Man in 23-year ‘coma’ was conscious all along

A German man was declared as being in a vegetative coma in 1983 after a road accident, but he was perfectly conscious. He subsequently spent 23 years watching all that was going on around him without being able to communicate in any way.

Rom Houben describes his experiences in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel which is being published in many European papers, including Liberation in France. He was totally paralysed after the accident and has been cared for in a hospital in Liège, Belgium.

“I cried and shouted but no sound came out” said the ex-engineering student and amateur combat sport fan, who has learned how to express himself on a specially adapted computer. “I’ll never forget the day they finally found out what the problem was. It was like a second birth.”

Back in 1983 the doctors quickly decided that he was in a vegetative coma and stopped all further testing. His suffering finally came to an end after  a medical examination at Liège’s university discoverd that his brain was in fact intact, three years ago.

His story came to light after the publication of an article in BMC Neurology by Belgian neurologist and coma expert Steven Laureys, MD, PhD.  Laureys told Der Spiegel that “The problem is that once a coma has been diagnosed, it’s very difficult to go back on the decision. Each patient should be tested at least ten times before he is catalogued as being in a vegetative coma.”

Houben described being condemned to hearing everything that was said around him without him being able to respond in any way.

“I was a witness to my own suffering when the doctors and nurses tried speaking to me at first before giving up,” he related in the interview.

The worst moment was when his mother and sister visited him to inform him of his father’s death. He wanted to cry but his body couldn’t. Little by little, cut off from the world, he began to spend his time meditating. “I kept deaming of a better life. Frustration is too weak a word to describe what I was feeling.”

He is still paralysed, but he can read thanks to a screen situated above his head and he uses the computer to communicate, adding that “I want to read my friends and speak to them with the computer. I want to live my life now that people know I am not dead.”