I just heard him reading an article (missed the first few seconds) about how the Buffalo fireman who just snapped out of his silence of 10 years was in a "persistent vegetative state" JUST LIKE Terry Schiavo. He claimed that the Buffalo Battalion chief e-mail him too.
So I get back to the office and looked it up. Here is what I found.
http://www.nbc17.com/news/4448223/detail.htmlThere have been a few other widely publicized examples of brain-damaged patients showing sudden improvement after a number of years. In 2003, an Arkansas man, severely disabled and largely silent for 19 years after a car accident, stunned his mother by saying "Mom" and then asking for a Pepsi. His brain function remained limited, his family said months later.
And Tennessee police officer Gary Dockery, left paralyzed and mute after a 1988 shooting, began speaking to his family one day in 1996, telling jokes and recounting annual winter camping trips. But after 18 hours, he never repeated the unbridled conversation of that day, though he remained more alert than he had been. He died the following year of a blood clot on his lung.
None of these people were in a "persistent vegetative state" like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose feeding-tube case raised anguished end-of-life ethical discussions.Basically the same article here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4511511.stmForbes
http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2005/05/05/hscout525539.htmlOne thing that does seem clear is that Herbert's case is entirely different from that of Terri Schiavo and that Shiavo was highly unlikely to have experienced this kind of awakening, had she lived, experts said.
"Terry Shiavo was a completely different scenario because she was in a persistent vegetative state," Carver added. "This
is a man who, as best as we know, had a greater degree of functioning in terms of his brain for the past 10 years. This is someone who was able to eat, able to say yes and no, someone who was able to sit and watch television, though he had some difficulty with vision. While he was obviously quite devastated from what happened to him, he was nonetheless neurologically functioning at a very different level from Terri Schiavo."