from the room where my unconscious subordinate was, so I peeked through the glass in the door. To my astonishment, he was sitting up on the bed.
My first impulse was to go right into the room and speak to him, but something felt deeply wrong. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he was repeatedly talking to the empty space in front of him. I thought he might be on a cell phone, but he didn't have one, nor could he have possibly had one. The words were hard to make out, so I gently opened the door a crack to listen. That was when the terrifying reality of the situation became clear.
"Yes… yes, that's right."
"So I just need to tear it from here onwards… yes."
"Yes, it's grown back quite a bit. Though the top of the arm is still…"
"The leg will grow back in two months too? Thank you very much."
He kept talking like this without moving a single muscle, looking up toward the upper part of the room the entire time.
Normally, this would be the moment to rejoice that he had regained consciousness, but the sheer abnormality of the situation left me utterly paralyzed, unable to move a single inch.
And then the next moment, he said, "Yes… well, please wait a moment. There's someone watching us right now."
My blood ran cold. Was he talking about me? There was no way he would ever refer to me as "someone" in normal circumstances. What's more, even as he spoke those words, he didn't move at all.
Trembling, I called out his name.
At that, he abruptly stopped talking. After a heavy silence fell, he suddenly shouted, "Hey!", facing the exact same way without turning.
I fled from the spot. I was so terrified I felt like I was losing my mind, but I somehow made it to the night-shift nurse's station and told her everything that had happened. Naturally, she didn't believe me, but she said that if he had regained consciousness, we should go check his room anyway.
When we returned to the hospital room, he was lying flat in bed, fast asleep. After the nurse finished doing her routine checks, she looked at me and said, "He hasn't regained consciousness." Even when I insisted, "That's impossible, he was just sitting up and talking a moment ago," she wouldn't believe me at all.
Presently, he has regained consciousness and has been discharged from the hospital. However, he claims he remembers nothing of what he said that night.