A tale for our time from the Daily Mail:
Please read the whole thing at the Daily Mail.A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.
'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.
'I dreamed myself away,' he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer. [. . .]
Doctors in Zolder, Belgium, used the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess his eye, verbal and motor responses. But each time he was graded incorrectly.
Only a re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege discovered that he had lost control of his body but was still fully aware of what was happening. [. . .]
Mr Houben said: 'I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me - it was my second birth.
'I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.'
Dr Laureys's new study claims that patients classed as in a vegetative state are often misdiagnosed.
'Anyone who bears the stamp of "unconscious" just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again,' he said. [. . .]
'I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.'
Then read Wesley Smith: Reason Not to Dehydrate: Man Speaking After 23 Years in Locked-In State
Excerpting, but read all of this, too:
We hear constantly that people diagnosed as being persistently unconscious should be dehydrated to death because they are not “persons,” or are actually “dead”–and so should be available for organ harvesting. We hear that even if the family resists, futile care theory should permit bioethics committees to impose unilateral withdrawal. And we hear this even as repeated studies demonstrate that 40 or more percent of patients diagnosed as PVS really aren’t.Bottom line:
But there are abundant reasons to treat people with profound cognitive disabilities as fully human beings. First and foremost, because they are us. Second, because we don’t know enough about how the brain works to know that there won’t be some regeneration to permit eventual restoration of some function. But also, because there is always hope.He's happy to be alive. Deo gratias.Houben is here today only because he wasn’t dehydrated to death. There is no doubt he went through a horrendous experience, but thanks to treating him as a fully equal human being by caring for him all those years and giving him tests late into his disability–explicitly refused to Terri Schiavo–he is here today to tell tale and live the rest of his life.
Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)
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2 comments:
I consider this case so important: everybody needs more attention: even and even more!!!
Euthanasia is not the solution: never.
Thank you for this report on your blog.
Q. What's worse than being incorrectly diagnosed as comatose for 23 years when you're really locked in?
A. Having a "facilitator" purport to speak for you by pressing your finger against keys on a keyboard that you aren't even looking at, and are helpless to protest against.
I think this is being very uncritically reported, and would like to see some double-blind testing of this facilitated communication (a process that was found to be completely delusional when it was a prominent treatment for severely autistic children--but not before it was used to make false charges of child abuse), as well as a second opinion from a neurologist of the imaging data, since this case is one that Laureys has a vested interest in sensationalizing to promote his theories.
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