That's true. Given his characterization, I'm more inclined to believe at most a couple of days passed by before he left to go find Lori and Carl. His entire focus was finding them, and it would seem OOC to then have him sitting around at Morgan's once he's mobile (mobile, not healed - he was mobile that very first night at Morgan's). It probably would have been smart to stay put and let his wounds heal, but he struck me as the type to push himself beyond what was 'smart' and do what he felt had to be done. In this case getting to Lori and Carl. But you're right, they never say how long he was at Morgan's so I suppose it's possible he did hang around there for a couple weeks or months even to finish healing before going to try and find his family. I don't think so, though. I think when he says he would have been dead but for them that he means he'd wouldn't have made it past that first walker in the street that Morgan shot.

 

Something pretty basic that i think is being over-looked here is Ricks wound... Morgan changed his bandages (or so he says lol) if Rick was in the hospital for any time longer than a month the stitches would have the wound healed... to the point where bandages weren't necessary... So if his wound was still sore (as we are lead to believe by Rick grimacing when he hits the walker with a bat) and requires fresh bandages i think he couldn't have been in that long.... I'm not a nurse but i have had a lot of stitches and it's my experience that if they are dissolvable stitches they last 2 ish weeks if not you have to pull them out and if you leave them and leave them you heal around them...

Ryan

 

Bringing back an old thread to life, but I decided to rewatch pilot today and the question bothered me.
Okay, so we know Rick was in a coma for atleast 60 days (2 months).

My guess is that the hospital wasn't overrun in the first days of the apocalypse, and when cases were reported, the army took over it. Someone had to give care to comatose patients to keep them alive, so that's how Rick survived. In the last days Shane was able to pay him a visit and lock the door with the hospital bed as he probably knew the army would leave the hospital right after, probably became too hard to defend it.

Rick woke up shortly after. Sounds plausible?

 

I think 2-3 weeks tops. If you look at the decomposed zombies in the first episode, they probably have about 2-3weeks of decay.

 

on IMDB.com it says Rick was in a coma for several months then wakes up to the new world

 

How could he possibly have survived, in a coma, with no one to care for him but more importantly FEED him and give him fluids, for several months? Under those circumstances he wouldn't have lasted a week. IMDB are clearly idiots.

 

Yeah, I have always assumed that he was in a coma for a week or TWO tops... There is no way he could survive being in a coma with no food or water for MONTHS.

 

Six weeks.

 

"Assuming you're in reasonable shape and in ideal conditions -- that is, not in the heat or cold and not exerting, a human can probably live for about 3 to 5 days without any water. Healthier humans can live another day or so longer."


He was not healthy, he just got shot.

 

You're absolutely correct. However, Darabont and Kirkman were apparently not aware of this, or apparently didn't care about it. All signs actually do point to him being in the coma for several weeks after shit went down. We don't know exactly how long he was in the coma before the day that Shane blocked his door with the cot, but probably not more than a week or two, since the shit hit the fan pretty fast. When they arrive at the CDC, its been 64 days since the global outbreak, and at that point Rick has only been awake for about 4 or 5 days. Since it was still very early on in the outbreak when Shane visited Rick [doctors and nurses were still working until that day], this would imply probably at least 6 weeks of coma after that day. This is backed up by the most recent Webisode, where Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors tells the female survivor that the hospital got abandoned 'months ago'. Yet the sign on the doors [Don't Dead, Open Inside] weren't written yet, so Rick was still in his coma then. The only way to possibly explain Rick's survival would be if Audrey had been keeping him alive. Yet, her M.O. was to mercy kill people, not prolong their life, so even that doesn't make sense. But its the best we've got. Because other than that, there is no real world explanation for how Rick could have lived that long without water. This is just a continuity error that the show seemed to willingly make in order for the story to work.

 

I had this same question tonight when I was rewatching episode one. One thing I will add is that when Rick leaves his room and sees all the carnage the fluorescent lights in the hallway are flickering. Assuming that the hospital had some sort of emergency battery back up, or even a generator, it probably wouldn't have lasted more than a couple of days.

so...

I'm thinking he was in the coma for about two months. The army set up an operational base at the hospital maybe a month or so after rick was shot, then everything went to hell. They most likely ordered an evacuation for the town once they realized they were losing the hospital. Shane tried to save him as they were fleeing, realized he couldn't do it, bolted, and rick woke up two or three days later. That still doesn't explain how Lori and Shane's relationship progressed as fast as it did, unless of course it started much earlier.

This might could be way off. Thoughts?

 

Well, even though it doesn't make much sense, I think the time lapse between Shane leaving and Rick waking up was much greater than that. Based on a few pieces of evidence, I think it was as long as 6 weeks. That makes no sense, based on human physiology and dehydration lol, but it appears thats how it went down. Part of this is based on the conditions of the roads and Atlanta, and how much they differed between the time Shane and Lori saw them, and when Rick arrived. Another piece of evidence is the most recent webisode, which would indicate that Rick was in his coma for several weeks after Shane left before the Don't Open/Dead Inside warning was painted on the cafeteria doors. There's no way to pinpoint the timing with a high degree of accuracy, but all the clues point to Rick being alone in coma for weeks, not days.

Also, you are very kind to call what happened at the hospital an 'evacuation'. Perhaps if they were evacuating life. It was an extermination.

 

A few weeks? A month? Two months at most.

Although people have been known [in the real world] to be in a coma-state for years and come out okay, Rick definitely wasn't in one for too long and with the breakout there wouldn't be anyone to keep Rick alive for that long.

 

This would be like trying to solve an algebra equation. 64 days since the virus went global. I don't think they mentioned at anytime that the outbreak originally happened in the US. Perhaps since Rick came from a small town, it may have been one of the last places hit. It took quite a bit of time for Rick to make it to Atlanta. He took a patrol car (I don't think they would have left a car at the station being out of gas. If it was still sitting there, unused, the tank would be full) He wakes up, inspects the hospital and goes home. I don't think it was the gunshot wound/coma recovery that Morgan was helping him recover from. Morgans son knocked him the f**k out!! He may have taken several days to wake up from that, or several hours. He stays with Morgan for some time, then goes off to the police station to pack his bag and returns to Morgans. Takes off in the patrol car and drives until he runs it out of gas. This would support the theory of his town being one of the last ones hit, as he had to drive past miles, and miles of farmland to get NEAR Atlanta. I estimate the car running for at least about 8 hrs with a full tank. Then he walks for some time, then finds the horse and rides it for some time, meaning he was at least about 400 or so miles away from Atlanta. It would have taken several weeks for the walkers to reach Ricks town at their pace, with such a great distance.

I'm using my own car as an example. My mother lives 384 miles from me. It takes just over a tank of gas to go and get her, taking about 7 hrs. But my car is a Mercury Sable (LS?). The big one, that only gets 17-19 mpg. A police patrol car would get MANY more mpg. For him to run the car out, walk, and ride a horse, 400 miles from Atlanta would be a very low estimate of how far away he actually was.

This means that the outbreak probably hit Atlanta long before it got to Ricks town. The original group did not travel together from Ricks home town. If Glenn was originally from Atlanta then he would have been dealing with this problem longer than Shane and Lori explaining his previous trips for supplies. Since he was not just gathering for himself, but a whole group, he would have had to make trips every couple of days at the least. This would explain the "Glen's trips" portion previously stated on this thread.

When people go through a traumatic experience, they look for comfort. When Rick first got shot, Lori may have immediately fell into Shane's arms for comfort ONLY, still being in love with Rick and having a "promise you won't tell" moment, that turned into more after hearing of Ricks death. That would explain the length of the relationship, another reason Shane would have lied and said that Rick was dead (wanting Lori for himself right away) aside from lying to get her to leave, and why she was so angry when she found Rick was alive.

There was a question of why the Walkers didn't get Rick, just because he had a bed up against his door. Simple. The walkers had been partially contained (Don't open, Dead inside). When Shane shoved the bed against the door, the soldiers were doing a sweep and kill of the entire hosp. This means that there weren't any walkers left TO get to Rick, and the living were already shot in the head, so no returning to move the bed away from the door.

I say Rick was in a coma for about 5 weeks. Woke from the coma completely dehydrated several days after the hospital fell. Stayed with Morgan for a week or so to recover and re-hydrate. Traveled to Atlanta (2 days? they don't show him sleep, but with the amount of time it took to get there, he had to) found by Glenn, stayed with the group on the hill for ?? before heading to the CDC. Factor in that travel time it took to get to the CDC.

The show isn't going to give us the outright time frame of the coma. What we need is for the evidence of the show to give us the EQUATION and then we could find the answer. This may have to be done by watching the episodes in a reverse order. Starting from the moment that Jenner gave the time frame of 64 days and work our way backward through all of the traveling time. Whatever number of days it takes to get back to Rick waking from the coma being accounted for, subtract that from 64, it will be the answer to how long he was in his coma. Seeing as I'm too lazy to do this, I'll leave it up to the rest of you.

Oh, and the webisodes were made AFTER the show, so any contradictions forthcoming from them, is the fault of the person in charge of the webisodes, and not the show itself.

 

Georgia is only about 230 miles wide, and 290 miles from the North to South border. So if Rick was 400 miles from Atlanta, then he would have been well outside of the state of Georgia. But his town was 'King County' Georgia. I don't know if we can assume that the police car tank was full, as it could have been anything between full and the level that the police department tells their employees not to let the tank go under. So maybe anything between a quarter or half full, and full. And remember, travelling in a ZA takes longer than in our world, because random cars block the road in places. And it may have taken weeks for the walkers to walk to Rick's city from Atlanta, but the virus that exists in the survivors would have travelled much faster than that, so anyone who died of natural causes in Rick's town would have turned into walkers, long before Atlanta walkers got there. I think this pandemic broke out everywhere just about simultaneously. That's the only way it could have ended up so devastating.

But we reached the same conclusion anyway. . He was in the coma for weeks.

 

I had no idea Georgia was so small. O.O It looks bigger than MI. on the map. I Should have done some research first, aye?
The police here have gas pumps at the station so they can always fill the tank for the next shift who uses the vehicle, that and it saves on the prices at a normal pump, but yeah, he was from a small town and they prolly didn't have that. I didn't even think about the random cars, which now has me thinking of something else...

If Rick was heading to Atlanta to the "safe zone", where were the cars heading into Atlanta? There were only cars heading out. I remember the scene where Shane, Lori and Carl are trapped in traffic trying to get there, when they saw an explosion? Bombs being dropped on the city? The road was flooded with vehicles that weren't moving. How did they get out of that traffic jam? You can't tell me that miles of people in vehicles would just hit reverse and drive back out. People are ignorant. The ones who were miles behind, and did not know that Atlanta was lost would still have been trying to push forward,(as Morgan had stated that the radio transmissions saying that Atlanta was safe had stopped) leaving the vehicles closer to Atlanta blocked. We have seen too many instances in real life of people being crushed to death because those behind them continued pushing forward with no place to go. If you took those panic'd people and put them in cars it would be worse, feeling less vulnerable and more invincible, they would drive the cars into each other trying to push through, especially those who were miles behind, who are trying to flee from what's behind them.

Where were those vehicles when Rick rode his horse down the deserted road, and saw all the burned cars that had been trying to exit the city? If all the cars were burned out, why was there no damage to the city when Rick rode in?

Sheesh!! There ya go, makin' me all think and shtuff...I hate it when that happens.

 

Very true, I remember we discussed this last year in some thread somewhere, there would have been more cars on the road going into the city. I think Darabont just went more for the iconic image of a man travelling into a big city on a road where all the cars had been trying to leave. Even though it doesn't really make sense, I still like the scene. I wouldn't want it changed. .

 

I just thought of something else...A lot of times when people are severely injured, doctors put them in a "Medically Induced Coma", perhaps this is what happened with Rick, and when the medication wore off (empty IV bag) he could have woken up. He was being taken care of, and I'm sure that when the outbreak started in the hospital, the chaos and shooting would have been over in a matter of hours, or less if soldiers were on every floor when the order for a complete extermination of the hospitals living, and dead was given. Perhaps the body bags were from people who were bitten/dying being exterminated one by one. The bodies in bags outside the hospital were well organized, giving the impression that the hospital/soldiers had been doing a good job of keeping people safe until they were eventually over-run. Rick may have woken up within hours of Shane's blocking the door. If this is what happened to Rick, it only takes about 6 hrs to wake from a Medically Induced coma after the medication has stopped.

This seems more of a possibility than him just "waking up" on his own, and would explain why he wasn't dying from dehydration. Any thoughts?

 

I assume it's because people drove into Atlanta, saw it had gone to shit, and decided to hightail out of there. IIRC the main group formed after Shane/Lori witnessed those events. It still doesn't make sense though. All those people in the woods wouldn't have gone back to the highway and started yelling out that Atlanta was a dead end? Than again people were so panicky and delusional they wouldn't care (or they'd just think someone who was saying that was some twisted ****). I still think you're right though, Darabont probably used that to portray some image.

Oh lawd I really do miss season 1 tho.