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Interesting article about the awareness of vegetative patients. We are not able to post the New Yorker's content, but check out the link. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/15/071015fa_fact_groopman?printable=true

Milan, Italy (LifeNews.com) -- An Italian court has denied a request by a disabled woman's father to remove her feeding tube and authorize her death by starvation and dehydration. Eluana Englaro has been a coma for 15 years after an automobile accident seriously injured her and, this year, her father asked a Milan court for permission to remove her feeding tube. This isn't the first time Englaro's case had been in court. In April 2005, the Italian Supreme Court confirmed a lower court ruling to keep her feeding tube in place. That case had also been brought by Englaro's father,...

ABC News' Bob Woodruff Reports: Senator Tim Johnson, the South Dakota Democrat who suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage last December, will seek reelection in 2008. Johnson greeted South Dakota voters Tuesday, in his first public appearance since falling ill. We continue to wish Johnson well, but now that Johnson decided to seek reelection it's time for the gloves to come off. Johnson won reelection in 2002 by just 524 votes and was a tempting target even before he became ill. Two Republicans, State Representative Joel Dykstra and business man Sam Kephart, are running for Johnson's seat.

A study by the Coma Science Group of the University of Liège, Belgium, finds that up to half of patients in an acute vegetative state regain some level of consciousness.In the study, which analyzed data collected over a five-year period, researchers assessed and classified comatose patients according to the Coma Recovery Scale. The researchers determined that some 40 percent had been incorrectly diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, when they were in fact in a minimally conscious state. And 10 percent of those diagnosed as being minimally conscious were communicating functionally.A patient who is minimally conscious shows periodic...

Two short weeks after the culmination of a legal battle between his wife and family over whether to maintain his life support, Jesse Ramirez of Arizona appears to be on the road to recovery. According to local reports, Ramirez, 36, suffered traumatic brain injury in a May 30 car accident, which put him in a coma. He had been in this minimally-conscious state for a little more than a week when doctors informed his wife that he may never recover -- and she made the decision to have his feeding and water tubes removed. Ramirez's family made a legal appeal...

SAN DIEGO - Wayne Albert Bleyle confessed to molesting "countless" young, brain-damaged children under his care at the hospital where he worked for 25 years, prosecutors say. On Tuesday, 15 months after his confession, the former respiratory therapist pleaded guilty to abusing four patients - a boy and three girls, including a 2-year-old toddler. The plea leaves unanswered how many disabled children he preyed upon. Bleyle, 55, treated 176 patients during the 10 years of his career at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. Bleyle told investigators he could only remember the names of four children, prosecutors said, hampering efforts...

~~~snip~~~ However, Mr Grzebski, who saw his story unfold first in the Polish media and then saw it repeated around the world, has now said he was never in a coma for 19 years. "I never said any of those things, I was not in a coma for 19 years, I only spoke to one journalist and what they wrote was not true - and every time the story was printed new things emerged," he added. ~~~snip~~~

Warsaw, Poland (LifeNews.com) -- A Polish man who doctors said would survive only two to three years after an automobile accident in 1988 has awaken from a 19 year coma. Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, a 65 year-old former railway worker entered the coma during a time of Communist rule in his native country and woke to find it a democracy and to see lots of other changes. "When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski said. He credited his caring wife Gertruda with his...

A Polish man has woken up from a 19-year coma to find the Communist party no longer in power and food no longer rationed, Polish TV reports. Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. "Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he told Polish television. He credits his survival to his wife, Gertruda, who cared for him. Doctors gave him only two or three years to live after the accident. A comatose...

WARSAW, Poland - A railway worker who emerged from a 19-year coma woke to a radically altered Poland and thinks "the world is prettier now" than it was under communism, his wife said Sunday. ADVERTISEMENT Gertruda Grzebska, 63, said that for years she fed her husband Jan carefully with a spoon and moved his body to prevent bed sores... "He was so amazed to see the colorful streets, the goods," she said. "He says the world is prettier now" than it was 19 years ago, when Poland was still under communist rule. "I could not talk or do anything, now...

A Polish man has woken up from a 19-year coma to find the Communist party no longer in power and food no longer rationed, Polish TV reports. Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. "Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he told Polish television. He credits his survival to his wife, Gertruda, who cared for him. Doctors gave him only two or three years to live after the accident. A comatose...

WARSAW (AFP) - A Pole who spent 19 years in a coma has woken up and will now have to adapt to a country where the communists are no longer in power, a television station announced Friday. Railwayman Jan Grzebski fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988, the private channel Polsat said. In an interview, Grzebski said that he owed his survival to his wife, Gertruda. "She's the one who always took care of me. She saved my life," he said. Grzebski was a father of four at the time of the accident. He...

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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. “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...

People have been coming back from the dead by the hundreds during the past 15-20 years. All over the world, stone-cold-dead people are being resurrected by the fervent, focused prayers of Christians praying in the name of Jesus. By now, the totals are likely over a thousand. No exaggeration, no joke. My own book "Megashift: Igniting Spiritual Power" documents 52 countries where at least one person has been raised from the dead – with named eyewitnesses ... who have street addresses ... and phone numbers ... and fax numbers ... and e-mail addresses. I even throw in a few photographs....

Doctors call it a miracle. A Southern Colorado woman was in a vegetative state for more than six years, but now, she's talking for the first time. She spoke exclusively to 11 News. Christa Lilly had a heart attack then a stroke. That's the last thing she remembers. It was November of 2000, when Lilly slipped into a vegetative state, which is essentially like a coma, but with the eyes open. Lilly was unconscious and unaware of her surroundings. Now, for the first time in six and a half years, she's awake, alert, and talking. "I think it's wonderful. It...

Minneapolis, Nov. 09, 2006 (CNA) - Timothy Vakoc has lay nearly comatose in a Minnesota hospital. Last week, however, he shocked family, friends and caregivers by uttering his first words since being severely injured by an explosion in Iraq. 46 year-old Fr. Vakoc--a Minnesota native--first arrived in Iraq in 2003, following a stint as military chaplain in Bosnia and Germany. His duties in Iraq included holding prayer services and escorting the bodies of fallen soldiers to planes bound for the U.S. Shortly after celebrating Mass on May 24th, 2004--the 12th anniversary of his ordination as a priest--he was struck by...

Thoughts of woman in 'waking coma' revealed Brain scans of vegetative patient ignites debate over her awareness. Michael Hopkin Neuroscientists have reignited the debate over whether patients in a vegetative state are conscious of their surroundings, by claiming that a woman in such a 'waking coma' can respond to verbal commands. The researchers say that brain scans show that she can selectively think of performing certain actions, such as playing tennis, on request. The British-led research team made the discovery after examining the brain of a severely brain-damaged patient who had been in a vegetative state — defined as a...

DALLAS, Texas, August 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The children of a comatose woman are challenging in court the “compassionate reasons” for a Texas hospital’s decision to remove their mother’s life-saving treatment, asserting that their mother, a devout Baptist woman, never would consent to anyone but God ending her life. On August 8, just days after 61-year-old Ruthie Webster's insurance stopped full coverage of her long-term care, the Regency Hospital’s bioethics committee in North Dallas, Texas, unanimously told the Webster family that they would discontinue life-preserving dialysis treatment for their mother within 10 days. The hospital claimed that Ruthie Webster's physician...

/begin my translationN. Korea: Paralysis of Strategic Decision-making How high-level N. Korean defectors see 'N. Korean missile launches'Kim Jong-il's impulsive decision.... nobody can objectThe sentiment,  "Chinese also need to suffer," is rising   Cho Myong-chol, former professor of Kim Il-sung University Ignoring Chinese plea and going ahead with missile launches, flatly denouncing UN resolution on N. Korea, and loudly threatening to launch additional missiles, these recent actions of N. Korean leadership generate a lot of questions. How do former high-level figures, now defectors in S. Korea, who lived under N. Korean system, see the reason (behind the actions) and the psychological situation of N....