Child ‘woken’ from 10-year sleep

Press, 28 August 1986, Page 10

Child ‘woken’ from 10-year sleep

NZPA-AP Shijiazhuang, China

Chinese surgeons who revived a 12-year-old girl who was unconscious for more than a decade because doctors had misdiagnosed her illness say she is recovering quickly, but they do not know whether she can regain years of missed development.

A more than three-hour brain operation on July 21 freed Xie Xiaoli from the rigid, blank-eyed stupor in which she had lain since

she was a little more than a year old. During a visit this week to her room at the People’s Liberation Army Air Force Hospital in Shijiazhuang, 280 km southwest of Peking, she had the relaxed appearance of someone recovering from a long illness.

Still too weak to move most of her muscles, she shifted her bright eyes around the room, responded alertly to music, smiled slightly and yawned. “They have given her a

second life,” Xie’s mother, Yang Xuqing, aged 38, said of the child’s doctors.

Xiaoli’s Rip Van Win-kle-like lapse into unconsciousness had begun 11 years ago after she fell from a bed on to her head in her family’s rural home, said her father, Xie Jingchen, aged 39. A lump on her scalp soon went away, but she began to fall down frequently, have spasms, and run a temperature.

After several months she slipped into uncons-

ciousness. Her eyes were dull, crossed, and motionless, her limbs were drawn tightly to her body, and her teeth were clenched. Xiaoli’s case was treated casually at some of the hospitals, where she was not even admitted, Yang said, bitterly.

Such complaints are common in China, where hospitals are overcrowded, doctors and nurses are lowly paid and sometimes poorly trained and medical equipment is often antiquated.