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‘Right to die’?: These incredible people found meaning in their lives, despite severe disabilities
Patient in “Vegetative State” for 16 Years May Have Been Aware The Whole Time
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What a story. This guy should write a book.
He went through a literal hell on Earth! Just unimaginable what that poor guy went through. His family too! Imagine what his mother must feel like right now having said that to him, and knowing that he heard and understood it. She’ll probably agonize over that until the day she dies.
RIP Terri Schiavo.
Bfl
I purchased his book, Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius
from Amazon in Kindle format. It is also available from Barnes and Noble and you can get a signed copy from the guy’s website.
It is one of those books that will almost certainly become a movie one of these days. It is inspiring, well written and nearly impossible to put down.
how does one not go insane locked up in their own mind like that? I can’t grasp that.
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“Vegetative State,” Says “I Was Aware of Everything” = Quaaludes
Thank God this young man did not have parents that gave him over to “hospice “ ... they woud have dehydrated him to death and ask for your donations to do it
What a beautiful story!
A few months ago I attended a psychiatry grand rounds at Duke University Hospital on this subject. They were able to communicate with people in a coma using MRIs and brain patterning to elicit responses.
One interesting question raised related to the competency for the individual in a long term coma to answer for themselves.
The research involved performing MRIs on a group of people when they were thinking of standing in place and hitting a tennis ball. They then did the same thing on the group with them imagining running around the tennis court but not hitting the ball.
They compared the two MRI patterns and found definite differences. They then asked the subjects to alternate every 30 seconds between the two thought images and monitored the differences.
Next they asked a question and said that if the answer was “YES” the subject should imagine standing in place hitting a tennis ball and if the answer was “NO”, they should imagine running around the tennis court without hitting the ball.
This yielded definite yes or no responses to questions.
Next they began asking questions to patients in a coma while in an MRI and found they could get “Yes” or “NO” answers from them by reading the MRI pattern.