cliché but classic trope: when the person who almost died wakes up in a hospital bed, looks around and sees the object of their affection sleeping uncomfortably in the chair next to them because they haven’t moved in days.
You can pry that trope from my cold dead hands.
cliché but classic sub trope of this: the person who almost died tells the object of their affection “you look like shit” despite the fact that they are the one in the hospital bed and almost died.
speaking of someone who has been the unconscious person waking up after 10 days, remember that that scene has probably already played out 10 times previously as the drugs fuck with your memory BIG TIME.
Alexei Navalny has a great real life version of this in his memoir. He was in a coma in a hospital in Germany after being poisoned with a neurotoxin by Putin. When he started coming out of it he was very scrambled and not able to remember much of anything. His wife was there, but he didn’t know who she was. He talks about how he would just lie there waiting for “the woman” to arrive. How she knew how to fluff his pillow just right. How everything was always so much better when she was there and so much worse when she was gone. He was so confused and fuzzy, and his entire blurry existence centered on her and her visits.
