Injured Man Abruptly Ends 9 Years of Silence

Doctors sought Tuesday to understand why a brain-damaged firefighter snapped to attention after nearly a decade of sitting silently in a wheelchair and watching television at his nursing home.

Firefighter Donald Herbert, 43, abruptly turned talkative and lucid to the delight of family and friends who visited him Saturday after he asked staff at the facility where his wife, Linda, was.

A news conference on Herbert’s condition was scheduled for today, said JoAnn Cavanaugh, spokeswoman for the Catholic Health System, which operates the nursing home near Buffalo, N.Y.

Herbert spent 14 hours chatting and catching up on news about his wife, four sons, friends and former firefighting colleagues. He then went into a deep sleep for 30 hours.

Herbert has maintained an improved condition but not to the extent of Saturday’s stunning revival, Cavanaugh said.

Buried under flaming debris while searching a Buffalo building in December 1995, Herbert went without oxygen for about six minutes before his rescue.

He lapsed into a coma for more than two months. When Herbert came out of it, he had lost his sight, his speech was halting and slurred, and he did not recognize loved ones.

There have been a few other widely publicized examples of brain-damaged patients showing sudden improvement after a number of years. In 2003, an Arkansas man, severely disabled and largely silent for 19 years after a car accident, stunned his mother by saying “Mom” and then asking for a Pepsi. His brain function remained limited, his family said months later.

And Tennessee police officer Gary Dockery, paralyzed and mute after a 1988 shooting, began speaking to his family one day in 1996. But after 18 hours, he never repeated the unbridled conversation of that day, though he remained more alert than he had been. He died the following year of a blood clot on his lung.

None of these people were in a “persistent vegetative state” as was Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose case raised end-of-life ethical discussions.