2 months before walking independently
Ben Askren did not begin walking on his own until approximately 2 months after waking from his transplant, starting with just a few steps at a time.
Snapshot · Modern Wisdom
Raw Truths From The Brink Of Death - Ben Askren - #1116
Explore episode
Jun 27, 2026
Where this was said
The Long Road Back to Health
At 15:20 · chapter starts 12:28
What Ben experienced in the first two weeks after waking was not really consciousness — it was a pharmaceutical fog of ICU delirium, caused by heavy sedation, continuous medication, and the radical sleep deprivation of a hospital environment. He was so convinced a hospital existed half a mile from his house on a lake that he repeatedly threatened nurses he would walk home. He could not walk. Some of his memories from that period are real — cross-referenced with friends who visited — and some were entirely invented by a mind desperately trying to construct a coherent reality from fragmentary sensory input. Throughout all of this, his wife visited almost every day, his mother and father alternated shifts at the hospital, and a network of friends rotated through to help with his children, who were kept at home on summer break and told only that their father was sick in hospital — never the full severity of how close he came to not coming back.
60 lbs of muscle lost
Ben Askren lost approximately 60 pounds — mostly muscle — while unconscious in hospital, dropping from around 195 lbs to 138 lbs.
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