And then there is the story of this woman!
A L B U Q U E R Q U E, N.M., Dec. 29, 1999 — For 16 years, life for Patti White Bull had been very much the same — not much of a life at all, her body locked in a coma-like state, fed by a tube.
But on Christmas Day this year, she was miraculously awake, writing a letter to her mother, dressing herself and walking with support. “Absolutely extraordinary,” is how one medical expert described the 42-year-old New Mexico woman’s sudden awakening after more than a decade and a half.
And today, like many other Americans in this holiday season, White Bull headed to a shopping mall, according to her doctor, Elliot Marcus.
It was her first request.
Unconscious Since Childbirth
“It really is quite amazing,” says Gregory O’Shanick, national medical director for the Brain Injury Association. “In general, people don’t spontaneously emerge from a minimally conscious state. It’s a gradual process. It’s not like a light switch going on.”
But that seems to be exactly what has happened to White Bull, a mother of four who lost consciousness during the birth of her youngest child. For the past 10 years, she has been in a nursing home in “total care.”
Her ex-husband Mark White Bull, who divorced her three years after she lost consciousness, planned to visit her today with their children, now 25, 19, 17 and 16.
Not Exactly ‘Comatose’
She can’t be described as awakening from 16 years in a coma, says one expert. Most patients spend no more than a month in a true coma, according to Ronald Cranford, neurologist and medical ethicist at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. After that, they go into a vegetative state, in which their eyes are open but they remain unconscious.
Patients can then emerge from this vegetative state to minimal consciousness, in which they are still not awake but can have what Randy Chestnut, a neurologist at Oregon Health Sciences University, calls “some very basic meaningful interactions with their environment.”
Suddenly, She Spoke
Just where White Bull was on the spectrum of consciousness before her Christmastime awakening, we are not yet clear. Marcus says her eyes were open, but she was unresponsive. Then, White Bull suddenly told an aide who was adjusting her covers, “Don’t do that.”
“This is extraordinary, but not out of the realm of possibility,” Chestnut says. He suggested she may have had some kind of brain-stem blockage that kept stimulation from getting to her brain until that very moment.
Cranford suggests White Bull may have been interacting with people in subtle ways that nobody was noticing: “Maybe on Christmas Day, people noticed more than they ever had before, and that made it seem like a dramatic recovery.”
He has investigated a number of cases of “late recovery” and found that most of them don’t pan out: “The longest well-documented recovery from a coma, is two and a half years.”
Nevertheless, he says he believes cases like this should be investigated to determine just exactly what happened and to help doctors treat other people in similar states.
Accolades for Attendants
Marcus is as amazed as anyone at his patient’s recovery, especially in that she is up and around already. Most people who awaken from vegetative states are physically disabled as well as mentally challenged.
He says the staff at Las Palomas Nursing Home in Albuquerque is to thank for White Bull’s remarkable mobility; they were constantly exercising her legs.
White Bull is currently undergoing intensive speech and physical therapy. Neurological tests are in the works.
While experts cannot yet explain her recovery, family members say they consider it a Christmastime miracle from God. 
ABCNEWS medical journalists Sarah Adler and Mary Harris contributed to this report, as did the Associated Press.
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