Eatimulacion Electrica

ELECTRICAL STIMULATION – DR. EDWIN COOPER.
For someone left for dead 12 years ago, Candice Ivey seems to be doing pretty well. She's still got her homecoming queen looks and A-student smarts. She has earned a college degree and holds a job as a recreational therapist in a retirement community. She has, however, lost her ballerina grace and now walks a bit like her feet are asleep. She slurs herwords a little, too, which sometimes leads to trouble. "One time I got pulled over," she says in her North Carolina twang. "The cop looked at me and said, 'What have you been drinking?' I said, 'Nothing.' He said, 'Get out here and walk the line.' I was staggering all over the place. He said, 'All right, blow into this.' Of course I blew a zero, and he had to let me go."
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In November 1994, when Ivey was 17, a log truck T-boned her Chevy Blazer. She remembers nothing of the next two months. But it's all seared into the memory of her mother, Elaine, especially the part where the doctors toldher that Candice, who was in a coma and breathing by respirator, should be pronounced dead. Her brain, they said, was entirely and irreversibly destroyed by a week of swelling and bleeding and being pushed up against the inside of her skull like a ship scuttled on a reef.
A few days later, however, Candice proved the doctors wrong. Unhooked from the respirator, she continued to breathe on herown – something she couldn't have done if she were truly brain-dead. Now Elaine faced the horrible decision of whether or not to feed her child. The doctors warned her that Candice would probably never wake up, and if she did, she almost certainly would be unable to live independently. In the worst case, she would enter the permanent twilight known as a persistent vegetative state, in which shemight sleep and wake and move her limbs, yawn and sneeze and utter sounds, but not in a way that was purposeful. Elaine decided to keep the feeding tube in place, which, she recalls, made the neurosurgeon furious. "He thought I was just prolonging her agony and that I would have a vegetable on my hands," she says. "But when it's your child lying there, you'll do anything."
In this case, anythingincluded letting an orthopedic surgeon named Edwin Cooper try an experimental treatment. He approached Elaine out of the blue soon after the accident and urged her to let him put an electrified cuff on Candice's wrist. It sent a 20-milliampere charge – enough to make her hand clench and her arm tremble a little – into her median nerve, a major pathway to the brain. It might rouse her from her coma, hesaid.
"I thought it was hokey, if you want to know the truth," Elaine says. She agreed nonetheless – she was, she says, "drunk as a coot" from a combination of "nerve pills and a full glass of whisky" – and the cuff went on. Within a week, Elaine was sure that Candice was stirring. Her doctors doubted it. "They kept telling me it was just reflexes, but a momma knows." Then, just before NewYear's Day, a month after the accident, Cooper asked Candice how many little pigs there were. She held up three fingers.
Now 29, Candice Ivey is thrilled to see the 64-year-old Cooper when he shows up at her door. She gives him a big, warm hug and sits close to him on the couch. They chat about the presentation on traumatic brain injury that she recently gave to nurses at Cooper's hospital, and how...