27 yrs on, woman in coma wakes up

LONDON: When Munira Abdulla had last been fully awake, the first George Bush was America’s president and the Soviet Union was nearing its demise. It was the year the Persian Gulf war ended. In 1991, at the age of 32, Abdulla, from the oasis city of Al Ain in the UAE, suffered injuries in a road accident that left her in a state of reduced consciousness for most of the next three decades.
After 27 years in coma, she awoke last June at a clinic near Munich, where doctors had been treating her for the complications of her long illness. “I never gave up on her, because I always had a feeling that one day she will wake up,” said Omar Webair, her 32-year-old son, who was just 4 when the accident happened.
Friedemann Muller, the chief physician at the Schon Clinic, a private hospital with campuses around Germany, said that Abdulla had been in a state of minimal consciousness. He said only a handful of cases like hers, in which a patient recovered after such a long period, had been recorded.
During her years in hospitals, Abdulla was tube-fed and underwent physiotherapy to prevent her muscles deteriorating. Mueller said doctors took a holistic approach to her treatment: controlling her muscle contractions, changing the medication she received for epilepsy and using physiotherapy to allow her to leave her room in a wheelchair, so she could get more stimuli, such as bird song.
“The case is very unusual, but not unique,” Mueller said, citing a patient who began speaking again after 20 years. He said Abdulla’s case offers hope for patients with similar conditions.
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