The infection is almost always fatal, but a few people have survived. The parasite, which lives in warm bodies of freshwater, enters through the nose and eats its way along the nerves to the brain, where it munches away at brain cells. One of the more miraculous medical recoveries in recent years have been from infections with the "brain-eating" amoeba Naegleria fowleri. The treatment "awakened" many of Sacks' patients from their catatonia, hence the name of the film. Sacks administered the then-experimental drug L-Dopa, which increases levels of the brain chemical dopamine and is used to treat Parkinson's disease. The disease can trigger delayed physical and mental responses and lethargy, according to the National Institutes of Health. The film is based on the 1973 memoir by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, who treated patients who survived a form of encephalitis called encephalitis lethargica. The 1990 film "Awakenings," starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, is the true story of how a doctor revived a group of catatonic patients who survived an encephalitis epidemic in the 1920s. ![]() Others have since been treated successfully using the same protocol. Giese survived and recovered most of her cognitive abilities within a few months. Doctors put Giese in an induced coma to allow her immune system enough time to develop antibodies to the virus, and gave her antiviral drugs. When she was 15, Giese was infected by a bite from a rabid bat in Fond du Lac, Wisc. Jeanna Giese is the first person known to have survived rabies without receiving a vaccine, Scientific American reported. But after symptoms occur, survival is rare - there have been fewer than 10 documented cases of human survival from rabies, and only two of these patients had not received preventative drugs, according to the CDC. Usually transmitted to humans by bites from wild animals such as raccoons, skunks, bats and foxes, the rabies disease is preventable if treated by vaccination before symptoms begin. The rabies virus attacks the central nervous system, causing brain disease and death within days of the onset of symptoms. Giffords recovered, but she still has difficulty speaking and walking and her right arm is paralyzed.Įveryone's familiar with the image of a rabid dog, mouth frothing and ready to deliver a fatal bite. The bullet passed through Giffords' skull front-to-back, causing less damage than a shot passing from one hemisphere to the other would have done. Doctors removed part of her skull during surgery to prevent damage from brain swelling, and placed her in a medically induced coma, according to CNN. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head in an apparent assassination attempt, during a shooting that left six other people dead. But on occasion, people have been known to survive the brutal trauma of a bullet to the brain. White Bull lay in a near-coma for 16 years, when one day in 1999, as a nurse was rearranging her blankets, she reportedly sat up and said, "Don't do that!" Other coma cases of severely brain-damaged patients have been reported, but in most of these, patients either wake up within a few days or weeks, or remain in a coma state for the rest of their lives.įew injuries can be as instantly fatal as being shot in the head. Mads Gilbert, of the Tromso university hospital, Norway, said the key to surviving such hypothermia included "a spirit not to give up".A woman named Patricia White Bull entered a type of coma called a persistent vegetative state - in which the patient is awake but not responsive - while giving birth to her son, the LA Times reported. ![]() The case was described in the Lancet medical journal. She spent 60 days in intensive care, including 35 days receiving ventilator treatment.įive months after the accident she returned to work and she has since resumed hiking and skiing. However doctors re-warmed her while her circulation was maintained with a heart-lung machine until her heart started to beat again. On her arrival at hospital she was not breathing, her blood circulation had stopped, and her pupils did not respond to light. Ms Bagenholm was resuscitated and given oxygen on her way to hospital by air ambulance. The previous survival record was held by a child whose temperature fell to 14.4C. No one is known to have lived after becoming so cold before. Her temperature had fallen more than 23 degrees below normal. As colleagues struggled to rescue her from beneath the ice, her body temperature gradually dropped and her vital organs shut down.
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