For 23 years, doctors believed a Belgian man to be comatose, but he was conscious the entire time.
A recently released scientific paper reported on Rom Houben, who was paralyzed in a car accident in 1983 and determined to be in a coma or persistent vegetative state, according to the Daily Mail newspaper. A re-evaluation three years ago by neurological expert Steven Laureys found Houben was aware of what was happening around him but had no control of his body.
“Medical advances caught up with him,” Laureys said, the British newspaper reported.
According to the newspaper, doctors in Belgium used the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess Houben’s eye, verbal and motor responses following the accident, but each time, he was graded incorrectly.
Houben, 46, said of his awareness and yet his inability to communicate, “I screamed but there was nothing to hear.
“All that time, I just literally dreamed of a better life,” Houben said. “Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.”
Although Houben may never leave the hospital, he is able to tap out messages on a computer and to read books while lying down, thanks to a special device over his bed.
“I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me — it was my second birth,” he said, according to the Daily Mail. “I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.”
Laureys, who led the use of high-tech imaging at the University of Liege in Belgium to determine that Houben’s brain was still functioning, said there may be similar situations around the world. A university study of 44 patients diagnosed by normal procedures as being in a vegetative state showed 18 were at least partly conscious and four ultimately came out of their “coma,” according to Agence France-Presse. (BP)
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