Was It a Miracle? Woman Wakes Up After 2 Years in Coma-Like State : Medicine: Experts advised her husband to prepare for the worst. ‘But I never gave up,’ he says. Neither did she.
Joe Brashers’ moist eyes lock onto a spot on the living room carpet as he recalls the low point in his wife’s two-year struggle to break out of a coma-like state.
His wife, Barbara, 45, underwent surgery on Oct. 12, 1989, for an aneurysm in her brain that led to a stroke. Complications followed the operation when she apparently suffered an allergic reaction to an anti-seizure drug, and less than two weeks later she slipped into a coma.
The experts advised Brashers, 68, to prepare for the worst. He placed a call to a funeral home.
“I always believed she would come through this, but I knew there was always the possibility I could be wrong. I had worried that I might go before she did, and there wouldn’t be anyone around to take care of her. But I never gave up.”
Neither did his wife, who last Dec. 18 spoke her first words in two years. Her doctor said she had come out of the initial coma after several months but remained in a less-severe “locked-in” state until her sudden awakening. Barbara Brashers has since surprised doctors by regaining some memory and motor skills they thought had been lost.
On Dec. 17, Joe Brashers was massaging his wife’s shoulders as he did almost every day when he visited her at the Golden Years nursing home in nearby Harrisonville, where she has been cared for since March, 1991.
Speaking more out of habit than for conversation, Joe asked if she wanted him to continue.
“Uh-huh,” came the startling response. She quickly picked up steam, and by the next day was calling the nurses by the names she had heard them call each other as she lay in bed alert, but unable to speak.
Even though Barbara was not in a true coma, nurses described her partial recovery as “miraculous.”
“It’s awfully unusual,” acknowledged Dr. Richard Price, her personal physician. “The Pope is the one who defines what a miracle is--but this comes close.”
Barbara still has periods of fogginess. Big patches of her life remain a blur. But she does remember her husband’s visits and even recalls riding in an ambulance when she was thought to be unconscious.
“I remember him coming to visit me,” Barbara told a recent visitor. After a pause, she added, “I love you, Joe” to her husband at her bedside.
Told how long she had been in hospitals and nursing homes, Barbara seemed surprised: “Has it been that long?” Then, like any healthy person, she began asking when she could go home.
Joe once asked his wife if she had ever given up hope. Without hesitating, she said she had not.
When asked why, she said to her husband: “Because you never did.”
Despite the tragic turn her life took on Oct. 12, 1989, when Barbara was running a day-care business out of her home and suddenly felt something pop in her head, the couple has found humor even at the most despairing times.
“I could have made it without you,” Barbara says playfully to her husband when she decides he’s had too much attention or is taking credit for her improvements.
Barbara lies slumped in her raised bed, her brown hair cut short. She seems amused by the attention she has received, but she wasn’t able to see her television debut. She said her vision is too blurred to see the image on a TV beside her bed.
Much of Barbara’s brain was damaged, either from a ruptured artery or a reaction to the anti-seizure drug, high fevers or a combination of factors.
She is still a quadriplegic and her speech is occasionally repetitive, as when she blurts out expletives and insults.
Another problem is Joe’s fixed retirement income, which runs far short of the portion of her medical bills that aren’t covered by Medicaid. Recent publicity has helped some, as individuals moved by the Brashers’ story contributed to a fund established to cover medical expenses.
Over the last two years, her husband sold some family items and gave up his hobby of fixing antique cars. But he says that was a small sacrifice to be able to stay with her, sometimes literally 24 hours a day for weeks on end.
“I would take one day at a time,” Joe says, explaining his routine at hospitals and a nursing home from the time of her surgery until March of last year.
“Every day when I got to her bed, I’d kiss her on the cheek and I’d tell her she was going to get better and one of these days we were going home.”
During the day he would massage her muscles, all the while reassuring her and telling jokes. When she coughed and her trachea tube was disturbed, he would chase after nurses to fix it.
Nearly a year ago, he moved his wife to the Golden Years home, where he believed she would get better care. While there, Barbara began showing some improvement, tracking with her eyes, for instance, or moving her thumb to indicate that she could understand some things. But she still couldn’t talk.
“I’d look at her and see her eyes were open,” Joe recalls. “But I just didn’t know if there was anything behind them.”
In October, 1989, during the first weeks after his wife’s surgery at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Joe said he arranged to stay at the hospital 24 hours a day. At night he would roll out a cot and sleep in his wife’s room. He left to eat only when nurses or doctors came to examine her.
When he did go home, it was only for a change of clothes, to grab a bite to eat or to relax by watching television before he dropped off to sleep.
The next morning would invariably present a new project--obtaining medical records, talking to lawyers, challenging bills he had received.
After Joe suffered a heart attack nearly 10 years ago, forcing him to retire, his wife started earning money by providing day care for 10 children. She kept that up for seven years.
The couple were married 22 years ago when Joe, then 46, was twice Barbara’s age. After meeting by chance at her mother’s dry cleaning store, the two started dating. “We became buddies,” Brashers said, though he admits having tried to pair her up with someone her age.
The couple never had children, though together they have four children from previous marriages.
Today, Joe’s face reveals a weariness from his struggle. Dark circles ring his eyes, which still burn with determination, but a pencil-thin mustache dances as he breaks into a laugh.
Brashers’ worn cowboy boots and silver belt buckle over sturdy jeans evoke an air of confidence.
“I’ve always been a loner myself,” he says. “The only people I talked to are smarter than I am, and there aren’t too many of them.”
A self-made man who ran his own air-conditioning and refrigerator repair service for 35 years, Joe does not leave the details to others. And while some people might be intimidated by brain surgeons, Joe learned what he could about the brain and didn’t hesitate to question the surgeons’ conclusions.
Price, his wife’s physician, politely describes Joe Brashers as “authoritative.”
“He’s a take-charge kind of person,” Price says. “That irritates people at times. But I don’t lose sleep over it.”
The full extent of Barbara’s problem is still unclear, though Price says the chance that she will walk again is “poor.”
Even so, her husband is determined to prove him wrong. Joe and nursing home officials are planning to transfer his wife to a rehabilitation center.
“The other day she complained of cramps in her legs,” Joe says excitedly. “I would massage those things, by golly. She hadn’t had any feeling for two years and all of a sudden she can feel cramps. So who knows?”
