US vegetative state woman wakes for three days

A US woman who went into a vegetative state more than six years ago awoke this week for three days.

She spoke with her family and a television station in Colorado Springs before slipping back into unconsciousness.

“I’m fine,” Christa Lilly told her mother on Sunday, her first words in eight months. She has awakened four other times for briefer periods since suffering a heart attack and stroke in November of 2000.

“I think it’s wonderful. It makes me so happy,” Lilly told television station KKTV-TV. She also got to see youngest daughter, Chelcey, now 12, and three grandchildren.

Before her relapse yesterday, Lilly told the station her biggest frustration was learning how to talk again.

After years of being fed from a tube, eating was no problem. “I’ve been eating cake,” she said.

Her neurologist, Dr Randall Bjork, said he couldn’t explain how or why she awoke.

“I’m just not able to explain this on the basis of what we know about persistent vegetative states,” he said.

A vegetative state is much like a coma except Lilly’s eyes remain open. Bjork said that he’d never seen a similar quality of awakening.

Bjork said that unlike the much-publicised case of Terri Schiavo, Lilly was minimally conscious. He said she could awake again.

Schiavo was a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state who was at the centre of a legal battle between her parents and husband over whether or not to remove her feeding tube.

Schiavo’s husband was allowed to have her feeding tube removed in March 2005, and she died a few days later.