At 9 tonight on Ch4 is a program about a man who was in a coma for 19 years only to reawaken to find the world had moved on without him. According to the blurb he can't adjust and is still mentally stuck in the year he entered his coma.

I find the whole concept totally mind-boggling. Imagine you went to sleep this evening and the next time you woke up it was 2024. Would you even be able to remember what you were doing before you went to sleep. If I've slept for longer than I should sometimes I am aware of it, but a lot of the time I'm surprised when I look at the clock (particularly on a work morning!). I wonder whether he had any idea he'd been asleep that long when he woke up.

Would he have dreamt or was it one very long blank existence? Would you even recognise your friends and family when you opened your eyes? Nineteen years of his life gone without any experience of it. It must be worse than a prison sentence.

Stick your vids on and record it if you're watching the other side as it sounds fascinating.

cherz, i wanted to watch that but didnt know when it was on, just put it on now xxxx

Drat! Forgot this was on tonight, I've just been watching a Drama on ITV :mad2:

Saw this programme.

He was in a bit of a state wasn't he, and clearly locked in 1984. I liked his "I'm a hillbilly and proud of it".
The thing that impressed me most was the dedication of his mum and daughter.
Also, the forbearance of the British woman whose husband couldn't show affection after his accident - her determi9nation to keep the family together despite his attitude was inspiring.

Also, the forbearance of the British woman whose husband couldn't show affection after his accident - her determi9nation to keep the family together despite his attitude was inspiring.
Was this the young couple, and he had been in a coma for about 10 minutes?? If it was they were on GM:TV yesterday morning with their 4 year old. Yes I agree, it showed remarkable fotitude on her part - I wonder, however, how long that will last?

Its is amazing how the mind works isn't it.
Its like when someone has a stroke and certain information can't be retained.......or they start to drink the water from a vase of flowers because they can't recognise what its purpose is. Just amazing. Makes you appreciate your brain, it really does.
As for waking up from a coma after 19 years and being able to hold a conversation .......... its just like something from a dream.
Really felt sorry for the woman whos husbands frontal lobes were damaged from that car accident and now he feels no emotions........ must be heart breaking.

Also, the forbearance of the British woman whose husband couldn't show affection after his accident - her determi9nation to keep the family together despite his attitude was inspiring

Was this the young couple, and he had been in a coma for about 10 minutes?? If it was they were on GM:TV yesterday morning with their 4 year old. Yes I agree, it showed remarkable fotitude on her part - I wonder, however, how long that will last?

I really felt for this couple, it just seemed so unfair. I honestly don't know what I would do in that situation. Hopefully through some treatment things might get better.

What a difference 20 years makes though - if you had taken someone from the 18th century locked them away for 100 years and brought them back in the 19th century, there really would not have been much difference but 20 years in this century is so life-changing.

It showed how complex and how amazing the brain really is.

Oh Drat - another program I wanted to watch and forgot it was on - well roll on the repeat :)

Lucky Lucky man......He has no knowledge of

Chris De Burg
Rick Astley
Phil (bluddy everywhere then) Collins
Jason Donovon
Bros
nnnnn...nnnninieteen.....nnnnineteen
Vanilla Ice
CHESSSSSNEEEEEY Hawkes
Take That
Mr Blobby
A-ha
Robson & Jerome
Simply Red
Sinead O'Connor
Boyzone
Aqua
S Club 7

Ah but to think he missed out on

The Bangles
Tiffany (ok I was young then)
Belinda Carlisle
Lisa Stansfield
Carol Decker (T'Pau)
Keren Woodward, Sarah Dallin, and Siobhan Fahey (Bananrama)



Come to think of it.....He didn't miss much but was saved from plenty!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was astonished at the dedication of his daughter. She'd been a babe in arms when he'd had his accident so never knew him as the father he could have been. His wife moved away when she was still young never to see him again, and yet she still came back to nurse and support him. Amazing.

Once again it showed just how little we know about the brain. It all seems very vague 'this frontal lobe is responsible for blah blah'. The frontal lobe probably being equivalent to about the size of Euroasia on a global scale. Even the most experienced expert was groping around in the dark for answers.

This programme sounds remarkable, does anybody know if there is a repeat on any channel? Please pm me if you ever find out, just in case I forget to look on this thread...

Many thanks, will appreciate it!!

The Man Who Slept for 19 Years

Dr Martin Brookes

January 2005

Terry Wallis' 19-year journey back to consciousness is a remarkable story. But in June 1984, the time of his car crash, he was just another statistic; one more name on the list of 1.5 million Americans who sustain a brain injury each year. Perhaps it's going too far to say that Wallis was one of the fortunate ones, but he did at least survive his brain injury. Each year in America, 50,000 people are not so lucky.

Brain injury is the great silent epidemic. In the US alone there are estimated to be 5.3 million people (more than 2% of the entire population) living with disabilities brought on as a direct result of brain injury. It is the leading cause of death among children and young adults, and it kills 1.5 times more people annually than AIDS.

The UK has its own unnerving statistics. Each year, almost 12,000 people will suffer a head injury so severe that they will remain unconscious for six hours or more. After five years, only 15% of these people will have returned to work. Most head injuries are less severe of course. Of the one million people who visit a UK hospital with head injuries each year, the majority will arrive with only small bumps and knocks.

But even relatively minor head injuries can have serious consequences for the brain. The common symptoms of dizziness, nausea, headaches and memory loss can be complicated by depression, anxiety and mood swings. Most people will make a full recovery after three to four months, but in some cases the changes can be permanent.

The fragile organ

The brain can be damaged in a number of ways: through a stroke, tumour, infection, or a degenerative disease like Alzheimer's, for example. But probably the most common forms of brain injury stem from a physical trauma to the head.

The brain is an extremely delicate organ, with the consistency of firm blancmange. Any sudden jolt causes it to slide around, compressing and expanding as it goes. For the billions of neurons that make up the brain, this is bad news. If the jolt is serious enough, these long fragile nerve cells will be stretched, twisted and sheared.

The extent of internal damage can confound expectations. A gunshot wound to the head, for example, might seem catastrophic, and often is, but when an external object penetrates the skull, the impact is often localised. Contrast this with the kind of serious jolt to the head that might occur in a car crash. Though the skin might remain unbroken, the impact on the brain can be more diffuse, and more devastating as a consequence. The brain will be thrown backwards and forwards against the walls of the skull, causing extensive damage at the points of impact. A bad situation is made worse by the fact that the bones at the front of the skull have a rough, irregular texture that can literally shred the frontal cortex.

The initial impact is often only the start of the brain's problems. With nowhere else to go, blood escaping from burst arteries in the brain will gather in pressurized pools (called haemotomas) and squeeze the life out of neurons. The nerve cells come under further pressure from the swelling that occurs at the site of the injury (known as a cerebral oedema). If the swelling is serious enough, it can kill more neurons by cutting off their supply of blood and oxygen.

The brain bounces back

The brain is extremely sensitive to damage, but it is also surprisingly robust when it comes to recovery. Stroke victims, for instance, often suffer from partial paralysis or speech problems, but they usually regain some or all of their faculties over time. The speed and extent of recovery will depend on the location and extent of the injury, but the chances of improvement are generally much greater for the young than for the old.

A serious brain injury may condemn millions of neurons to death, but amazingly, new neurons may grow in their place. Recent research has shown that regeneration can occur in the hippocampus, a relatively primitive part of the brain that's associated with learning and memory. Elsewhere, the powers of neuron replacement seem restricted. Even so, the brain still has other strategies to overcome the injury.

When neurons die they release toxins that can paralyze neighbouring and otherwise healthy areas of the brain, exacerbating the effects of the initial injury. The job of cleaning up the toxins falls to the glial cells – the neurons' own support network. Once this mopping up operation is complete, millions of neurons are back in business. The disposal of toxic waste together with the rebuilding of damaged blood supplies can do much to aid the brain's initial period of recovery.

Elsewhere, surviving neurons themselves get in on the act, sprouting new lines of contact to help patch up damaged circuits; while the contacts themselves can become more sensitive to compensate for the loss of synaptic inputs. There is also evidence that the brain has circuits which are ordinarily silent but can be switched on in times of crisis.

Concussion and coma

Head injuries are often accompanied by a loss of consciousness. In mild cases, this means concussion lasting a few minutes or seconds. Concussion is caused by temporary neuronal paralysis, but strictly defined, there is no damage to the brain itself.

At the opposite end of the scale, comas are usually measured in terms of hours, days and weeks. They are typically caused by damage to the brain stem, an arousal centre located at the base of the brain. Injury, which can come from a direct hit or from pressure caused by swelling in other parts of the brain, effectively shuts down consciousness. Since the brain stem is a central hub for neuronal circuits, damage to this area can also have drastic knock-on effects that extend throughout the brain.

Comas are poorly understood and difficult to define. But in general, someone with their eyes closed all the time, who is unable to communicate or respond to instructions, is in a coma. Whether comatose people really are oblivious to the outside world is a moot point. People who have recovered from comas claim they had at least some awareness of their surroundings; they were just unable to demonstrate it. One apocryphal story even tells of a comatose Terry Wallis shaking his head when his family were presented with a massive doctor's bill.

Officially, the end of a coma is signalled by the opening of the eyes. Although it is a good sign that some functionality is returning to the arousal centre of the brain, people can remain trapped in so-called 'vegetative states' for months or even years after they open their eyes for the first time. In truth, people do not suddenly 'wake-up' from a coma; they make a slow and sometimes painful return to consciousness, via incremental improvements to their sense of themselves and their environment.

Healing power

When doctors first got a look at Terry Wallis after his car crash all those years ago, they knew that his prospects were not good. With extensive damage to his temporal lobe, frontal cortex and brain stem, the prognosis looked bleak. Days turned into weeks; weeks into months; months into years. The longer it went on, the worse his odds became. But his mother, Angilee, stuck by him on his 19-year journey back to consciousness, and his story became a real victory for the family who never gave up hope.

The doctors were right, of course: Wallis had all the symptoms of a lost cause. But the brain remains the most enigmatic of organs, tender yet tenacious, vulnerable but strong. It may be fragile, but it is nothing if not resourceful. Even in the most hopeless cases, it can still bounce back and surprise us.

But the brain doesn't get better just on its own. Like a muscle, it requires mental exercise to regain some of its strength. Specialised therapies are vital to the treatment of people recovering from brain injury. Even in older people, the brain retains a certain degree of plasticity, and faculties lost can sometimes be regained through the training and reworking of the brain pathways that remain. Angilee's routine visits to Terry's bedside may have been made more in hope than expectation, but who knows what essential nourishment her gentle but regular inputs provided?

Of course, Terry is not out of the woods yet. His awareness of himself and his surroundings are still distorted, and he seems to lack a short-term memory. Perhaps these faculties will never be regained. But if the Terry Wallis story teaches us anything, it is never say never.