Woman Awakens After 16 Years in Vegetative State

For 16 years, Patricia White Bull was unresponsive to the world--unable to speak, swallow or move much. On Christmas Eve, she suddenly snapped back to consciousness.

“Don’t do that,” she blurted out when nurses were trying to fix her nursing home bed Dec. 24.

Doctors cannot explain why White Bull, 42, awakened from the catatonic state she slipped into while delivering her fourth child. Her mother, Snowflake Flower, said it was a Christmas miracle from God.

Since then, White Bull--known as “Happi”--has been speaking her children’s names, catching up on family developments and spending a lot of time just watching her children and smiling.

“I just went up to her and gave her a hug, and she gave me a hug back,” said her oldest child, Cindi, a 26-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina. “It was the first time she had ever hugged back. It was scary at first. It was overwhelming emotionally.”

White Bull’s speech is clear but still limited. She has talked very little but listened a lot. Her hands, which had been clenched tightly for 16 years, have loosened.

She has been driven up into the mountains to breathe the fresh air. She has been wheeled around a shopping mall. She has eaten a small bite of pizza. And this week, with her ability to swallow improving, she ate chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy.

Pointing to new running shoes, she said: “I’m going to run.”

Doctors say White Bull’s condition was caused by a blood clot that lodged in her lung and caused her to stop breathing while her son Mark Jr. was being delivered by caesarean section. She was resuscitated, but suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen.

Cindi, Mark Jr., 16, and White Bull’s other children, Floris, 17, and Jesse, 19, have been raised by their father on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. They rushed back to Albuquerque when they heard their mother had awakened from the vegetative state they had been told would last the rest of her life.

What White Bull’s world was like for the last 16 years is still a mystery. “We haven’t been able to delve into what she’s thought about,” Mark Sr. said.

For three years after White Bull slipped into a catatonic state, her husband kept the children in Albuquerque, where he was a computer programmer for the city. But then, he said, “I grew to accept that nothing was going to change.”

He moved his children to the reservation so they could be raised with the help of his family. He took a job with the Standing Rock Sioux tribal government. And he sought a divorce.

But now, “If she recovers and she wants to reestablish a relationship with me, I’m here,” he said.