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Brain dead woman comes back to life after ambulance hits huge pothole on UP highway
(www.wionews.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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An alternative headline is that a woman was nearly burned alive after being misdiagnosed.
Reading the article, it doesn't seem like a misdiagnosis. She showed all the signs of brain death and her chances of living were basically zero. Her family decided to start making preparations. When her body was being delivered back in an ambulance, they hit a pothole that jolted her brain back into action. Genuinely crazy medical story, but with 8,000,000,000 people on earth, this happening to at least one person is all but guaranteed.
Brain dead diagnosis is not very scientific based.
Not really. And let me explain.
You can see if there is electrical activity signals , you can do a fMRI scan (shows blood usage which indicates changes in cognitive processing. Most brains show patterns of blood use when doing tasks).
But. When you are unconscious, these always show low activity.
It's not really that much different than someone being under anesthesia. They show the same pattern of brain activity as someone in a coma.
Now sometimes there is specific abnormalities for an injured region. But this just tells you that part of the brain is damaged. It doesn't tell us if the person will regain consciousness
Awareness (consciousness in this definition) is controlled by a specific area in the mid brain (just north of the brain stem) called the renticular activating system.
Damage to this system is considered more conclusive brain death but that's rare because of where it is. But it can still happen.
Actually interesting fact, anesthesia is used to study locked-in and "brain dead," patients. Lots of ongoing research.
Anywho. There is a lot of controversy about what counts as brain dead. And how to distinguish , objectively with tests, from locked-in syndrome. Which is like being aware but being 100% paralyzed.
But one way you can be 100 % sure someone is brain dead is you keep them alive for 6 months to a year. And you compare their white matter scans from a MRI from start to that time.
For those who won't be coming back, they will show pretty fast white matter loss generally everywhere.
Because the brain works like a muscle. Use it or lose it. And a loss that fast means nothing , literally no cognitive or perception processing, is occurring.
But as you can imagine there are ethical issues for that too and , financial ones.
Often if the patient shows no changes in electrical activity and no awareness for a few weeks or so, the general conclusion is they won't be recovering.
Not exactly a reliable conclusion.
I thought when you’re under anesthesia, your brain activity has a rhythmic wave pattern that blocks communication. Scans show that hearing and other senses are active but not recorded basically.
So neural oscillations, also known as brain waves, are constant in a live brain.
The frequency (how fast the waves are) of these oscillations changes based on activity and location . Being awake or asleep, doing a demanding task or not, if the task is audio or visual. Etc. )
When you are asleep there are different oscillations that you cycle through on a fairly predictable pattern.
However this can be altered by many things including drugs and medications. And health problems. Even environment stress and such.
When you are unconscious from anesthesia , you don't get typical sleep pattern but different kinds of patterns. These are predictable too.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/brain/anesthesia-brain
"According to Brown, anesthetic drugs cause brain circuits to change their oscillation patterns in particular ways, thereby preventing neurons in different brain regions from communicating with each other. The result is a loss of consciousness—an unnatural state that he compares to a “reversible coma”—that differs from sleep. The oscillations vary, he explains, based on the type and amount of anesthetic used and the age of the patient’s brain (since brains age at different rates). These powerful drugs can cause mental side effects that often linger for days, months or longer."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation
We are definitely getting into a more complex area of neuroscience.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2025.1604173/full
This dense paper is on some recent research on locked-in patients and explains in the literature-review section how research on neural oscillations changed artificially with anesthesia has helped them more accurately investigate locked-in syndrome. Explains how these oscillations change in a coma state.
This is not my area of study. But if you have any simple questions about how this works I can probably answer them. Wikipedia might be more useful tho. The "Function" section is most informative.
Lovely reply, thank you for taking the time to educate us.
There was a woman in the 90s who was brain dead and kept alive by life support for many years. It was controversial because her husband wanted to remove her feeding tube but her parents objected. Legally. Long drawn out legal battle from 1990 to 2005.
Anywho.
Here is an image of her brain scan. A CT. Not a MRI. But you can get similar info.
The dark areas are empty fluid filled.
White band around the head is the skull. Didn't know the skull could thicken with brain loss but I suspect that's a rare thing since people aren't typically kept alive that long with a shrinking brain.
Anyway.
You can see comparison of image taken in 2002 after being in her state (1990) for 12 years compared to an average brain of her peer (female of same age).
Her brain weighed about half as much as it should have.
She was finally allowed to die in 2005.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC558485/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
Depending on your age and if you are in the U.S or not. You might remember hearing about her.
If you read the article, it seems she was properly assessed as having no brain stem activity. Could be a cover up, who knows.
And they wouldn't actually cremate her until there was no pulse. Unless they covered that up too!
I mean obviously we only have the accounts of the article, but they claim her vitals were low, her Glasgow Coma Scale had dropped to a 3, and multiple tests showed she had neurotoxins in her system. It sounds like there are records to back up the claims being made. Obviously someone could always be lying, but it sounds like they've got the right info backing it up here.
Well, obviously, she was not properly assessed.
I mean, yeah. But did they actually do anything wrong, anything that any other doctors would have done?
Sounds like a X-file