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UNITED STATES - A Colorado woman woke up to eat, drink and enjoy her life for three days after six years in a coma caused by a cardiac arrest and stroke.
"I'm fine," Christa Lilly, 49, told her mother last week - her first words in eight months. She relapsed into the coma three days later.
She has awakened four other times for periods from hours to days, since suffering a heart attack and stroke in November of 2000.
"I think it's wonderful. It makes me so happy," Lilly told a TV station. She also got to see youngest daughter, Chelcey, now 12, and three grandchildren.
Before her relapse on Wednesday, Lilly said her biggest frustration was learning to talk again. But after years of being fed from a tube, eating was no problem. "I've been eating cake," she said.
Doctors who care for Lilly have refused to believe, until now, reports by her mother, Minnie Smith, that Lilly has woken up several times in the past six years.
One doctor, Randall Bjork said: "She was smiling and grinning, and told my staff she wanted to go to a club, even doing a little chair dance in her wheelchair," Bjork said.
Lilly suffered a cardiac arrest in November 2000, and Smith has since cared for her daughter at home. This time after Lilly woke up, Smith removed her feeding tubes and took her out for her favourite foods, including catfish, cake and ice cream.
Bjork said doctors may have to redefine the term vegetative state for people such as Lilly. Currently, those people were described as being in a persistent vegetative state, and occasional wake-ups are treated as miracles. Doctors were now describing Lilly as being in a "minimally conscious state".
Bjork said he would like to try stimulating Lilly to bring her back to normal, but Smith was reluctant.
"I don't want my daughter to be a guinea pig for nobody," she said, adding that that Lilly would be back, if God allowed it.
There are other reports of patients waking up after slipping into a long-term vegetative state. Forty-three-year-old New York fireman Donald Herbert woke in 2005 after 10 years in a coma and said, "I want to talk to my wife." He was able to speak at length nearly a decade after he was hit by a collapsed roof and fell into a coma with loss of his memory and vision. Another American, Terry Wallis, woke in 2003 after a 19-year coma.
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