After six years, she is responsive for three days before relapsing......

     I came across this article a few days ago in one of my local newspapers (March 9, 2007) and found it very interesting. I will pass it along.

     "A woman who has been in a coma-like state for more than six years awoke for three days this week to talk with family members and eat her favorite foods before relapsing."
      Although there are many medical reasons for people falling into a coma,  the medical community might want to revamp their notes. There have been so many medical breakthroughs and studies I would think they might want to re-visit this issue.
     "She was smiling and grinning and told my staff she wanted to go to a club, even doing a little chair dance in her wheelchair," said one of her doctors, Randall Bjork.
      The woman, Christa Lilly 49, suffered a cardiac arrest in November, 2000. Since then, her mother Minnie Smith, has been caring for her at home. Ms. Smith said Ms. Lilly had awakened five times, sometimes for hours, then for day."
      Although statistically there is no stead ast rule on how long someone's brain will take to heal, in most cases it does heal. In this day and age I would think it should not matter how many years someone is in a coma. At some point, the brain will heal and most of the time they do awake from this "sleep". It is God's decision to make as to the time frame a person remains in a coma, but that is just my opinion.
      "We may have to rethink these people that have been called vegetative in nursing homes who may have some awareness of their horrible circumstances," Dr. Bjork said. "It goes against the grain of what we thought."
      "Dr. Bjork said that he had been skeptical of Ms. Smith's previous reports of her daughter's waking states, but that he was now a believer. He said Ms. Lilly was in a "minimally conscious state," rather than a persistent vegetative state."
      Okay, so there is one doctor who agrees to begin researching the possibility of change. I can only hope that others will follow in his footsteps and see how wrong they have been. It just makes me wonder how many people have been left to starve and suffer a painful death because of ignorance.