This case will bring hope to the families of comatose patients. An Emirati woman has regained consciousness after 27 years in a deep coma following a serious brain injury.
It was his son who announced the good news this Wednesday, April 24. Mounira Omar, an Emirati in a coma for almost 3 decades, just woke up inexplicably. It’s a circulation accident who plunged this woman into a long coma: Mounira Omar was then only 32 years old and was driving her 4-year-old son at the time to school in the city of al-Ain. But her car is hit by a bus, and she suffers severe brain damage. Luckily, the little boy escaped with a bruise on his head. When the doctors were uncertain about the chances of his mother waking up, he took it never lost hope.
A “very unusual” case
“Many doctors told us not to expect much after 15 or 20 years in a coma, but I never accepted that,” Omar, who is now 32, told AFP. . The doctor Friedemann Müller, who took care of Mounira Omar in a hospital in Germany where she had been transferred, speaks to her of a “awake coma“. She would in fact be in an intermediate stage between coma and consciousness. Before waking up, she was in a “state of minimal consciousness”, according to the doctor. He considers this a very unusual case: “in a ” awake coma”, patients can open their eyes, but not in a (traditional) coma. She could look at something briefly and in particular clearly react when she saw the face of her son”. This awakening after more than 20 years is a kind of miracle, which gives hope to many people whose loved ones are in the same situation. Normally ‘no patient wakes up from a coma after 27 years’
How to keep people in a coma in this state of minimal consciousness? “I would advise relatives to stay in touch with the patients,” Dr. Friedemann Müller told the German newspaper. Der Spiegel. According to him, contact is the most important: you have to show the patient that he is surrounded “Talking to them again and again, exposing them to new stimuli, mobilizing them and observing them closely.” It would be partly thanks to the skills of the staff of this hospital that Mounira Omar was able to wake up. They provided him with regular physiotherapy sessions on a very regular basis, supplemented by drug treatment for epilepsy.
In stable condition today
It was in 2018 that Mounira Omar woke up, but the family did not want to communicate this to the media immediately. “We wanted to see his condition stabilize before going public with our experience,” his son explained. Now 60, the mother is “in stable condition”. It obviously follows many treatmentsa physiotherapy and therapy, in the United Arab Emirates.
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