Trapped in a Coma for 20 Years: The Sarah Scantlin Miracle

In 1984, 18-year-old Sarah Scampi fell into a coma. For 20 years, she slept. She just lay pretty much unresponsive for 20 years. Doctors said she would never wake up. Then, in 2005, something extraordinary happened. For the first time in 20 years, Sarah spoke. It's an amazing day for the Scantlin family. A daughter who's been silent for 20 years is now talking again. Sarah's story is certainly a story of hope. That was a huge ray of sun beaming through this dark cloud. Neurologists all over said, this is not possible. And I said, oh yeah, you go there and you talk to her and you tell me that this isn't possible. I don't know why she has come back after 20 years. I don't know that anyone can give us an answer. This is the story of the real Sleeping Beauty. Hutchinson is a small town in Kansas in the Midwest of America. It is an old farming community in a forgotten corner of town. Lines nursing homes treat elderly in their firm residence. It is also the home to a medical miracle. Sarah Scantlin defied medical convention when she woke after being in a coma-like state for 20 years. Her friends and family had given up all hope that she would return to them. Doctors had told them she was lost forever. We know that after about a year, you've kind of reached the plateau in your recovery process. There are small changes that can sometimes be significant to family members, but they are minimal. It's a lot like somebody very dear to you dies. It's the day before the funeral and you never get to go. But Sarah awoke after 20 years. Never before in medical history has somebody been in a coma-like state for so long and started speaking again. Lori Shockley is Sarah's best friend. They met at the local high school. I had been friends with Sarah since sixth grade. We immediately hit it off. We became best of friends, almost sisters if you will. For the last 20 years, Lori has been making the three-hour journey to visit Sarah from her home in Kansas City. Until recently, these visits were the cause of great sadness, as she was always greeted by silence. Over the course of the 20 years, I saw very little changes in Sarah. Every time I went to see her, I didn't expect to go in and see anything different. And that's one of the things I had to deal with in my own mind, is this is as good as it gets. Now that Sarah has woken... Hi! How are you doing, sugar? Good! What's new about me today? Am I? Because that would make you old too, Sarah. That's funny. Did you notice I got new glasses? Do you know why I have new glasses? Because I'm getting old! Are you in a coma? Huh? Are you in a coma? Yeah, I am. That's alright, I don't care. 20 years in a coma have dramatically affected Sarah's body. Her joints have slenced and her voice is slurred as she is using muscles that have lay dormant. After 20 years of walking into a room to stone-cold silence, to walk in her room and to hear her say, Hi, Lori! The Sarah that's here and with us today is very much the same Sarah that was with us 20 years ago. She can talk to you and she can answer you and she can tell you when she's mad. And if you write her a letter, she'll read every word of it. And those are the things that inspire me. Who's your best friend? You. Who's my best friend? You. I love you so much. I love you too. I know you do. Sarah and Lori have a close friendship that has lasted nearly 30 years. But it is a relationship that was to change forever on one tragic evening in the autumn of 1984. I remember looking up and telling myself that it wasn't going to be that bad, she was going to be okay, she was going to be okay. And my next thought process was I needed to call her mom immediately. Sarah Scantlin amazed the medical community when she started speaking after being in a comatose state for 20 years. Since Sarah first started talking in January 2005, improvement has been a slow and hard-fought battle, one which she is fighting with extraordinary determination. How you doing? Good. Are you getting your nails done? Yeah. You look really, really nice today. Today is her father's birthday, and she has prepared a surprise for him. Happy birthday, Jim. Bless your heart. Very good, Sarah. That's all right, that's all right. This is the first time that Jim has heard his daughter sing happy birthday in 22 years. Happy birthday. I'll tell mom you sang happy birthday to me, okay? Sarah has left her parents almost bankrupt. They have sold the family home and live on a trailer park with the remainder of their possessions and memories of happier times. There's Sarah in her glory in high school. Who's your dream picture? Her Farrah Foster haircut. This is my favorite right here. She was probably five. We didn't want a picture taken. This was Sarah's 16th birthday. Those are all the high school pictures. Her senior dance, her senior prom. Life was a wonderful thing to her. I never, never saw her down. In 1984, 18-year-old Sarah started college. It was the beginning of her adult life. Sarah's attitude for life was vibrant and she was funny and she had many, many friends. She was always there for everybody. Her first time, Sarah was selected for the college cheerleading squad, the Dragon Dolls. I immediately liked her a lot because she was vivacious, friendly and outgoing. She was one of those people that just captured your heart. And I could tell that all the other girls liked her as well. On September the 22nd, the girls went out to celebrate. We had gone out to the local bar called Tapper's. We were just being college kids and partying and having a good time. As Tapper's closed that night, we were walking out to the car and I was in front of Sarah. The next thing I can recall is me getting pulled down out of the way. And I saw Sarah's body in the air and knew immediately she'd been hit by a car. And while she was still in the air, another car from the other direction hit her. She lay lifeless in the middle of the road like a rag doll. And my next thought process was I needed to call her mom immediately. It was Lori. And she was crying. And she said, Mom, Sarah's been hurt. Sarah's injuries were so serious that she had to be airlifted to a specialist emergency hospital 40 miles away in Wichita. What do you mean? I'm just, I'm stunned. I mean, I'm not in shock yet, but I mean, I'm just, I'm not comprehending anything. So, I mean, I drive like a madman to Wichita. When they arrived at the Wichita hospital, Jim and Betsy were informed that Sarah's condition was critical. The impact with the second car had fractured Sarah's skull, causing massive brain injuries. It's the center of all thought and emotion, but it is incredibly fragile. The skull encases it to protect it. If the brain starts to swell due to bruising or bleeding, then that protective casing can become a fatal trap. Sarah had massive hemorrhaging in her frontal lobe, which was forming into a blood clot the size of a fist. One very common problem following brain injury is swelling of the brain. This can occur on its own or it can occur in association with other kinds of damage, for example, the development of blood clots. And the problem with swelling within the skull is that there isn't anywhere for the brain to go. The only way to relieve that pressure is by removing a portion of the skull and taking the clot out. To save Sarah's life, her doctors had to perform dangerous surgery. I was starting to lose it and I started sobbing uncontrollably. I'm just scared to death. I was thinking, well, maybe she died and they just haven't told us yet. And they were in surgery forever and it's well up into the morning before they come out. After the surgery had finished, Betsy and Jim were allowed in to see their daughter. What they faced was every parent's worst nightmare. A neurosurgeon's sitting us down and saying there's a good possibility that Sarah is going to physically survive. However, the brain was shattered and Sarah, as we knew her, was dead. A coma means the patient's not responding to their environment. We speak to them, they don't answer back. We pinch them, they don't feel the pain. They don't do anything. Very little is known about this condition. Patients with brain injuries were kind of a mystic injury. They didn't really know what was going on in there and it was pretty much just wait and see whether they lived or died. What kind of function there was going to be if they did live. A coma is a transient state. The vegetative state is a state of wakefulness without awareness. A state in which there's a sleep-wake cycle but there's no evidence of communication. What the Glasgow Coma Scale invites you to do is to look at three aspects of someone's behaviour to try to come up with a measure of their conscious level. The scale gives you a score out of 15. Patients with a score of 8 or less are considered severe brain injuries. Tests on Sarah showed she was severely brain injured. She had a Glasgow Coma Scale of 5 or less because even after she left the hospital she wasn't responsive. She wouldn't respond to her environment. The longer a patient has been in a coma-like state, the less their chance of recovery. If you've been in a vegetative state just for a matter of a week or two, your chances of regaining awareness are pretty good. If you have been in a vegetative state for a year, your chances of regaining awareness are very low, of the order of a few percent at best. As the weeks turned to months, hopes that Sarah would ever wake up started to fade. She was transferred to the Golden Plains Nursing Home, where she would lay unresponsive for the next 20 years. Sarah's best friend, Laurie, moved on with her life. She moved away and started a family, but she always felt responsible for the accident that caused Sarah's brain injury. Carried a lot of guilt with me, continued to have nightmares at least once a month for approximately 20 years. Why am I still here in the capacity in which I am here, and she's not? Why was the car directed at her versus myself? Sarah's doctors encouraged her friends and family to accept that she would be trapped in a vegetative state forever. Despite this, they tried desperately to wake her. Pictures, constantly putting pictures in front of her and saying, do you remember this, in hopes that she's going to say, oh yeah, I remember that, or music, and again, to no response. And efforts weren't just confined to her bedside. Her mother brought her here in a wheelchair, thinking if she saw the girls again, it was a part of the atmosphere, maybe it would bring something back in her. When she came, I looked in her eyes, and I thought she was gone. No matter what Sarah's parents or Laurie tried, they failed to elicit a response from her. In deep sadness, we gave up, and basically just says, Sarah is in such dire straits, and so severely injured, it's foolish and self-defeating to drain herself anymore, hoping for the impossible. And it's unimaginable the torment that it causes. Days became months, months became years. With somebody in a comatose state like that, there's really no resolution. You're just hung there. Like sleeping beauty, Sarah slept on. But there was little hope of a fairy tale ending. If she ever woke, it was likely that the young woman friends and family had known, was gone forever. Even patients who recover from relatively short comas can be affected for the rest of their lives. On the other side of the Atlantic... Hello, Flopsy. Oh, you want some first, don't you? You want some? It can be traumatic for the families of brain injury victims. After Shana woke up, her father Tristan struggled to accept the dramatic changes in his daughter. The last year before Shana's accident, she planned with her brother, this photograph and this letter, which they sent to us. It reads, thank you for an absolutely wonderful holiday. I can't wait till next year. Massive hugs and kisses. Love, Shana. The very next time she wrote to me was almost two years later. She has just about managed to write my name, Higgledy-Piggedy, at the top, as you can see. But it is now in the hand of probably a five or six year old with sweet but very innocent little diagrams and messages on it. In June 1997, Shana had spent the weekend at Glastonbury Music Festival. I had been at Glastonbury with five friends and we were all into dance music, so most of the time we were in dance tents, dancing. I had an absolutely brilliant time. After four days of partying, the friends were travelling back to their homes in Brighton. Hit a crash barrier. Either died instantaneously. I went straight through the windscreen, landing on the road, on my head, on that side, at 90 miles an hour, fracturing my skull. Shana fell into a deep coma. Her parents were told to expect the worst. There were a number of occasions where we were approached jointly and also individually about the possibility that we should let Shana slip away. One particular occasion, after about three weeks, the senior doctor took me into his office at the side of the unit and I was then put under fairly intensive pressure. There's no way you're going to give up. There's just no way you're going to give up. As far as I'm concerned, I'm prolonging her life by keeping her on this machine and there's no way we're going to have it turned off. I should never forget how close we were. I don't know how I'd live myself now if I had taken the other decision. After 23 days trapped in a coma, Shana astounded everybody when she started to wake up. I just wanted to cry. I was just so happy. It was like I was on cloud nine. We are told that if 100 people sustained the injuries that Shana did, 90 would die, seven would live a very poor state of existence and three out of that hundred could achieve a recovery, something approaching Shana's. First thing that I remember from after my accident was being wheeled into the house at home with no hair. I didn't care that I was in a wheelchair. I just saw myself in the mirror with no hair. Who's stolen my hair? Where's my hair gone? Being allowed home was only the start of her recovery process. It was like going back to being a toddler again. I had to relearn absolutely everything, to walk, to even simple things like to dress, to use the bathroom. It was horrible. Like Sarah Scantlin, Shana had severe injuries to the frontal lobe of her brain. The frontal lobe of the brain is really the personality centre. Patients who have frontal lobe injuries often times are very uninhibited. Generally you see their pre-injury personality sort of blossom. So if they were a very outgoing, social, talkative person, they become even more so. Her inhibitions were just like a child's really. She used to have terrible tantrums if she couldn't get her own way. I threw a few punches at my mum which I dread to talk about but which I feel ashamed about and I don't like the fact that I did it. Shana struggled to come to terms with her situation. She had a couple of suicide attempts. One day she slashed her legs with a razor and I just, you know, it was so frightening. I just didn't know how to help her anymore. She most certainly was not the person, the daughter that we had before her accident. Shana's parents didn't know if they would ever get back the daughter they knew and loved. They realised Shana, like all brain injured patients, would need professional help to have any chance of making a full recovery. Sarah Scantlin lay helpless at Golden Plains Nursing Home. Seasons came and went without any change in her condition. I continued for years to go visit her and there's not a lot to say when somebody's not responding back to you though. I would go to see her and my visits would become shorter and fewer and farther between. Then, after 17 years of silence, there was a dramatic development. Sarah began to scream. Friends and family were filled with hope. They believed these screams could be the start of meaningful communication. Sarah finally got her voice back, which I thought was going to be nice, however Sarah just screamed. As her cries continued, the initial hope faded. I hate that scream because I do not know what that scream means. Does that mean don't go? Does that mean I love you? Does it mean don't come anymore? What does it mean? I would have to tell her I'd have to make my journey back to Kansas City and she would scream to which I would hear her all the way down the halls of Golden Plains. It just broke my heart. It's heart-wrenching. It's heart-wrenching and you walk out and she's still sitting there with nobody. It's worse than the silence because now you can hear it in your head. Sarah's family was forced to accept that her screaming might continue forever. But then, after three years, something extraordinary happened. In February 2005, 20 years after Sarah Stanton first fell into her coma, her parents received an urgent phone call. It was one of the nurses at Golden Plains. She said, I got somebody here that wants to talk to you. And then I hear Sarah go, hi mom. And I said, Sarah, is that you? Yeah. And I said, well what are you doing? Nothing. It's like when your baby first starts to talk. It's the same relation I had the first time I heard him say mama. It really is. Betsy then immediately phoned Lori. She said, Lor, are you sitting down? And I said, no, do I need to be? And she said, Sarah's talking. And chills went from the tip of my head to the tips of my toes. And just saying that again gives me chills. I said, what do you mean she's talking? She says, she called me on the phone and she's talking. And she asked for makeup. Ms. Vane Sarah, that's one of the first things she asked her for was to bring makeup. I knew that I needed to get there as quickly as I could. She was just. Nobody had been in a coma-like state for longer and started talking. Hi. It's an amazing day for the Scantlin family. A daughter who's been silent for 20 years is now talking again. After 20 years of silence, it's hearing this. Hello. That is the most beautiful music Jim and Betsy Scantlin could ever ask to hear. No one, including her doctors, really knows how well Sarah will ever get. But as her dad puts it with her determination, Sarah will carry it as far as she wants to. After 20 years of despairing and resignation, she can speak well enough that you understand. And it confirms that she is cognizant of her environment. So that was a huge ray of sun beaming through this dark cloud. Lori has been haunted by what she witnessed the night of the accident. She's visiting Sarah's parents to seek their advice on how she can move on at long last. Lori! My number two daughter. The relationships were warm enough between my family and her family that my relationship with her folks were mom and dad Scantlin. That's just how I know them. We've talked a lot since this has all happened. You do start thinking about it again. To see that destroyed is probably the heaviest traumatic thing anyone could go through. And for whatever reason, one day, I guess this is after Sarah started talking again, I drive out there on purpose and I stop and I get out of the car and I said, It's nice to visit the place where Sarah had her last best fun. And I put that in a lot more positive way. And it was really neat because she was with her best friend. So think of it in those terms. You were with Sarah the last night Sarah was having fun. Hey! Who's here? My mom and dad. You bet. Good to see my girl. How you doing? Fine. Good. Sarah's emergence after two decades was like a fairy tale. Doctors were baffled by her recovery. Sarah's case is certainly unique in that most patients with her severe head injury that are comatose for those 20 years don't have the recovery that she has had. She is doing things that we can't explain. There's no medical reason to my knowledge that Sarah should be talking today. I don't think there's an answer for it. And I don't, I can't give you that answer. I think Sarah laid there long enough. She said, I am getting sick and tired of this. And put her entire being into this urge that I am going to get through this blackness and this impossible maze. I'm going to find an exit. I think the intriguing part about all of this is nobody knows the answers. Closer examination of Sarah's brain scans makes her newfound ability to talk even more extraordinary. When the surgeons removed the blood clot that threatened to kill her they had to destroy part of the frontal lobe of her brain. This is a CAT scan of Sarah's brain performed a couple of years ago which shows that there is quite extensive damage to the front of the left side of the brain. This damage is likely to include Broca's area, the language area at the front of the brain which is required for processing fluent speech. Incredibly, Sarah was able to regain the power of speech with this part of the brain destroyed. There is a large portion in everybody's brain that is not being used or is what I call in backup mode. When a patient is challenged and stimulated we all hope that those dormant areas of the brain can pick up some of those functions what we all call neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a relatively new theory that refers to the ability of the brain to change. In Sarah's case, this may have allowed her to start talking again. The right hemisphere seems relatively well preserved. The right hemisphere does often have some capacity for language and it's possible that over time that capacity might develop to allow speech to recover. Sarah is now a 41-year-old woman but she still has the same love of make-up that she did as a teenager. What colours do you like to wear? What eye shadow colour do you like? Pink. Pink, yeah. Is that colour alright for your blush? Yeah, okay. The reality is that Sarah still believes she is a teenager. People who have woken from long-term comas often have a distorted view of the passage of time. Tell me your date of birth and the year. May 2nd. May 2nd, which year? 1966. 1966? Tell me how old you are. 19. Yeah. I don't think she really grasped the time thing. I think that in this 20 years, it seems like yesterday to her. She just looks in question like, how is this possible that you have four children? And you can tell there's a question there in her mind that she just can't quite put it together. The idea that someone suddenly wakes up from a coma and is normal again is only what you see in television dramas. You have your old memories from many years ago that are ingrained in your head, but the recent new learning tends to be a struggle. Since she woke up, Sarah has shocked everybody by describing what she experienced during those 20 years. Are you all fixed up now? Ooh, you look nice. How could you hear? How was your hearing? But you couldn't see as well? Yeah. Sarah also claims to remember events that happened while she was in her coma. Do you remember about what somebody says, 9-11? What's that mean? It was a bad deal. A bad deal? What hit those buildings? A plane. A plane, exactly. What did it do to a lot of people? Killed them. Yeah, killed them, that's right. Based on this apparent level of awareness, doctors now believe that Sarah was in what is called a MCS. The minimally conscious state is a state in which there is some early evidence of recovery, some attempt to communicate on the patient's part, some evidence of purposeful action. Clearly there was a lot of sensory intake coming in. She just wasn't able to express outwardly what was going on. MCS is a recently described condition. There was no name for it when Sarah first fell into her coma. This formation of a new diagnosis was controversial. It raised the specter that patients like Sarah had been written off too quickly. Can you imagine having a high level or a level of awareness and not being able to express it? I said to me it would be like being, you remember when you were a kid and you'd have a nightmare and you couldn't quite get out of it? After 20 years of sleep, Sarah's emergence was not a fairytale ending. Now her challenge is to see how far she can recover. 18 months after coming out of her three week coma, Sharna Thwaites had regained the power of speech, just started walking again. But she was still suffering from the effects of her brain injury. I just didn't know how to cope with her anymore, her frustrations and her anger at being like this. She couldn't understand as she got better why she couldn't lead a normal life, but she was vulnerable and she really couldn't take care of herself. Her parents sent her to a specialist rehabilitation unit to help her overcome her disability. Today Sharna is making the two hour journey to Banstead near London, England. It is the first time she's been back in seven years. Since I was at Banstead I think I've improved a lot. I've done five years at college, now qualified to hopefully get into university this autumn. And I can't wait to tell them that. I'm looking forward to going back to show off, but I don't know, I don't want to sound big headed. But then I don't know why I shouldn't be, because when someone's been through what I've been through and come as far as this, then you've got a right to show it off. Sharna has arranged to meet the carers who were so instrumental in helping her recover from her brain injuries. Most of the people who come here have been in a coma, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. They all have some cognitive difficulties, so they might have disinhibition, they probably have personality shifts and typically they don't understand or accept that there's anything wrong with them. One of the main objectives of staying at the brain unit is physical rehabilitation. Sharna had to overcome paralysis on her right side. I remember doing this with the balloon, some use of my right hand, because my right hand was just locked up like that. You made very good progress with that though, didn't you? Because when you first came here you didn't want to use your right hand at all. No, I didn't. No, no. You did some work on balance, didn't you? Yes. And still now, ten years on, balancing on the right side, my leg goes wobbly and everything. So I've got to practice on that one. Rehabilitation also helps with any psychological damage. They're having to come to terms with the fact that they are not the person they were, so we have a lot of grieving for the person who was, as well as understanding the person who is. During her year at Banstead, Sharna improved greatly. For the final two months, she lived independently in a cottage in the grounds of the unit. Hey. Changed a bit. Kitchen. Kitchens are exactly the same. Plus my bedroom, it's just here. I was in this room. Does it bring back lots of memories? Yeah, it does. Sharna is a very good example of what rehabilitation after acquired brain injury can do. She left here with much greater life expectation than she had before. Brings back a lot of memories, both good and bad, but I wouldn't be where I am now if it wasn't for Banstead. So it's helped me come on this far. It's great to see how well she's progressed. It's absolutely fantastic. After a ten-year struggle, Sharna has made a remarkable recovery. She lives a full life with good friends and a boyfriend, Gary, who she's been dating for two years. But she will always suffer from the effects of the injuries that put her in a coma. The most difficult thing for me to accept has been the loss of my intelligence. I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to go far, and now I'd fail the exam straight away. That is very hard to accept. A 100% recovery, I couldn't possibly even envisage what that would be. If you mean a 100% recovery to the person she was before, then no, we won't experience that. But we have another daughter now, a different person, and she's 100% the person she is. Sharna took years of rehabilitation to recover from her 23-day coma. After 20 years in a minimally conscious state, Sarah Scantlin faces a much greater battle of recovery. Since Sarah Scantlin first emerged from her coma-like state, she has made extraordinary progress. Sarah's mind has broken free from her coma, but her body still suffers the effects of being unable to move for 20 years. Her nursing home provides physical therapy three times a week. Doctors have decided Sarah's first big goal is to feed herself again. Sarah is improving by small steps, but they will give her greater independence. You know, it's 20 years. You can't do it just within a few months. It'll take some time. And I think she's doing really good. When Sarah comes for her rehabilitation, she will have comprehensive therapies. We primarily use three disciplines, physical, occupational, and speech therapy. It mostly comes down to hard work and therapy expertise, finding out what she can do, finding out ways to allow her to do as much as she can herself. As someone who is very close to her age, I could see where she was at 18 and where I was at 18, and how life-changing it was for someone who had so many goals and ambitions, and the family had dreams for her, and these last 20 years had not been what they had prepared for. Sarah amazed the medical community when she defied all odds to find her voice again. She is determined to break new boundaries and continue her fairy tale recovery. So what are we going to try to do next? What are some of your goals? Do what? Walk. Oh, that's a big one. Well, all the more. Boy, I'd love to see that, Sarah, and it is certainly possible. Besides walking, and boy, that's a big one, that's great, what else do you want to try to do? Give me another one. You want to do what? Say it again. You want to walk, all right, okay. But are there other things? Go home, yeah, I know that. Wow, you have to, oh, Sarah, you're just great. I'm sure glad you're in my life. You're the best. I couldn't have found a better daughter. Sarah has proved to all of us that there's hope. The mindset was that she would lay lifeless the rest of her life, and the fact that she can talk and can communicate is a miraculous story of hope. I thought she was condemned for 20 years, and now we've had this ray of sunlight, and Sarah will take it as far as Sarah can take it. I'll guarantee you that. You've just surprised the world, and I'm betting the dollar you're going to do more and more and more. There's nothing that Sarah can't do.