PRETORIA – An Italian woman has woken from a coma after 10 months, BBC reported citing local media reports.
Cristina Rosi, 37, was seven months pregnant when she suffered a heart attack in July last year, the British broadcaster wrote.
Her daughter, Caterina, was delivered by emergency Caesarean section. However, Rosi was left in a coma with suspected brain damage.
She has now woken up and spoken her first word. “Mamma, we didn’t expect it, it was a real joy after so much suffering,” her husband Gabriele Succi, was quoted telling the La Nazione newspaper.
The news channel said Rosi was transferred to a clinic in Austria in April to receive specialist care during her recovery. Both her husband and mother were by her side when she spoke.
Her treatment abroad has been paid for by a crowdfunding page, which has so far raised more than US$208,000, for further rehabilitation, including physiotherapy.
“Cristina is hardly recognisable now,” Succi was quoted as saying by the Arezzo Notizie news website.
“She’s more relaxed, they removed her tracheotomy [and] through a pump they are giving her a medicine that should lead to other physical progress.”
The couple’s daughter spent a number of months in hospital due to a lack of oxygen during delivery.
In a similar case in 2019, a woman in the United Arab Emirates regained consciousness after spending 27 years in a comatose state, the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National reported.
Munira Abdulla, who was aged 32 at the time of the accident, she suffered a severe brain injury after the car she was travelling in with her then four-year-old son collided with a bus.
The National said Abdulla spent years in Emirati hospitals until April 2017, when the Crown Prince Court gave the family a grant for treatment in Germany
Doctors at the Schön Clinic in Germany took a holistic approach to Abdulla’s treatment, employing “a combination of physical therapy, medicine, operations and sensory stimulation,” Deutsche Welle reported.
ANA