8mm
Posted on 03/07/2007 7:50:20 AM PST by OB1kNOb
Doctors call it a miracle. A Southern Colorado woman was in a vegetative state for more than six years, but now, she's talking for the first time. She spoke exclusively to 11 News.
Christa Lilly had a heart attack then a stroke. That's the last thing she remembers. It was November of 2000, when Lilly slipped into a vegetative state, which is essentially like a coma, but with the eyes open. Lilly was unconscious and unaware of her surroundings. Now, for the first time in six and a half years, she's awake, alert, and talking. "I think it's wonderful. It makes me so happy," Lilly tells us.
The last time Lilly was aware of the world around her, Bill Clinton was in office and the September 11th attacks hadn't even happened. Lilly was also surprised to find out her youngest daughter is now 12. "It's kinda exciting," Chelcy says. She’s Christa’s daughter. And she's also a grandmother of three, that's new too. "Seeing her talking," Latiana says, is the greatest gift of all. She's 6-years-old and the oldest of the grandchildren.
“To come back out of it... God is good," Minnie Smith, Lilly’s mother, says. She has been taking care of her all these years. She says this past Sunday, her prayers were answered. "Every morning, I always check on her when I wake up, before I go to the bathroom. I always say, ‘Hi baby, how are you doing?’ She said, ‘I'm fine’ and that's when I knew she was awake." A two-word answer that changed everything.
Lilly says her biggest frustration is learning how to talk again. "I've been eating cake." Eating is no problem for this woman, who had been kept alive by a feeding tube.
“This is a miracle,” Lilly's neurologist, Dr. Randall Bjork, tells us. He checked to see her how her brain is functioning. He says he's as surprised as everyone else. "This is all mystical and I can't explain it."
Uttering her first sentences in more than 6 years, Christa has a lot of catching up to do.
Lilly's mom says her daughter has awakened 4 other times in the past, but not completely, not like this. There's a chance Lilly could slip back into her vegetative state, but the family is hoping she's back for good.
How sad for her that she will be denied the euphoria of starvation.
> Sorry...but we disagree and there are and were
> professional opinions on both side of the matter.
There are *always* "professional" opinions on "both" sides, if you define "professional" loosely enough.
Even the faintest shadow of doubt was removed by the autopsy. Only flagrant denial of reality allows people to maintain the complete and utter fiction that Ms Schiavo could ever have recovered.
Bringing her up every time someone, somewhere, in a completely different circumstance, recovers from a vegetative state does nothing but provide meat for Jon Stewart and Markos Moulitsas.
Great article. Thanks.
"This is all mystical and I can't explain it."
Her brain was not "dead" --- it was severely damaged. If she were "brain dead", as the reporters inaccurately called it, she would have not been able to breathe or have a heart beat w/o machines. There is a difference between being "brain dead" -- in which it literally is a matter of machines keeping you alive and a "persistent vegetative state."
On the matter of dehydration explaining her brain size: get a grip. There was 5 times as much cerebrospinal fluid in her skull as should have been there. Conceivably, dehydration could have explained a small amount of the change in brain mass. Let's go way over the top and say 10%. Her brain was still about half the size it should have been.
Large parts of her brain, most of it, were, flatly, gone.
Under no circumstances, ever, was she going to recover.
Now, whether she should have been remanded into the custody of her parents, since they wanted to keep her alive anyway, is another matter entirely. An injustice, in the absence of a clear living will, might well have been done there.
Anyway, it's great that the woman in this story wasn't damaged like that, so she could recover.
It certainly is.
Cuts both ways...a real two-edged sword.
As to your contention that recovery was impossible...well, I learned a long time ago with medical matters, with personal experience, to never say never. Stranger things have happened that medical science cannot explain at this time.
The bottom line is, she was capable of living...of breathing and being fed. Her parents and specialists on that side of the equation indicated she was responisve and when you have the slightest indication, you err on the side of life IMHO.
Her parents loved her and wanted to care for her. As I said, in the citcumstances and absent any clear living will or derective from her...the only humane thing to do in those circusmatnces was to allow the parents to ovingly care for her IMHO...instead, the state killed her in what many (myself included) consider to be a very agonizing way.
Too bad she missed out on the 'euphoric' state of starving to death. I bet she would have looked so beautiful too.
BTTT
The adult brain is extremely vulnerable to various insults. The recent discovery of neural progenitors in adult mammals, however, raises the possibility of repairing damaged tissue by recruiting their latent regenerative potential.Here we show that activation of endogenous progenitors leads to massive regeneration of hippocampal pyramidal neurons after ischemic brain injury. Endogenous progenitors proliferate in response to ischemia and subsequently migrate into the hippocampus to regenerate new neurons.
Intraventricular infusion of growth factors markedly augments these responses, thereby increasing the number of newborn neurons. Our studies suggest that regenerated neurons are integrated into the existing brain circuitry and contribute to ameliorating neurological deficits. These results expand the possibility of novel neuronal cell regeneration therapies for stroke and other neurological diseases.
Man Recovers From Near-Coma After Two Decades
For 19 years after a car accident that caused severe brain damage, Terry Wallis lingered speechless in a minimally conscious state, a limbo only a few steps up from a coma. Then one day in 2003, he stunned his mother by calling her "Mom" and, over the next few days, regaining the ability to talk. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Medical College in New York City, was amazed when he examined Wallis's brain eight months later.In July Schiff and his colleagues reported that Wallis's brain was badly atrophied—but it had not been idle. Using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which can spot neural connections, the researchers saw what appeared to be massive tracts of new axon growth. Wallis's brain had been rewiring itself.
During the year after he regained his speech, Wallis continued to improve, recovering some use of his limbs. A second scan made 18 months after the first one found that his brain was still changing.
The first exam had seemed to show thick areas of new connections in the rear cortex of his brain, a region linked to awareness. A year and a half later, those areas looked more normal, and the cerebellum, which controls motor function, showed major changes, consistent with his recent physical improvement.
Schiff's ongoing studies of Wallis and his astounding recovery may transform our understanding of the brain's ability to heal itself. Neurologist Steven Laureys of the University of Liège in Belgium, who has studied similar cases, says, "This is very welcome, because there's so little we know about these late recoveries."
I'm not debating whether or not she would recover. I really don't know. All I'm saying is that there is a big difference between being "brain dead" and being in a PVS. If someone were to conduct a poll and ask people if they would, morally, support pulling the plug on a "brain dead" person, I would answer "yes". Unfortunately, reporters would incorrectly extrapolate from that that I support starving/dehydrating to death someone like Schiavo. From a moral standpoint, as I understand it, the Catholic Church does not oppose removing artificial life support from someone who is "brain dead." The problem I have with the news coverage of the Schiavo case is they kept reporting it as she were "brain dead", when she wasn't. Thus, public opinion on the issue was skewed. I don't know if she would recover or not. All I know is that she was alive in the same sense that a baby is. She had to bed fed, washed and changed, just like a baby. But she could also breathe, move a little and have a heartbeat like a baby. It is a crime that she wasn't given at least the opportunity to develop.
Apparently she has no memory of the lapsed years; which of course brings up the question of whether she would have known she was dying if the feeding tube had been removed.
This leads to the ethical question of whether pain or cognizance are mitigating factors in any decision to end such ordeals for the family and those who care for such patients.
Will this case and other similar outcomes strengthen or weaken society's resolve to bring "closure?"
It was not about recovery for her parents, it was about undying love and an indefatigable sense of duty.
It was the husband and the bean counters who were in charge of the scales weighing tradition against convenience to bring about a new definition of convention.
Real pig farmers wash and change clothes when the work of the day is done; the pigs rejoice in their filth.
If the determining factor in whether or not medical care becomes based on the value to society of the patient rather than to the patient herself, all your arguments will still inhere and no precedent will intervene in the final decision.
> It was not about recovery for her parents, it was about
> undying love and an indefatigable sense of duty.
And good on them.
But then there's no reason to bring Ms Schiavo's name up every time somebody recovers from a vegetative state, is there?
"An injustice, in the absence of a clear living will, might well have been done there."
Hers was just such a case; I would rather use the word inhumane than injustice, though.
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