Considered in a coma, he was awake but paralyzed

For 23 years doctors have thought he was in a coma. But, says the patient from Belgium, he was awake, but unable to communicate because he was trapped in a totally paralyzed body.

"I screamed, but no sound came out," Roma Houben said, 46 year old patient. "I will never forget the day when they finally discovered what was wrong, it was my second birth," said this former student-engineer who learned to type words on a specially adapted computer.

Victim of a traffic accident in 1983, he has been treated at a hospital in Liege, Belgium, where doctors and nurses decided quickly that it was a vegetative state coma.

Medical examinations at the University of Liege discovered, three years ago, that his brain was intact. The patient recounted the ordeal in which he had lived for years, sentenced to hear everything that was said about him helplessly.

The worst was the day his mother and sister came to tell him about the death of his father. He wanted to cry but his body remained motionless.

"All the time I dreamed of a better life. The frustration is too weak a word to express what I felt," he said.

Today, he still can not move, but he can communicate via keyboard. "I want to read, talk to friends, and enjoy life now that people know I'm not dead," he said.

His story was revealed after the publication of an article in a medical journal by a neurologist Steven Laureys.

The problem, says Laureys quoted by the Spiegel magazine, "is that once a coma was diagnosed, it is very difficult to undo it. Every patient should be tested for at least 10 times before they finally define the coma state as vegetative," said the doctor.

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