Hope for brain-injured firefighter

A brain-injured US firefighter who started speaking after almost a decade of near-total silence has had moments of clarity since then but has not matched last weekend's startling progress, his wife said yesterday.

Don Herbert, who will turn 44 on Sunday, went without oxygen for several minutes after being trapped under a collapsed roof while fighting a house fire in December 1995. He spent 10 weeks in a coma and was left blind and with little, if any, memory.

But last weekend, he chatted with his wife Linda for 14 hours at his nursing home in New York state.

"He has had several infrequent moments of lucidity, which has given us much hope for further recovery," she said.

"Although the subsequent periods of lucidity were not of the quality of Saturday, they were still of a degree which was considerably higher than before Saturday."