THE facts answer

23 minutes are enough to understand Rom’s 23 years
A man has been hostage of a wrong diagnosis. We are hostages too of an age that doesn’t comprehend our humanity.

A Belgian man has been hostage of a wrong diagnosis. We are hostages too of an age that doesn’t comprehend our humanity.
Imagine the life of Rom Houben, the Belgian man who for 23 years following a motor accident was imprisoned in his own body, unable to move a muscle, believed by his doctors to be in a coma, and yet capable of comprehending everything that happened around him.  Every day, he could see and hear the medical staff as they came and went around his bed. His mother would speak to him in the way people often speak to those presumed to be in what is called a persistent vegetative state, but she always believed he could hear.
When his mother told him that his father had died, Rom could not cry. He could only listen. His mother’s and sister’s intuition was that their beloved Rom was present, but the doctors and specialists, the physiotherapists and speech experts, all concluded that the patient was in a “permanent neuro-vegetative” condition.
In due course, his mother’s determination led her to get in touch with an expert in computer aids for the paralyzed, who brought his equipment to Rom’s bedside.  His mother said,  ”We needed to make him press the mouse. But how? He was lying down. He’s very spastic. He can’t control his movements. The doctor saw that he was moving his right foot. We put the mouse under the foot and they were shouting, ‘Push, Rom, push, Rom, push!’ And he pushed. The computer said, ‘I am Rom.’”
Later, an experimental neurologist, who was researching the “neuro-vegetative” condition, took a closer look and discovered that Rom Houben’s brain was functioning almost normally.
How, hearing of this miracle, is it possible to doubt that there is Something in the world that loves us with a love that cannot be extinguished?
This story, undoubtedly, raises all kinds of important ethical and moral questions about the capacity of human society to adjudicate on matters of life and death. Often, I find, such debates lead me into a moral maze in which I can pendulum between one side and the other.
But there is a way of avoiding this. It is to lie on a bed not for 23 years, or even 23 days, but perhaps for 23 minutes and think about the life of Rom Houben. Imagine his predicament. Imagine his thoughts, which can be accessed in a few of the phrases from an interview with him in Der Spiegal, conducted on the computer adapted to allow him to write his thoughts.
“I had dreamed myself away,” he wrote.
”I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.”
”I travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether.”
“I was only my consciousness and nothing else.”
The story of Rom Houben is the story of our time, the most dangerous and worrisome period for humanity since humankind began. We can perceive in his life perhaps the most extreme version imaginable of all our existences, trapped as we are in cultures which do not seem to understand the nature of our humanity and cannot hear the words we cannot speak.