"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. Rom Houbens was simply paralysed and had no way to let doctors caring for him what he was suffering. Only the re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege brought to light that Houben was only paralysed all these years. Hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
posted by njbradburn on Nov 23, 2009 - 94 comments

Sandra Bergen sued her dealer after she suffered a heart attack and spent 11 days in a coma because of crystal meth. Her full website. What people think.
posted by gman on Jan 14, 2008 - 223 comments

65-year-old Jan Grzebski, hit by a train in 1988, awoke recently from a 19 year coma to find that communism is no longer the order of the day in his native Poland. Oh, and he also found that during his little nap, his 4 children had given him 11 grandchildren. Now, Jan's wasn't the world's longest coma (apparently 37 years is the record) although that person, er, never woke up. Canadian Anne Shapiro, on the other hand, woke up after 30 years to find, well, a few things changed.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Jun 2, 2007 - 20 comments

Logically, the last thing you would think would help a person trapped in a persistent vegetative state is a nervous system is sleeping pill. Illogically, when you do, many of them wake up.
posted by eriko on Sep 12, 2006 - 56 comments

Vegetative Patient 'Communicates' Sort of.
posted by MarshallPoe on Sep 8, 2006 - 25 comments

A Living Saint.
Audrey causes a frenzy with her blessings.
Her mother clears the corners
and opens the doors, ringing in the constituency
and clicking the number-cruncher as they come.
posted by grabbingsand on Mar 28, 2005 - 13 comments

Blogger analysis of Terri Schiavo's CAT Scan. Healthy brain. Terri Schiavo's brain.
posted by fandango_matt on Mar 23, 2005 - 105 comments

Man awakens from 7-year coma. Peter Sana of Honolulu, Hawaii, finally began responding to human interaction last month after slipping into a Meningitis-related coma in 1995. Peter, we've got some good news... aaaaaaaaaand some bad news...
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Sep 11, 2002 - 55 comments