Pancho was a healthy farm worker who worked in California vineyards until one Sunday in the summer, he was in a car accident after a football game. After an operation for severe stomach damage, he was discharged from the hospital and he walked out, talking and thinking that he was on his way to recovery.
However, the next morning I was “vomiting and unable to hold myself,” he wrote. Doctors said he had had a brain stem stroke, apparently caused by a postoperative blood clot.
A week later, he woke up from a coma in a small, dark room. “I tried to move, but I couldn’t lift a finger, then I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get a word out,” he wrote. “So I started crying, but since I couldn’t make a sound, all I did was a series of horrible gestures.”
It was terrifying. “I wished I had never woken up from the coma I was in,” he wrote.
This new approach, called neural speech prosthetics, is part of a wave of innovations aimed at helping tens of thousands of people who cannot speak but whose brains contain the neural pathways to generate language, said Leigh Hochberg, a neurologist who works at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brown University, and the Department of Veterans Affairs who was not involved in the study, but who co-wrote a editorial about him.
Among these people, there could be some with brain damage, diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), or cerebral palsy, which causes patients not to have enough muscle control to be able to speak.
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