Back from the brink - Miracle recovery from coma stuns kin
Published: August 25, 2006
Just over a week ago, Scott Ashworth was picking out a cemetery plot for his only son, wondering how many weeks or years he’d be on life support as the death grip of EEE locked his body in a coma.
Turns out Derek Ashworth, a 23-year-old semi-pro football player, is as strong off the field as he is on.
In a stunning turn of events, Derek, who contracted Eastern equine encephalitis from a mosquito bite, has awakened from a six-day coma.
“As bad as he had it, typically they don’t do well. But doctors also said ‘Don’t ever give up hope. There’s always a chance for a miracle.’ If I didn’t believe in him before, we do now,” said Scott Ashworth, the Rochester fire chief.
His son walked 10 steps on Wednesday, ate pureed chicken and mashed potatoes and started talking and asking questions about the past 14 days of his hospitalization.
Yesterday, in his fifth-floor Boston Medical Center room, the wide receiver wore his Middleboro Cobras jersey and clutched a football. He sat in his wheelchair and talked on a cell phone as his girlfriend and parents looked on.
“He’s making miraculous leaps and bounds,” his dad told the Herald.“Everything is coming back. It’s like the brain has been short-circuited and now someone hit the reset button.”
Ashworth, of Acushnet, who faces months of rehabilitation and has possible neurological damage, is one of two human cases this year of the brain-swelling virus.
Derek Ashworth’s miracle story stands in contrast to that of Sheila Clark’s a 52-year-old from Lakeville who entered the hospital Aug. 12, the same day as Ashworth, but who is still in a coma.
Her husband of 23 years, Brad Clark, has hope.
She opened her left eye briefly yesterday, he said.
“That’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long time,” he said, adding that he’s heartened by Derek Ashworth’s recovery.
The encephalitis killed two people last year, but the vicious nature of the virus has people scared. There is no cure for EEE.
That is understandable, said Dr. Stephen Zinner, chairman of the Mount Auburn Hospital medicine department and an infectious diseases expert. The infection has at least a 30 percent death rate, although in the past 70 years in Massachusetts it has killed 47 of the 86 who contracted it.
“Any illness that attacks otherwise healthy people and can’t be treated is scary,” he said.
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