Woman wakes up from coma-like state after 28 years
She has fully regained conscious from the fatal car crash she experienced in 1991.
(Web Desk) – Munira Abdulla, a woman who suffered a severe brain injury in 1991 and went into vegetative state, woke up after 28 years today.
She has fully regained conscious from the fatal car crash she experienced in 1991.
She went into a vegetative state which is similar to coma except the patient responds to pain.
“I never gave up on her because I always had a feeling that one day she will wake up,” Munira Abdulla’s son, Omar Webair told The National newspaper.
According to an international website, his mother suffered a severe brain injury following a car crash in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1991 when he was just four, he added. She had hugged him to protect him as a school bus ploughed into their vehicle in the city of Al Ain.
Along with his uncle, Mr. Webair only suffered only minor wounds, but Ms. Abdulla, who was 32 at the time, suffered a brain injury which remained untreated for hours before she was eventually taken to hospital.
She was eventually transferred to London for specialist treatment, Mr. Webair said. There she was declared to be in a minimally conscious state; responsive to nothing but pain.
Doctors returned Ms. Abdulla to the UAE, where for years she was fed through a tube and provided with physiotherapy in an attempt to ensure her muscles did not deteriorate.
In 2017 Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, offered to pay for Ms Abdulla to receive specialist treatment in Germany, Mr. Webair said.
There, doctors prioritized physical therapies and gave her drugs to improve her wakefulness and sleeping patterns.
“Our primary goal was to grant her fragile consciousness the opportunity to develop and prosper within a healthy body, just like a delicate plant which needs good soil to grow,” Dr Ahmad Ryll, a neurology specialist who treated Ms. Abdulla, told the UAE-based newspaper.
Mr. Webair said the treatment appeared to make his mother more responsive, and a year later, in June 2018, a row in her hospital room “caused her a shock”.
“She was making strange sounds and I kept calling the doctors to examine her, they said everything was normal,” he added. “Then three days later I woke up to the sound of someone calling my name. It was her! She was calling my name, I was flying with joy; for years I have dreamt of this moment, and my name was the first word she said.”
Ms. Abdulla has continued to become more alert, and is now able to hold a conversation, recite prayers and tell people when she is in pain.
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She is now back in Abu Dhabi with her family, where she continues to receive treatment.
“The reason I shared her story is to tell people not to lose hope on their loved ones; don’t consider them dead when they are in such a state,” Mr Webair said. “All those years the doctors told me she was a hopeless case, and that there was no point of the treatment I was seeking for her, but whenever in doubt I put myself in her place and did whatever I could to improve her condition.”
