Jan Grzebska has only recently woken up from a very long nap and even his doctors are having trouble believing it. The 63-year-old railway worker sustained critical head injuries in an accident when he was trying to attach two train carriages. That was in 1988. He'd been in a coma ever since, a bleak stretch of nothingness that lasted 19 agonizing years. But that started to change last fall and the Polish native has astounded the world with his amazing recovery.
A lot has happened in the two decades he's been unconscious and the now nearly-senior citizen is trying to process all the changes the world has gone through in that time. When he was hurt, Poland was still under the grip of a
Communist dictatorship and the
Soviet Union had dominance over a large part of eastern Europe. Now, both are gone.
"He remembered shelves filled with mustard and vinegar only" under communism, recalls his rehab specialist Wojciech Pstragowski. Today the country is a democracy and has a market economy.
For Grzebska's wife, Gertruda, it's a happy ending she never gave up on. Doctors originally told her that her husband wouldn't survive - and that in addition to his injuries, they had detected brain cancer. She took him home, painfully spoon feeding him every day and labouriously moving him around to prevent bedsores.
"For 19 years he did not move or say anything," she remembers. "He tried to say things but it couldn't be understood. Sometimes we pretended we understood. Now he spends his days sitting in a wheelchair and last weekend we took him out for a walk in his wheelchair. He was so amazed to see the colorful streets, the goods. He says the world is prettier now."
Grzebska's recovery began last October when he came down with
pneumonia and had to be put back in a
Warsaw hospital. Whatever doctors did to him in there appeared to revitalize him and he slowly showed signs of recovery. "He began to move and his speech was becoming clearer, although I was the only one to understand him," she explains, her eyes filling with tears. "This is my great reward for all the care, faith and love."
Pstragowski also credits Gertruda's incredible devotion for the miracle and predicts his patient will be up and walking again soon.