ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 4, 1996 TAG: 9601040058
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL Q. HANEY ASSOCIATED PRESS BOSTON
AND THE DOCTOR who witnessed one patient's astonishing comeback thinks some less hopeless terminology is demanded.
Doctors use an especially hopeless-sounding phrase for patients unconscious more than a year. ``Permanent vegetative state,'' they call it.
But a Texas doctor who watched a young woman's slow recovery after months in this condition believes they should abandon the word ``permanent.''
Dr. Nancy L.Childs, a physician at the Healthcare Rehabilitation Center in Austin, described her patient's return to consciousness in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
After suffering severe head injuries in a 1987 car crash, the 18-year-old woman was unresponsive for 15 months. Then nurses noticed she seemed to obey their orders to move her leg or close her eyes.
Over time, she learned to answer multiple-choice questions and do simple math problems using eye blinks. At one point, she wrote, ``Mom, I love you.''
After five years, she could mouth words and short phrases.
Five years and two months after the injury, she was sent home, wheelchair-bound and dependent on others for all care. Her rehabilitation had cost well over $1 million.
When Childs last saw her patient three years ago, ``she still certainly was severely disabled,'' Childs said. But ``she seemed to enjoy herself.''
A vegetative state is considered persistent if it lasts more than a month. After a year, it is called permanent.
Only one similar, well-documented case of recovery from a permanent vegetative state has been written up in a medical journal. Nonetheless, Childs believes such cases may be somewhat more common.
Records of the Traumatic Coma Data Bank show patients regained consciousness in three of the 22 ``permanent vegetative'' cases in their files.
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