Whenever you hear about someone’s heart stopping and the person getting brought back to life, there are usually only a few minutes in between. But one man was pronounced dead and came back to life 32 minutes later.
David Verdegaal was on a business trip in April 1986. After he had checked into his hotel, he suffered a massive heart attack in his hotel room. After David was put into the ambulance, he died on his way to the hospital. Jill, David’s wife, quickly flew to Austria to be with her husband.
Jill explained, “The documentation we had from the doctors was that in the ambulance David’s heart stopped beating completely, he stopped breathing and he started to go blue. So…yes, he died.”
The ambulance took David to the University Hospital at Innsbruck. The doctors who worked on David explained that he suffered from ventricular fibrillation which means, “the heart is standing still, and no circulation is in the brain.”
The doctors shocked David’s heart three times with no success. The doctor decided to give his heart one more shock, and that last shock brought David back to life. Shortly after his heart started beating again, David was taken to the intensive care unit, but he was in a deep coma.
Since David’s brain was without oxygen for 30 minutes, the doctors assumed that he was going to be in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. The damage to David’s brain was severe. The medical term for his condition is apallic syndrome, which means a persistent vegetative state. The whole cortex of his brain was damaged.
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Though most of the doctors did not expect David to recover, he quickly proved them wrong, two weeks after being admitted. When David woke up, he was blind, paralyzed, and unable to talk.
Once David got back to England, a miracle happened. He was more than determined to get back to his old self and shocked his family and doctors when he began to restore his movements, like walking and writing.
Even though David had to learn everything from scratch, as if he was born again, he did exactly that, defying all the odds against him.
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