London, England, Jan 28, 2009 / 00:31 am
A woman who doctors believed could remain comatose indefinitely recently revived after her husband asked her for a kiss.
Just ten days after giving birth to her son, Telford, Shropshire resident Emma Ray suffered a heart attack and collapsed while shopping with her husband, Andrew. Andrew performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her, after which she was taken to a hospital where doctors were able to restart her heart.
“She could wake up the following day, she could wake up in a month, or you may be left with a sleeping beauty,” Andrew Ray said a doctor told him, according to the Daily Mail.
Andrew went to great lengths to try and rouse his 34 year-old wife from her comatose state, playing recordings of their baby son Alexander and of their daughter Ella and songs from their wedding reception.
“I would speak softly to her, clasp her hand, pinch her fingers, all the time telling her I loved her or begging her to wake up. By the time I asked her to kiss me I was approaching my wits' end,” he told the Daily Mail.
He bent over his wife’s hospital bed and said “Emma, if you can hear me, please just give me a kiss.”
“'What happened next was beyond my wildest dreams,” he told the Daily Mail. “She turned her head towards mine, puckered up her lips and gave me a little kiss.”
“I couldn't believe it. My heart felt like it was going to leap from my chest –it suddenly felt like a huge weight had been lifted.”
Doctors who witnessed the kiss were astonished by her response.
Emma ray continued to drift in an out of consciousness. Her brain had been oxygen-starved after her heart attack, resulting in short-term memory loss.
She was eventually allowed home but requires ongoing rehabilitation for the brain damage.
“The recovery is awful because I have so little memory,” Emma told the Daily Mail.
Her husband said he was grateful his wife had survived.
“She can walk quite well holding hands now, and at least our kids still have a mother and I still have a wife,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.