A woman left for dead awakens from a 2-year coma and names her brother as her attacker

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Originally published at: A woman left for dead awakens from a 2-year coma and names her brother as her attacker | Boing Boing

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That’s gonna make the next Thanksgiving dinner kinda awkward!

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Can someone explain the medical side of this? For her to wake up at 24 months, something must have been going in her system that wasn’t going on at, say, 19 months.
Has there been a process of veeery slow healing and tissue regrowth? Neurons re-connecting in some way?

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Her Mom says it was the prayers…

No, it was medical science.

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Good that she’s making a bit of a recovery but still a sad story. Even though she’s out of the coma they say she’ll never fully recover.

The news story said she was bludgeoned in the head, and my understanding is that most people recovering from a coma (or even just knocked unconscious) have a lot of trouble remembering how they received their injuries in the first place. So I wonder how much of the attack itself she remembers, vs whatever events were leading up to it.

That said, I’m sure that her brother probably has a history of abusive behavior so even if she didn’t remember the exact moment that she was hit in the head she probably had absolutely no doubt about who was responsible.

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Her mother says Wanda “didn’t deserve it.” Wondering who does deserve to be beaten with a hatchet.

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If only she had prayed not to be attacked with an axe, none of this would have happened.

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(Excerpts from NRLC.org)

  • New connections can be made between brain cells where connections have been lost. Parts of the brain take over the function of other parts that have been lost

  • Patients who emerge from coma have often received therapy consistently, to stimulate their brains and keep their bodies moving.

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If not any other time frame, the last several years have replaced that wonderment with certainty.

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Indeed, I remember a few years ago they discovered that a sleeping drug, Ambien, could sometimes wake up coma patients:

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I have a list if you’re interested.

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A room-mate in my uni days had a hiking accident - slipped on ice and tumbled down a rocky hillside and knocked his head. He slowly started to emerge from a coma several weeks later, and was absolutely not the same. Pre-accident, he was a semester away from a physics degree. A few years post accident, after much therapy, he was working on his early high-school algebra. It was not only intellectually difficult for him now, but emotionally too. He could remember this being easy for him, and it was so frustrating now that it wasn’t easy.

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I heard an interview with Emily Gordon, who was once put in a medically induced coma (the best kind, as far as comas go) and whose story was seen in the 2017 dramedy The Big Sick. One thing she noted about emerging from a coma is that the patient has no idea what’s going on except that they feel awful and are in a hospital for some reason, yet their family is very happy, which is very disconcerting. So there’s sorta a “Why are you people so happy?? I’m scared and feel like shit, what the hell is going on??” reaction. Usually happens several times, actually because the patients have trouble remembering things at first. And that’s pretty much the best case scenario for emerging from a coma.

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