Tag Archives: medical miracles

Health

I was diagnosed and ‘cured’ of lung cancer in the same day

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A grandmother in Texas was diagnosed and cured of lung cancer in the same day.

April Boudreau, 61, awoke from undergoing local anesthesia to discover that a tumor in her lungs had been identified — and removed — in one sitting.

“You pinch yourself because you can’t believe it’s true,” she told the Daily Mail. “This was all so simple, with no radiation or chemo.”

Boudreau had already undergone cancer treatments three times in her life, having survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma twice in 1984 and 1985 and breast cancer in 2002.

The grandmother was undergoing a yearly CT scan in January when doctors detected an alarming nodule on her right lung.

She was called into Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital for a follow-up test in the spring. During the lung biopsy, doctors confirmed the nodule was in fact early-stage lung cancer.

And so doctors sprung into action and decided to remove the cancerous cells immediately while Boudreau was under local anesthesia. The medical team employed a new, minimally invasive thoracic surgery technique that uses a robotically guided, ultra-thin catheter to target lesions in hard-to-reach areas of the lung.

Boudreau was undergoing a biopsy when doctors detected the cancer in her lungs and immediately removed it.
credit: Texas Health Harris Meth

Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth is one of the first hospitals in the state to adopt the new robotic-assisted technology, which can identify lung cancer tumors at an earlier stage compared to traditional diagnostic testing.

The 61-year-old awoke to shockingly discover that she had been both diagnosed and cleared of her cancer while she was under.

She said the only symptom she had experienced was growing a little out of breath, which she had initially chalked up to aging.

During her operation, doctors made just five tiny incisions on her side to remove the tumor, allowing her to go home the next day.

“I took pain pills for three days, and that’s all I needed. Within three days later, I was just normal, walking around. I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

She is now required to increase the frequency of her CT scans to every six months but is proud to announce that she is currently cancer-free.

One in 16 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer in their lifetime — meaning an estimated 236,740 people will be diagnosed with the disease in the US this year, according to research from the Lung Cancer Research Foundation.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide but last year those numbers hit an all-time low thanks to a decrease in smoking rates.

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Health

1 in 5 people recall ‘lucid dying’ after being revived by CPR

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A clearer picture of life after death — albeit short-lived — is coming into focus

A new study has shown that 20% of people on the brink of death have experienced “lucid dying.” The phenomenon is said to occur in the moments between undergoing cardiac arrest, when they are unconscious or dying, and receiving lifesaving cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

One in five survivors reported feeling separated from their body and observing events without pain or distress — which researchers have differentiated from hallucinations, delusions, dreams or living consciousness.

“These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death,” said lead researcher Dr. Sam Parnia. His team at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City presented their findings Sunday at a symposium as part of the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Chicago.

Parnia said the results indicate evidence that some people have a “unique inner conscious experience, including awareness without distress,” after physical death. These extraordinary experiences, as well as heightened brain activity at time of death, suggests that consciousness may carry on in some capacity after death.

The study suggests consciousness may not stop completely around the time of death.
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Researchers analyzed data from 567 hospital patients who had gone into cardiac arrest and received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020, in both US and UK hospitals. They furthermore included self-reported testimonies from 126 non-hospital survivors of cardiac arrest.

Patients were also tested for hidden brain activity during this time, revealing spikes up to an hour into CPR, including gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves — the same that may occur in the living while performing high-level thought processes.

Upon death, the brain is known to fire off a series of “disinhibition” signals, that open new pathways to memory and imagination. Scientists don’t understand the evolutionary purpose of this process, but it does raise “intriguing questions about human consciousness, even at death,” said Parnia.

Scientists have only begun to reckon with the notion of consciousness as more than just a side effect of having a functional brain. In a statement, Parnia urged for further study into the specific biomarkers of “clinical” consciousness.

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Health

Paralyzed man gets brain implant, immediately asks for ‘beer’

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He wanted some post-op hops.

A paralyzed man who was unable to move or communicate for months is now finally able to speak thanks to a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface system.

His first words? “I want a beer.”

The unnamed 36-year-old patient had been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive nervous system disease that affects the brain and spinal cord, resulting in loss of muscle control. As a result, the man was left unable to talk or even move his eyes, preventing him from communicating in any way, per a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

While his first request is astonishing, his case might also be groundbreaking in terms of recovery.

“Successful communication has previously been demonstrated with BCIs in individuals with paralysis, but, to our knowledge, ours is the first study to achieve communication by someone who has no remaining voluntary movement and hence for whom the BCI is now the sole means of communication,” exclaimed Dr. Jonas Zimmermann, the head neuroscientist at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, where the operation took place, Yahoo News reported.

A breakthrough came in 2018 when the ALS sufferer consented to be fitted for the BCVI at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva.

Surgeons implanted the beer-loving male’s motor cortex with two “intracortical microelectrode arrays,” which decipher the brain signals used for communication. These are then translated into speech in real time via a special speller program like a neurological Google Translate, as demonstrated in this video by the Wyss Center.

It took three months of trial and error for the unnamed patient to finally be able to answer “yes” or “no” when presented with letters, Yahoo News reported. Three weeks later, he was finally able to “say” his first sentence.

Communications generated through the “RoboCop”-esque mind-reader included a request to listen to the Tool song “Loud,” asking his mom for a head rub and even orders for various dishes to be fed to him through his tube, including goulash soup and sweet pea soup.

“For food, I want to have curry with potato, then Bolognese and potato soup,” read one of the orders. He was also able to interact with his wife and 4-year-old boy, to whom he told “I love my cool son.”

Communications generated through the “RoboCop”-esque mind-reader included a request to listen to the Tool song “Loud,” asking his mom for a head rub and even orders for various dishes to be fed to him through his tube, including goulash soup and sweet pea soup.
Wyss Center/YouTube
Until now, a brain implant had never been fully tested on a totally locked-in patient, meaning that scientists had no way of knowing if it even worked.
Wyss Center

Scientists were ecstatic about the progress. Until now, a brain implant had never been fully tested on a totally locked-in patient — meaning that scientists had no way of knowing if it even worked, the Independent reported.

“This study answers a long-standing question about whether people with complete locked-in syndrome — who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including movement of the eyes or mouth — also lose the ability of their brain to generate commands for communication,” said Zimmerman.

Best of all, the man was able to use the BCI on a laptop from the comfort of his own home.

“This is an important step for people living with ALS who are being cared for outside the hospital environment,” said George Kouvas, chief technology officer at the Wyss Center. “This technology, benefiting a patient and his family in their own environment, is a great example of how technological advances in the BCI field can be translated to create direct impact.”

“Successful communication has previously been demonstrated with BCIs in individuals with paralysis, but, to our knowledge, ours is the first study to achieve communication by someone who has no remaining voluntary movement,” exclaimed Dr. Jonas Zimmermann, the head neuroscientist at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva.
Wyss Center

Currently, more research is needed into BCI’s safety and effectiveness before it can be used more widely to treat ALS.

“This is experimental technology, our mission to further develop this technology and improve the lives of people with paralysis,” said Zimmerman.

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World

Indian man presumed dead after crash found alive in morgue

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An Indian man was declared dead following a motorcycle accident and placed in a morgue freezer – but shocked his family when they discovered that he was still breathing the next day.

Srikesh Kumar, 45, was in critical condition after he was struck by the motorcycle in Moradabad, east of the capital New Delhi, on Friday, Agence France-Presse reported.

He was declared dead on arrival at a private medical facility and was then taken to a government hospital.

“The emergency medical officer examined him. He did not find any signs of life and hence declared him dead,” Rajendra Kumar, the hospital’s medical superintendent, told the news agency on Sunday.

The body was then placed inside the freezer until his relatives arrived six hours later.

“When a police team and his family came over to initiate the paperwork for the autopsy, he was found alive,” Kumar said.

A man who was involved in a fatal accident in India was found to be alive after spending the night in a morgue.

“This is nothing short of a miracle,” he said, adding that the man remained comatose after the shocking discovery.

Kumar’s sister-in-law Madhu Bala noticed that he was still moving, The US Sun reported.

“He’s not at all dead. How did this happen? Look, he wants to say something, he is breathing,” Bala said in video that has gone viral.

“We will lodge a complaint against the doctors for negligence as they almost killed Srikesh by putting him in a freezer,” she told reporters.

Hospital chief Dr. Shiv Singh said “the emergency medical officer had seen the patient at 3 a.m. and there was no heartbeat. He had examined the man multiple times.

“Thereafter, he was declared dead but, in the morning, a police team and his family found him alive. A probe has been ordered. Our priority is now to save his life,” Singh added.

He said the incident was the “rarest of rare cases … We can’t call it negligence.”

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Health

HIV patient ‘cured’ herself without treatment, study suggests

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An Argentinian woman appears to have been naturally “cured” of HIV despite not being on medication, according to scientists who hailed the case as a “rare” hope for the nearly 38 million people infected with the virus.

The 30-year-old mom has been dubbed the “Esperanza patient” after the town where she lives — and whose name fittingly means “hope.”

The patient was diagnosed with HIV in 2013, according to research published Monday in the “Annals of Internal Medicine.”

She never felt sick or took medication, and a battery of recent tests did not find the virus, “despite analysis of massive numbers of cells from blood and tissues,” the study said.

The findings suggest “that this patient may have naturally achieved a sterilizing cure of HIV-1 infection,” the co-authors wrote.

“These observations raise the possibility that a sterilizing cure may be an extremely rare but possible outcome of HIV-1 infection,” the study concluded.

One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Xu Yu of the Ragon Institute in Boston, told NBC News, “This is really the miracle of the human immune system that did it.

“This gives us hope that the human immune system is powerful enough to control HIV and eliminate all the functional virus,” Yu added to the Boston Globe. “Time will tell, but we believe she has reached a sterilizing cure.”

Dr. Xu Yu, one of the study’s co-authors, called the development a “miracle.”
Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard

The patient’s case was similar to that of Loreen Willenberg, a 67-year-old California woman who also appeared to have cured herself despite not using antiretroviral drugs in the three decades after she was infected.

The unidentified woman in Esperanza had been extensively tested by the scientists in Argentina and Boston since 2019, with no signs of the virus.

Only the presence of antibodies appeared to confirm she had, in fact, ever been infected, the study said.

Scientists hope to discover exactly what happened in both cases so the knowledge can be used for future treatments and even cures for others.

Loreen Willenberg is another example of an exceptionally rare HIV case.
amfAR

“Just thinking that my condition might help achieve a cure for this virus makes me feel a great responsibility and commitment to make this a reality,” the “Esperanza patient” wrote to the Globe’s STAT News.

Her first child is healthy and HIV-free, and she and her partner are now expecting a second, said the woman, who did not want to be named.

“I enjoy being healthy,” she added to NBC News in Spanish in an email.

“I have a healthy family. I don’t have to medicate, and I live as though nothing has happened. This already is a privilege,” she said.

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World

Teen awakens from 10-month coma with no memory of COVID-19

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Joseph Flavill has no recollection of testing positive for the coronavirus last year — nor does he remember anything that happened during the past 11 months.

The 19-year-old Brit had been in a coma since March 1, 2020, after suffering a traumatic brain injury when the student was hit by a car while walking street-side in his hometown, Staffordshire Live first reported on Monday. It would be three weeks into late March before the UK entered its first nationwide lockdown of the pandemic.

“We also don’t know how much he understands as his accident was before the first lockdown, and it’s almost like he has slept through the whole pandemic,” said Sally Flavill Smith, Joseph’s aunt, in a statement.

Much of Flavill’s family have not been permitted to see him in person due to pandemic safety restrictions at Adderley Green, a rehabilitation center where he was transferred after waking up at Leicester General Hospital, where he’s been laid up since last year.

“How do you explain the pandemic to someone who has been in a coma?” asked Smith, whose nephew has also tested positive for COVID-19 twice — once while unconscious and again during rehab — and recovered.

“We try to keep it as simple as possible,” Smith also told the Guardian. “We don’t really have the time to go into the pandemic hugely — it just doesn’t feel real does it? When he can actually have the face-to-face contact, that will be the opportunity to actually try to explain to him what has happened.”

For now, the family visits with Flavill via video calls, though in December he was granted a brief visit home to celebrate his 19th birthday with his mom, Sharon Priestley — but wearing personal protection equipment and remaining at a safe social distance.

Though far from fully recovered, Flavill’s motor and cognitive functions are returning, slowly, said Smith. “We’ve still got a long journey ahead, but the steps he’s made in the last three weeks have been absolutely incredible.”

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