by APFLI | May 19, 2016 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
Christopher Dolan, attorney for Jahi McMath’s family, shows an MRI of the 13-year-old Oakland girl during a press conference at Dolan Law Firm in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Oct. 3, 2014. Dolan showed photos and a pair of videos where McMath moves her foot...
by APFLI | Apr 29, 2016 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings, Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive
Comment: I saw this myself even in the early 1970s (before “vegetable” became a diagnosis) when some of our trauma and coma patients unexpectedly started to respond when we talked to and cared for them as if they were fully awake. We were surprised and...
by APFLI | Apr 27, 2016 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
There is only one type of death but two means of declaring a person “dead.” One is the irreversible cessation of cardio/pulmonary function. Let’s call that “heart death.” The other is total brain failure, or the irreversible cessation of the brain–and all of its...
by APFLI | Jul 24, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
[Comment: I have been privileged to know this great writer and doctor, Wes Ely. He has also published two wonderful articles in the Wall Street Journal that I have sent in the past. As a nurse, I wish that every doctor could be a doctor like Dr. Ely with great...
by APFLI | Jul 6, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
After a European court issued a ruling saying a disabled patient can be starved to death against his will, the brother of Terri Schiavo says the parallels in the case are eerily similar to what happened to his sister. Vincent Lambert, a tetraplegic patient who has...
by APFLI | Jun 9, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings, Uncategorized
A car accident left 19-year-old Dylan Rizzo in a coma. This is the story of the long, perilous crawl to recovery. Dylan Rizzo, April 2015. Photo: Dylan Coulter for New York Magazine Day Zero Despite its encircling fortress of bone, the human brain is especially...
by APFLI | Jun 7, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
The brave woman who refused brain surgery to give birth to her unborn baby free from the effects of the surgery, is improving and her baby is headed home. Melissa C., 39, is a modern-day hero. Her dreams of becoming a mother finally came true even if she wasn’t awake...
by APFLI | May 29, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
Sleeping Drug Broke Man’s 3-Year Coma A 28-year-old South African man who has been comatose since an accident three years ago is able to wake up with the unlikely help of a sleeping medication… Louis Viljoen was hit by a truck on a highway in 2003, and has...
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
In a coma for 2 years following a car accident, Salvatore C., father of 4 children, awoke suddenly and told doctors and family that he heard everything going on around him, despite doctors who told family he was not conscious. “I understood everything and I...
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state. But across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking … a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough....
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
Kate, 36, communicates through a keyboard. Scientists have shown for the first time that a person diagnosed as being in a vegetative state can communicate. In 1997, when Kate was 26, she caught an acute viral infection. It was so serious that it confined her to a...
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
PVS & Ambien: Several studies are being conducted worldwide on patients thought to be in PVS, using zolpidem (Ambien) which actually wakes up to sixty percent of these patients. Tests conducted on a 23-year-old, severely brain damaged woman—clinically diagnosed as...
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
A young boy, who had previously been diagnosed as being in a “permanent vegetative state,” has awakened from a 22 month-long coma and is breathing on his own. Devon Rivers collapsed in a seizure during a phys-ed class in 2004 and his condition was never explained,...
by APFLI | May 26, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
An international study finds that about forty percent of patients like Terri Schiavo who are supposedly in a persistent vegetative state are misdiagnosed and another fifty percent of them recover from their situation. The study finds the patients in question were in a...
by APFLI | May 21, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
After two weeks and no change Ryan Finley took his wife Jill off life support and suddenly she awoke. Imagine being 31 years old and having to make the agonizing decision to discontinue the life-support keeping your comatose spouse alive. Now imagine that spouse...
by APFLI | May 21, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
The bar chart shows the causes of injury that result in traumatic brain injury (TBI)-related deaths vary by age group. In 2013, 77% of the TBI-related deaths among infants aged <1 year were from causes other than transportation, firearms, or falls, and primarily...
by APFLI | May 20, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
A Virginia family was shocked but relieved when their mother, Val Thomas, woke up after doctors said she was dead. Mrs. Thomas, 59, while being kept breathing artificially, had no detectable brain waves for more than 17 hours. The family was discussing organ donation...
by APFLI | May 20, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
Research, recently published in the journal Psychophysiology, sheds new light on the condition known as the completely locked-in state (CLIS), a state where the patient’s total lack of muscle control makes communication virtually impossible. Patients totally paralyzed...
by APFLI | May 20, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
If there’s one thing worse than being in a coma, it’s people thinking you are in one when you aren’t. Yet a new comparison of methods for detecting consciousness suggests that around 40 per cent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are...
by APFLI | May 18, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
LifeNews has repeatedly chronicled cases of people who were prematurely declared dead or said to be in supposedly persistent vegetative states who ultimately recovered. We have also covered miraculous cases where an act of God appears to be the only reason or only...