Life-Changing Coma Experience
"It wasn't a dream, I wasn't watching it happen, I was doing it and living this whole other life."
Keenan Acton, 26, endured over four weeks in an induced coma after collapsing during a Hyrox fitness competition in October 2024.
More than 18 months later, the father of two is still trying to comprehend the alternate life he says he lived while unconscious, which included his wife giving birth to twins and their family moving to a large lakeside house.
In a remarkable coincidence, his wife Olivia is now pregnant with twins.
"Now I'm just hoping and waiting for this nice big glass house overlooking the water,"he joked.
Collapse and Medical Emergency
Keenan, a gym owner and dedicated fitness enthusiast from Rossett, Wrexham, has limited memory of the day he collapsed and relies on others to fill in the details.
"My wife was watching us, waiting for us to come in, and I dropped and had a seizure,"he explained.
He was rushed to Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, where Olivia was informed that his brain was swollen and multiple organs were failing. He was placed in a medically-induced coma.
Keenan had developed rhabdomyolysis, a critical condition caused by rapid and extensive skeletal muscle breakdown, often triggered by extreme physical exertion.
Coma and Cardiac Arrest
After three weeks, Keenan was brought out of the coma, but on the fourth day awake, he suffered a cardiac arrest.
He was resuscitated and returned to the coma for an additional eight days. During this period, Olivia was repeatedly told that his chances of survival were slim.
"I think what I find the hardest is not what I went through, it's what everyone else had to go through and knowing that my wife had to live through that,"he said.
"On one occasion, she was told I had 24 hours left."
Unreal Experiences While Unconscious
Upon awakening, Keenan was unaware that his experiences during the coma were not real.
"One of the first things I said to Liv when I woke up was, 'how are the babies?'"he recalled.
Olivia was confused and asked if he meant their sons Roman and River, then aged four and three.
"I was getting quite annoyed and asking her to get her social media out because I believed that we announced it to everyone on social media."
Learning that they did not have twins and had not moved house was devastating.
"I instantly felt like a piece of me was missing."
Vivid Coma Memories
When describing his coma experience, Keenan was clear it was not a dream.
"It was real, I wasn't watching it happen, I was doing it, I was living it."
He recalled his wife giving birth to twins while on holiday and returning to a "nice big glass-fronted house overlooking the water."
"And we had the four kids,"he said.
"It made me feel on top of the world."
However, many of his unconscious experiences were dark and distressing, including being forced to do unpleasant things.
One example was being "moved into the middle of nowhere and put in this hut" where he had to continuously use an exercise machine to survive.
"I had a Garmin watch on my wrist and it was counting down from eight days.
When I woke up, I said to my friend that this had happened and he said to me: 'Mate, your second coma was eight days long.'"
Understanding the Coma State
A medically-induced coma involves sedatives to place a patient into a reversible deep unresponsiveness state to protect the brain from damage.
Several intensive care patients have reported vivid dreams during coma, with studies in Greece and Australia exploring this phenomenon.
Former Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, who was in a coma after a 2006 car crash, described a vivid dream of visiting a tree at his favorite Lake District spot while unconscious.
Keenan sought to understand his coma memories further, and the BBC arranged a meeting with consultant clinical psychologist Pieter du Toit, clinical director of the charity Brainkind.
"When you were in your induced coma your brain wasn't shut down,"Pieter explained to Keenan.
"It wasn't the switch was flicked off, but there was a lot going on."
Keenan asked why he experienced having twins and moving house specifically.
"Our dreams and our experiences in coma, or the ones we remember, are the things that are important to us,"Pieter said.
"Our minds are always creating a narrative, a story, a whole."
Regarding Keenan's experience of being in the hut, Pieter noted it demonstrated how the brain is a "metaphor and meaning-generating machine."
He added that Keenan's brain likely transformed his hospital experience into a scene reflecting themes of isolation, survival struggle, and the prospect of death.
Recovery and New Beginnings
In December 2024, while living in Chester, Keenan was discharged from hospital using a walking frame and returned to the gym within weeks.
Eight months after leaving the hospital, Keenan and Olivia married, surrounded by friends and family.
He described the highlight as discovering Olivia was pregnant, with a due date in June, and an unexpected surprise.
"We went for the scan and the lady turned around and she said, 'oh, there's two of them in there',"he said.
"Of course, it ties into what I've seen in the coma. What was going on in my head at that moment in time was like, 'this is magical'."
Keenan noted there was no family history of twins, and the twins were conceived naturally without IVF or fertility treatments.
"I think it's too much of a coincidence for me to not believe that [my coma] was a look into the future and what was to come,"he said.
"I think you've got to experience it to believe it."
Pieter commented that science would likely attribute this to coincidence but acknowledged that science does not explain everything.
"What I would say about our scientific understanding is that there are limitations,"he said.
"It's all about what makes sense to the person, what's helpful to us, rather than being right about something."
Life Perspective After Collapse
Keenan said his collapse has given him a new outlook on life.
He has sold part of his gym and now prioritizes spending time with his family.
"Life for me personally, and for the family, is better than it was before,"he said.
"I'm not rushing around dead stressful, I see my kids eat breakfast, daddy's at home to read a book for bedtime and at home for bath time.
I'm not going to call what happened a blessing in disguise because it wasn't a blessing for anyone and it put everyone through hell.
Physically, I can't do what I used to be able to do but I've realised that some things are more important in life."
