Ohio mother wakes up from coma seven months after doctors told family to take her off life support
A Ohio woman, a mother of two, reportedly woke up from coma nearly seven months after doctors had given up on her and told her family to turn off her life support after she had a seizure, reports state. Doctors had pronounced Kertisha Brabson 'brain dead' after they were unable to diagnose her condition. Brabson, however, made a full recovery after her mother sought out a specialist who diagnosed her and treated her anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a disease in which a person's antibodies attack his own brain cells.
The 31-year-old woman, while talking to WBNS on Wednesday, said that her symptoms started to show in September 2018 when she began to behave strangely and then suffered a seizure, resulting in her slipping into a coma. Reports state that she was taken to a hospital in Alliance, Ohio before the seizure where she was observed dancing, reaching for objects that did not exist and speaking in incoherent sentences.
Brabson told the outlet that she does not remember the next seven months that she spent in a hospital bed lying unconscious. Doctors, during this period, struggled to diagnose her condition and told her mother, Kertease Williams, that her daughter was 'brain-dead' and that it was advisable to 'pull the plug'. However, Williams was determined to save her daughter and continued hunting for specialists to properly diagnose her.
"Something had taken over and ruined my daughter. I just don't know what," Williams told the outlet. "We were going to keep moving her because once I saw the doctors scratching their heads, that clearly let me know they had given up and they didn't know what's going on with her. Every decision that I made was because she got two little people depending on their mother to come home and that was her kids."
Brabson was then taken to Ohio State's Brain and Spinal Hospital, where she was having up to 20 seizures a day. A stroke and neurocritical care specialist, Dr. Shraddha Mainali, while talking about Brabson's condition said that patients in her state have "mortality above 60 percent". Dr. Mainali said her team aggressively treated Brabson's encephalitis and ensured that medications did not worsen her condition. Brabson finally came out of coma and thought it was still September, the same day she had fallen asleep nearly seven months ago.
"[The nurse] was like 'yeah, Ms Brabson, you've been asleep for seven months'. I was like 'does my mom know?','' Brabson told the outlet.