Terri's family and the nurses maintained all along that Terri responded to them, so Terri was NOT "just a body".
Also, I read that the fireman was actually in worse shape than Terri, he couldn't swallow his own salive, Terri could.
http://www.wsmv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3305923
One thing that does seem clear is that Herbert's case is entirely different from that of Terri Schiavo and that Shiavo was highly unlikely to have experienced this kind of awakening, had she lived, experts said.
Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged patient who died March 31 at 41 years of age, was the subject of an intense court battle between her parents, who wanted to keep her attached to life-sustaining nutrition, and her husband, who fought to have her feeding tube removed. The courts ultimately sided with Mr. Schiavo.
"There was a lot more damage in Shiavo," Nedd noted, adding that there's a point where the brain is so severely injured no interventions can be expected to help.
"Terry Shiavo was a completely different scenario because she was in a persistent vegetative state," Carver added. "This [Herbert] is a man who, as best as we know, had a greater degree of functioning in terms of his brain for the past 10 years. This is someone who was able to eat, able to say yes and no, someone who was able to sit and watch television, though he had some difficulty with vision. While he was obviously quite devastated from what happened to him, he was nonetheless neurologically functioning at a very different level from Terri Schiavo."