“Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die,” Eve Baer pleaded over her son Ian’s hospital bed, after a car crash left him in a coma just before the end of his senior year of high school.
Seventeen days later, Ian woke up, unable to speak or control his limbs, but alive. Doctors told Eve that her son was in a vegetative state: devoid of thought, of feeling, of consciousness. But she refused to believe it.
Sarah Zhang’s latest article for The Atlantic tells the story of how Eve and a loving cast of family and friends built a community of care around Ian. For decades, they held out hope that, despite what the doctors said, he was still there. One day, finally, science proved them right. As Zhang reports, new research has shown that Ian, and many others who would have been dismissed as “vegetative” in the past, may retain more consciousness than previously thought.
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