Rom Houben, a 46 year-old Belgian man who was diagnosed as being in a coma after a car accident in 1983, has been discovered to have normal brain functions after a scan was performed in 2006. In the beginning, “I cried out, but nothing came out”, he says. The day his brain was discovered to be intact was like “being born again.” He says he eventually learned to live with the opinion that others had of him. His mother has said that she always believed her son could communicate.
Houben, though paralyzed, now communicates with a specially adapted computer keyboard, and is writing a book on his experiences.
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 24 November 2009.
Filed under: World news
Tags: Belgium, coma, false diagnosis, Rom Houben
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November 24th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
This is definitely a wakeup call to those in the field of medicine , who may have ignorantly and unitentionally cut off life support for such long coma cases.i think it must be scary to look back at the many lives one may have summarily ended through misdiagnosis.again this is a very emotional story to begin with.