FOR 23 years Rom Houben was imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him daily during their rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died.
But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.
Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.
Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Dr Laureys found to his amazement that Mr Houben’s brain was functioning almost normally.
"I had dreamed myself away," said Mr Houben (46), whose real "state" was discovered three years ago and has just been made public by the doctor who rescued him, according to a report this week in the German magazine Der Spiegel.
Dr Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège in Belgium, has published a scientific paper saying Mr Houben could be one of many cases of falsely diagnosed comas. He discovered that although Mr Houben was completely paralysed, he was also completely conscious – just unable to communicate the fact.
Mr Houben now communicates with the help of a computer with a special keyboard which he activates with his right hand – movement developed with the help of intense physiotherapy over the past three years.
He realised when he came round after his accident, which had caused his heart to stop and his brain to be starved of oxygen for several minutes, that he was paralysed. Although he could hear every word his doctors spoke, he could not communicate with them.
“I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,” he said, via his keyboard.
The Belgian former engineering student, who speaks four languages, said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. He told doctors he had “travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether”. Sometimes, he said, “I was only my consciousness and nothing else”.
Care personnel and doctors at the hospital in Zolder in Belgium eventually gave up hope that he would come round. The moment it was discovered he was not in a vegetative state, said Mr Houben, was like being born again. “I’ll never forget the day they discovered me,” he said. “It was my second birth.”
Experts say Dr Laureys’s findings are likely to reopen the debate over when the decision should be made to terminate the lives of those in comas who appear to be unconscious but may have almost fully functioning brains.
Belgian doctors used an internationally accepted scale to monitor Mr Houben’s state over the years.
Known as the Glasgow Coma Scale, it requires assessment of the eyes, verbal and motor responses. However they failed to assess him correctly and missed signs that his brain was still functioning.
Dr Laureys, head of the Coma Science Group and department of neurology at University of Liège hospital, has advised on several prominent coma cases, such as the American patient Terri Schiavo, whose life support was withdrawn in 2005 after 15 years in a coma.
Dr Laureys concluded in his study that coma patients are diagnosed falsely "on a disturbingly regular basis". In about 40 per cent of cases diagnosed as vegetative, more careful examination shows that there is still some level of consciousness. – ( Guardianservice)