(NaturalNews) Imagine being stuck in your bed, conscious but unable to
speak or move, for a quarter of your life, while everyone around you
thought you were just a comatose "vegetable." This is what happened to
50-year-old Rom Houben of Belgium, who back in 2006, and later reported
in 2009, was discovered to have actually been fully conscious, just
paralyzed, for all these years, following a near-fatal car accident he
suffered back in 1983.
It is one of the most nightmarish thoughts
imaginable, being stuck in a lifeless body but unable to communicate
with anyone for a full 23 straight years. But somehow, Houben was able
to survive this unimaginable experience that shatters much of what the
medical system thought it knew about brain damage and being unconscious.
The entire coma diagnosis process as we currently know it, in fact, is
now in question, as many more allegedly comatose individuals out there
could actually be fully conscious and aware of their surroundings.
According to the U.K.'s Guardian,
Houben has essentially been a prisoner in his own body since the early
1980s, unable to communicate with nurses, family and others who
continually tried to communicate with him. It was not until 2006 when a
new state-of-the-art PET scanning system came onto the scene that
Houben's caretakers came to realize the error of their assumptions --
Houben had all along been able to hear and understand life, as it was
taking place around his otherwise lifeless body.
"I screamed, but
there was nothing to hear," said Houben via a special keyboard that was
made for him following the discovery. "[I] traveled with my thoughts
into the past, or into another existence altogether. I was only my
consciousness and nothing else," added the former engineering student,
who speaks four different languages, about how he coped with his
vegetative life.
Recalling the day his caretakers first discovered that he had been fully conscious
all those years, Houben says it felt like a "second birth," as it quite
obviously changed the course of his entire existence in a major way.
All the anger, powerlessness and despair that Houben felt all those
years, which he says he soothed away through meditation and other
desperate means, was gone in an instant.
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