I had a call from Emily's dad on Tuesday. Seems that she is ready to be moved to a "rehab hospital", but based on the July 12  diagnosis of the neurologist ("all hopeless, she's just a vegetable") Moss Rehab turned her down. What about all those indications of awareness I (and the nurses and sister and parents) saw? "All dumb reflexes", says the esteemed doctor, "nothing personal." Here's my heated rejoinder (addressed to Emily's sister).

But lest you think I'm just some sort of delusional Christian who believes when all the evidence is otherwise, let me say a few things in my scientific defense.

a) Nurses who deal with comatose patients know the difference between "unconscious" and "paralyzed". The nurses told me Emily was not unconscious. I talked to Emily, you talked to her, she's not a vegetable, and her responses are not mere "reflexes". So why is Dr Mengele saying this stuff? Because a lot of doctors deal with life-and-death decisions everyday, and while they don't start out becoming Materialist Utilitarians, the realities of Medical Insurance and weeping relatives force them into it. In the end, they smother their guilty consciences with liberal doses of "well, it wasn't a life worth living anyway" sort of nonsense. For his sake, I hope the Dr is Catholic so he can go to confession and avoid a very hot purgatory.

b) There are 4 ways to communicate with paralyzed people that I know of:
1) The Stephen Hawking approach using eye movements. Emily isn't there yet, but because of the circle of willis and the way the nerves leave the brain stem, the eyes are usually the last to go in cases of ALS, neck trauma and progressive brain malfunctions. Unfortunately, Em's brain damage was from the inside out, so her eyes don't seem to be under voluntary control right now. So we can't do the Stephen Hawking thing with her.
2) MRI brain scans. The article I linked to in my blog page, talks about two research scientists in England who estimate that 40% of the diagnoses of "persistent vegatative states" are wrong. They monitored the brain with MRI while talking to the patients and discovered that when they said "imagine you are playing tennis", the parts of the brain that direct the muscles was lighting up. With a bit of training, the patient could easily respond to yes/no questions. The MRI that Dr Mengele performed did none of these things. Since this is old news, he could have done it if he wanted to. But MRI requires a $10M instrument, so this isn't a practical solution.
3) EEG brain waves. This puts little electrodes (and lots of gooey gel) on the head and measures the electrical signals. Imagine that you put the same wires on the outside of your computer and tried to figure out what was going on. You can imagine that besides "awake" "asleep" and "meditating", there isn't a whole lot of information that comes from this. Personally, the equipment is about $100, so I'd like to plug the output into a computer and see if we can use some modern data processing software to get a few more bits of information out of the system. Dr Mengele didn't even try to do this with Emily...
4) Polygraph. This is monitoring things like breath rate (or chest muscle tone), blood pressure, heart rate, pupil dilation etc. These are indirect measures of excitement / fear etc, which aren't part of the conscious or voluntary nervous system. They are the principle components of a "lie detector". And Em had at least three of them hooked up to her in the ICU. So when I spoke to her, I could see the heart and pressure jump. When Bekah sang to her, they dropped and Em went to sleep. (The real reason for BBN.) This is the information that Dr Mengele calls "reflexes". But he's wrong, as every polygraph specialist can tell you, because there's a whole lot of information in this test. The only problem is that it isn't very good for communication, since none of us have any practice raising and lowering our heart rate.

What about Dr Mengele's comment about brain shrivelling? Well duh, her brain swelled up with the damage. Of course it shrank afterwards... And Dr Mengele didn't have a "before the lightning" MRI to compare to, so he doesn't really know how severe the shrinkage is. Tell him to stick his head in a pickle jar and see what happens...

Okay, Em has had #4, and a crude form of #2. I'd like to set her up with #3, and perhaps if she keeps healing, #1 would work too. So I called my electronics genius friend, and talked about Em. He was in a hurry, and spent only 9 minutes on the phone with me, but it sounded like he thought converting #3 to a communication tool wouldn't be too difficult. That is, if Em can hear us talking to her, then all I have to do is hook up this equipment with a speaker, and she can practice saying "no" and "yes" by thinking the right thoughts, until she gets the hang of it. After that, we can add words to her "EEG vocabulary" and we will have duplicated the Stephen Hawking computerized voice equipment.

An engineer in town has said that this technology can perhaps be used by the Army to control equipment without using hands or voice (say, you're a special forces operator in a vulnerable location). So he is willing to finance my research into this area, perhaps with $10k or so of equipment. (I'm supposed to research this and make him a proposal.)

Is it worth it? What if we can't get it to work? What if it works, then what?

I don't know about you, but if the gift of speech isn't worth a whole lot more than this, I don't know what is. After all, that was what God breathed into Adam to make him Man; it was the reason of the "Therefore" that defined marriage three paragraphs later; it was the partial denial that punished Babel and all mankind; and it was the divine word that rescued Man once again.

The real shame, is silence.