Buried Alive

By Brian Robinson.

There are lots of reasons why people have been buried alive, but when you boil the reasons down, you end up with by accident or design. There are bad people in this world. There’s no getting away from that. And bad people are capable of doing bad thing.

Then there are the medics. They’re not bad, but they do make mistakes. Before medicine grew up, doctors used to place a red-hot poker up the corpse’s rectum to look for a reaction. If they didn’t get one, they pronounced the patient dead. If they did get one, I’m not sure what the procedure was? Run for the hills probably?

However, none of that applies to me. But I’m not going to lie, when I awoke to find myself in a beautifully lined coffin, my first reaction was to panic, even though I’m not the panicking type.

I found it’s better if you keep your eyes closed. That way you can trick you brain into thinking that the world still might be light. Make sure you never open them again.

The second thing that I found helped, is to accept that you are going to die. Let’s face it, you’re never going to scratch your way six foot to the surface so there’s no point in trying. And likewise, we’re all going to die and be buried at some point, so being buried alive is just a matter of things getting slightly out of the natural order.

My thoughts then turned to how people die, and to be honest, the way some people meet their end put the willies right up me. I didn’t fancy any of that.

I know enough about physics to realise that in the coffin I would gradually run out of oxygen and it would fill up with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a natural tranquilliser, indeed, vets use a compressed version of it to sedate elephants. So I’m thinking now: this isn’t going to be so terrible after all. I’ll just slip into a coma and die peacefully.

I should have mentioned this earlier, there is a drug that can mimic death. It’s called Donnatal and contains the medications Hyoscyamine, Atropine, Scopolamine and Phenobarbitol. I shan’t be taking that shit again in a hurry.