![]() But the next day, and for many days after that, zolpidem revived him, a few hours at a time.Ĭhris in 2008, shortly before his coma. A few hours later he became unresponsive. And then he began to talk (his first words were “Hello, Mummy”), and move (he could control his limbs and facial muscles). His eyes, which normally wandered the room, vacant and unfocused, flickered with the light of consciousness. But 20 minutes after his mother ground the tablet up and fed it to him through a straw, Viljoen began to stir. Thinking he was suffering from insomnia, his family doctor suggested zolpidem to help him sleep. A patient named Louis Viljoen, who, three years before, was declared vegetative after he was hit by a truck, had taken to clawing at his mattress during the night. The first report of a zolpidem awakening came from South Africa, in 1999. Only now, more than a decade after the initial discovery, are they taking a closer look. The early reports were so pronounced that until recently, doctors had a hard time believing them. ![]() Rather than put them to sleep, both Ambien and its generic twin, zolpidem, appear to awaken at least some of them. A growing body of case reports suggests that the popular sleep aid can have a profound - and paradoxical - effect on patients like Chris. So far, their best hope has come from an unlikely source: Ambien. What that means - what it says about his experience of the world around him or his prospects for further recovery - is something they are still trying to figure out.Ĭonvinced that the son they know and love is still “in there,” Chris’s parents have spent the past three years searching for a way to bring him back out. Doctors agree that Chris has progressed beyond a vegetative state, to a hazy realm known as minimal consciousness. On good days, they say, he can respond to basic commands - blink his eyes for yes, wiggle his finger for no, give a thumbs up when asked. Still, Wayne and Judy say that his cognition is improving. He can move only the slightest bit - his fingers and eyelids twitch, but his arms and legs remain mostly immobile - and his neck is not quite strong enough to hold up his head, which leans against a crescent-shaped support around his wheelchair headrest. Although he breathes on his own, his lungs battle a steady barrage of infections a feeding tube provides all his sustenance, and his muscles have contracted into short, twisted knots. Three years later, Chris still cannot talk. It was not the awakening of Hollywood movies in which the patient comes to, just as he was, speaking full sentences and completely mobile. He deserved every chance the hospital could give him. accident, he’d never given them much trouble at all. He was planning to take over the family repo business when Wayne retired in a few years. He liked playing basketball and fishing in the pond near his house. He was a good kid, a joker, but bashful, especially around girls. “This is our son.” Chris still lived with his parents. “This is not some dog we’re talking about putting down,” Wayne shouted. Even if they managed to keep his body alive, what was left of his brain would surely die in the days ahead. “Then they tried getting us to sign a do-not-resuscitate order.” Without one, the doctor explained, hospital staff would be forced to revive Chris each time he started slipping away, which could mean cracking his ribs and shocking him with electricity. “First they asked us to let them pull the plug,” Judy recalled one recent afternoon, as we sat in the living room of the Coxes’ house in a Memphis suburb. After 30 minutes, there is likely to be more dead tissue than living. Brain cells begin dying off just five minutes after blood stops delivering oxygen. It took the paramedics another 15 to get it pumping again even then, doctors had little hope he would survive. His parents learned later that he had taken too much.īy the time the ambulance arrived, Chris’s heart had been still for at least 15 minutes. His doctor had recently prescribed Oxycontin. accident the previous August left him with debilitating back pain that physical therapy did nothing to alleviate. As he pumped Chris’s chest and scooped out the vomit that had collected in his mouth, Judy ran to the kitchen and steadied herself long enough to call for an ambulance.Ĭhris was 26. ![]() Wayne jumped out of bed and raced down to the driveway, where he knelt over his son’s limp frame and tried frantically to elicit a breath or a heartbeat. He wasn’t breathing, and when she couldn’t revive him, she ran screaming into the house where her husband, Wayne, was still asleep. It was an October morning in 2008, and she had just stepped out the door to run an errand when she found him lying faceup in the driveway, ghost white, covered in purple splotches. The moment she saw him, Judy Cox knew her son was dead. ![]()
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