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All around the world, thousands and thousands of families are faced with a dilemma that must be absolutely heart-breaking. I can’t begin to imagine having a loved one in a coma, and having to decide wether the doctors should keep them ”artificially” alive at all costs, or not.

I mean, to this day, no matter how good they are, doctors have no way to say for sure, if there is a chance that the patient will someday wake up. Up until recently, they could read brain waves, but there was no certainty of definite finality of the conscience.

After all, how could anyone measure one’s soul, right?

And countless families have to make the choice of pulling the plug or not, not knowing if there is a chance their loved one would wake up from the coma, didn’t they choose to do it.

That spells mental torture to me, and that’s why I was compelled to come and write this post tonight.

Because this evening, I listened to a very interesting interview with Catherine Duclos,  assistant professor at the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine of Montréal’s University. And you’ll have to bear with me, because I am no scientist, but the knews are so great (at least, I think so), that I just HAD to share them.

It all started with a simple ”what if” question (I love random ”What ifs”).  Scientists had already studied the effects of anasthesia on brain waves of patients going through surgery. To make things really simple, picture a highway with the traffic usually going from the front of your brain to the back (it might be the other way… Give me a break! I told you I have no Phd!!). Either way, when put under anesthesia, a patient brain’s highway turns the traffic the other way.

And that’s when someone thought about putting a coma patient under anesthesia, and measuring brain fonctions before, during and after the procedure. Any change in the data would mean that there is a sign of residual conscience. Meaning that even if the person looks braindead, there would still be hope for an awakening, thus explaining why some people that were considered irrecuperable did wake up in the past.

So far, the study pool is still on the experimental level, but the results are quite promising. And if the information gathered is sufficient, the team should be able to come up with a new medical tool, to define if a coma patient has a chance to come out of it.

And therefore, taking that much of a load, off from family members’ shoulders.

How awesome is that??