‘Comatose’ Man Was Actually Awake For 23 Years

Posted by JacobSloan on December 14, 2009

This is a pretty horrifying fate…reminds me of the video for the Metallica song ‘One.’ From the Telegraph:

A Belgian man diagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time. Rom Houbens was simply paralysed and had no way to let doctors caring for him what he was suffering.

“I dreamt myself away,” says Houben, now 46, who was misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after a car crash. Doctors and nurses in Zolder deemed him a hopeless case whereby his consciousness was considered “extinct.”

When he woke up after the accident he had lost control of his body, “I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,” he says.