I think brain dead would require a ventilator since there would be no mental ability for basic functions to keep alive. It would be better to say seriously brain damaged, extremely diminished capacity or even the “ lights are on, nobody’s home” phrase you used later on. I hate to be pedantic but we thought he might be really brain dead the last 2-3 months when no one saw him.

You could also look into becoming an electrician. That touches on more high tech stuff than plumbing. And you get to flex your math skills as a master electrician. I think (hope) that there is a fairly rigorous certification for getting into electrical apprenticeship programs in every region. In the city where I grew up, they had to sit for exams in order to get to specific levels.

Edit to add: while both jobs have too much crawling through spiderwebs in crawlspaces for my tastes, electricians encounter orders of magnitude less poop than plumbers.

I agree that the trades can be hard on the body and there is a decent risk that your career can be cut short due to injury. However, the characterization of tradesmen as all ignorant MAGA types is unfair. I imagine this varies a lot by region and market but I live in a fairly liberal-leftist area and happen to know a bunch of folks in the trades and they are not like that.

FWIW I am in a fairly affluent city and my friends will sometimes complain about working with subcontractors who come in from the exurbs who will throw fits about not being able to easily park their giant trucks wherever they want or make sideways comments about crime in the city. The response to that is usually something like “oh, you don’t have all these annoying parking rules in your rural town? Maybe you should go work on building multimillion dollar projects over there then? Oh, what’s that? There are no multimillion dollar projects in the middle of fucking nowhere? Hmmm”

There are also trades and regions where unions are still highly regarded.