A woman woke up after losing consciousness at the age of twenty-seven – 26/04/2019

By PALKO KARASZ and CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

LONDON – Last time Munira Abdulla was awake, George Bush father was the president of the United States and the Soviet Union was approaching its dissolution. It was the year of the end of the Persian Gulf War.

In 1991, at the age of 32, Abdulla, a native of the city of Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, was injured in an accident on a highway that left her in a state of consciousness weakened for nearly three decades.

After twenty-seven years, Woke up last June in a clinic near Munich, Germany, where doctors treat you for the complications of the condition in which you have been for a long time.

"I never gave up on it, because I always felt that one day I would wake up," said Omar Webair, his 32-year-old son, who was 4 years old at the time of his birth. # 39; accident. It is he who told the story of his mother with the Emirati news website The National April 22nd.

Friedemann Müller, medical director of the Schön Clinic, a private hospital with several campuses in Germany, said that Abdulla was in a state of minimal awareness. He said that only a handful of cases were recorded as hisin which a patient has healed after such a long time.

Patients with impaired consciousness are generally clbadified into three categories: in a complete coma, the patient shows no signs of awakening, has eyes closed and does not react to the environment; a persistent vegetative state includes those who appear to be awake but do not show signs of consciousness; while a minimal state of consciousness may include periods in which a response, such as moving a finger on demand, may be noticed. Familiarly, the three categories are often described as "being in a coma".

The signs of Abdulla 's healing began to appear last year, when he began to pronounce his son' s name. A few weeks later, he began repeating verses from the Qur'an that he had learned several decades ago.

"We did not believe it at first," said Müller. "However, it finally became very clear that she was saying her son's name."

Müller said he was not expecting a resumption of this magnitude from Abdulla.

She was in the German clinic to receive treatment for convulsions and crooked muscles, which made her body difficult to handle and prevented her from sitting safely in a wheelchair. Part of the treatment consisted of installing a device that allowed him to administer drugs directly to the spine, a factor that, according to Müller, could have contributed to his recovery.

Similar background

We know that only a handful of people had similar overlays.

Terry Wallis, a native of Arkansas, was 19 years old when he slipped on a bridge in a truck. He uttered his first word since the accident, "Mom", almost two decades later, in 2003.

His recovery was so unusual that scientists have used it to study how the brain works and to help determine which patients with serious brain injuries had the best chance of healing.

The question is often of vital importance. In a landmark 1976 decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Karen Ann Quinlan's father had the right to decide to abandon the treatment that kept her alive for her. Quinlan died in 1985, a decade after falling into a coma.

The case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who spent fifteen years in a persistent vegetative state before her feeding tube was removed in 2005, fueled debate in the United States and beyond her borders. the right of a person to live or die.

With medical care, some people may remain in a state of diminished consciousness for decades. Aruna Shanbaug, an Indian nurse, lived more than forty years in this state until her death at the age of 66 in 2015. She remained in a permanent vegetative state after being strangled with a chain of metal during a badual badault.

Webair, Abdulla 's son, said that he had been saved from serious injuries during the 1991 accident because his mother had been hit by the impact and had managed to take in his arms.

"For me, it was like gold, the more time pbaded, the more valuable it became," he told the National.

According to the newspaper, Abdulla, who has already returned to the United Arab Emirates, receives care in a hospital in Abu Dhabi.

Palko Karasz was reported in London and Christopher F. Schuetze in Berlin.

© 2019 the New York Times