Buffalo firefighter suddenly improves after ten years without memories

Donald Herbert, a firefighter from Buffalo, New York, has lived in a nursing home for the past seven years, mostly silent, nearly blind and with severe memory impairment since injuries leading to oxygen deprivation occured at an apartment fire in 1995. Over this past weekend, he suddenly became animated and asked for his family, believing he had lost only about three months time and not the ten years that have changed his youngest son -- a toddler -- into a 13-year-old boy who answered the phone when Herbert had a nurse call home.

By all accounts, this change seems miraculous and how permanent or complete Herbert's recovery will be is unknown yet, but there are some salient points to his story with regard to disability. From the NYT:

In 1999, a year after he was moved to the nursing home, Linda Herbert [his wife] prevailed in a brief legal fight with Mr. Herbert's parents, Geraldine and Donald P. Herbert, over who should have control over decisions in a medical emergency, like pneumonia or a serious infection. All agreed that extraordinary resuscitative measures should not be taken in the event of a stroke or a heart attack.

No one has asked any of the Herberts if they would have signed a DNR ("Do Not Resuscitate" order) had they known the firefighter would wake up in a decade and recognize family and friends (and to be fair, it's not the sort of thing to be routinely expected), but it's quite possible the verdict wouldn't have been unanimous. And so little is really understood about the human brain that experts cannot predict or explain when a "miraculous" recovery of this sort might happen. From Newsday.com:

Dr. Rose Lynn Sherr of New York University Medical Center said when patients recover from brain injuries, they usually do so within two or three years.

"It's almost unheard of after 10 years," she said, "but sometimes things do happen and people suddenly improve and we don't understand why."

And while nondisabled observers might ponder what life "trapped inside" a nonresponsive body or brain might be like, even imagining it to be hellish and a living death, as many said about Terri Schiavo, Herbert's experience of the past decade doesn't seem to be a hell of any kind. He thought he'd been recovering for about three months. And, of course, as people are wont to do, he seems happy to be alive and visit with family and friends. Good thing that DNR didn't get put to use. Good thing he didn't have a feeding tube.