Woman wakes after 27 years unconscious

When Munira Abdulla had last been fully awake, the first George Bush was America’s president and the Soviet Union was nearing its demise. It was the year the Persian Gulf war ended.

In 1991, at the age of 32, Abdulla, from the oasis city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, suffered injuries in a road accident that left her in a state of reduced consciousness for most of the next three decades.

After 27 years, she awoke last June at a clinic near Munich, where doctors had been treating her for the complications of her long illness.

“I never gave up on her, because I always had a feeling that one day she will wake up,” said Omar Webair, her 32-year-old son, who was just 4 when the accident happened.

Dr Friedemann Müller, the chief physician at the Schön Clinic, a private hospital with campuses around Germany, said that Abdulla had been in a state of minimal consciousness. He said only a handful of cases like hers, in which a patient recovered after such a long period, had been recorded.

Patients in a state of reduced consciousness are usually classified into three categories. In a full coma, the patient shows no signs of being awake, with eyes closed, and is unresponsive to the environment. A persistent vegetative state includes those who seem awake but show no signs of awareness, while a minimally conscious state can include periods in which some response — such as moving a finger when asked — can be noted. Colloquially, all three categories are often described as comas.

Signs that Abdulla was recovering started to emerge last year when she began saying her son’s name. A couple of weeks later, she started repeating verses from the Quran.

“We didn’t believe it at first,” Müller said.

Abdulla had been at the German clinic for treatment for seizures and contorted muscles that made her body hard to handle and that kept her from being able to sit in a wheelchair safely. Part of the treatment was to install a device that delivered medication directly into her spine, a factor that Müller said could have brought on her recovery.

© 2019 New York Times News Service