Rick Grimes Waking Up in a Hospital

About

Rick Grimes Waking Up in a Hospital refers to a scene from the first episode of the horror drama series The Walking Dead in which the character Rick Grimes (played by actor Andrew Lincoln) wakes up in a hospital bed and struggles to crawl out of it. Starting in October 2023, the scene has been used as a video and GIF caption meme format, often used in memes about struggling to wake up.

Origin

On October 31st, 2010, episode one titled "Days Gone Bye" of the American post-apocalyptic horror series The Walking Dead (TWD) premiered on AMC.^[1] In one scene of the episode, the protagonist Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up at a hospital after spending several weeks in a coma following a gunshot injury prior to the zombie apocalypse. Not being able to summon a nurse, Grimes crawls out of his bed, struggling to stand (scene shown below).

On October 2nd, 2023, TikTok^[2] user @mikekerloslive posted the earliest found video caption meme based on the clip. The meme, captioned, "Most average waking up at 7 AM on a Monday for school experience:" and set to a mash-up of "QKThr" by Aphex Twin and the default iPhone alarm sound, received over 480,000 likes in one year (shown below).

Spread

On November 5th, 2023, X^[3] user @ShadowxTwilight reposted a TikTok based on the meme captioned, "POV: Me trying to wake up for school at 7:10 am with 10 hours sleep" (original post could not be discovered). The post (shown below) gained over 500 reposts and 3,800 likes and was frequently reposted by meme accounts in the following year.

For example, on November 6th, the X^[4] account no context memes (@weirddalle) reposted the video, with the post garnering over 29,000 reposts and 270,000 likes in one year.

Good afternoon twitter pic.twitter.com/1mGUSY88lF

— Shadow Cringelord (@ShadowxTwilight) November 5, 2023

In 2023 and 2024, the caption format saw further spread on TikTok and X. Notably, on March 18th, 2024, the X^[5] account @badwalkingdead posted a caption meme based on the format that garnered over 3 million views, 15,000 reposts and 93,000 likes in seven months (shown below).

new monday same struggle pic.twitter.com/cnDUOo1Kl9

— BadWalkingDeadMemes (@badwalkingdead) March 18, 2024

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References