Terry Wallis, who spontaneously regained his ability to speak after a traumatic brain injury left him virtually unresponsive for 19 years, and who went on to become the subject of a large-scale study showing how a damaged brain could heal itself, died March 29 at a rehabilitation facility in Searcy , Ark. He was 57.
He had pneumonia and heart problems, his brother George Wallis said, confirming the death.
Terry Wallis was 19 when the pickup truck he was in with two friends skidded off a small bridge in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas and landed upside down in a dry riverbed. The accident left him in a coma for a short time and then in a persistent vegetative state for several months. A friend died; the other recovered.
Until 2003, Mr. Wallis lay in a nursing home in a minimally conscious state, able to track objects with his eyes or blink on command.
But on June 11, 2003, he effectively returned to the world when, seeing his mother Angilee, he suddenly said, “Mom.” On seeing the woman who was told it was his adult daughter, Amber, who was six weeks old at the time of the accident, he said, “You are beautiful,” and told her he loved her.
“Within a period of three days, after he said ‘Mom’ and ‘Pepsi,’ he had regained his verbal fluency,” said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan who led imaging studies of Mr. Wallis’s brain. The findings were presented in 2006 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
“He was disoriented,” said Dr. Schiff in a telephone interview about the rise of Mr Wallis. “He thought it was 1984, but otherwise he knew all the people in his family and had that fluency.”
Mr. Wallis’s brain scans — the first ever of a late recovering patient — revealed changes in the strength of apparent connections in the back of the brain, believed to have aided his conscious awareness, and in the midline cerebellum, an involved area in motor control, which may have explained the very limited movement in his arms and legs while he was minimally conscious.
Mr. Wallis, who regained some exercise after waking up, was diagnosed with severe quadriparesis, characterized by muscle weakness in his limbs.
“He’s a unicorn in the sense that he showed up so late,” said Dr. schiff. But, he added, “We’ll never know exactly why he showed up after 19 years.”
Mr Wallis’ family believes regular home visits while he was minimally conscious had an impact. “We think that helped him wake up,” his brother George said.
Mr. Wallis’s recovery came nearly two years before the death of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had suffered extensive brain damage and fell into a persistent vegetative state when her heart stopped beating in 1990. Her feeding tube was removed after a bitter national debate over patients’ rights.
Terry Wayne Wallis was born on February 4, 1964 in Marianna, Ark. His father, Jerry, was a mechanic and farmer. His mother, Angilee (Marshall) Wallis, worked in a shirt factory.
At the time of his accident, Mr Wallis was working as a car mechanic and, his brother said, was “a little wild and living on the edge, doing what he could to enjoy life.”
After Terry woke up in 2003, his father said in an interview, “He enjoyed flirting with the nurses and he could move his arms and legs, but couldn’t get up.”
He added: “He could talk to us, but it was as if time had stood still for him. He remembered people from the time he vandalized.”
George Wallis recalled an incident eight years ago when he took his wife, Lindsey, to visit his brother, who was more than a decade in his recovery by then.
“My wife is a lot younger than me, and my mother said, ‘Terry, do you know who this is? This is Lindsey. She’s George’s wife,” said Mr Wallis. ‘And Terry said, ‘She’s way too beautiful and way too old for him.’ He thought I was 12 years old.”
Until he was transferred to a rehabilitation center eight months ago, Mr. Wallis spent most of the past 19 years living at his parents’ home, where he was cared for by relatives, including his daughter and his mother, who died in 2018. was the glue,” said his brother George, “the absolute savior.”
In addition to his brother George, his daughter and his father, Mr. Wallis leaves behind another brother, Perry; a sister, Tammy Baze; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Sandi Wallis ended in divorce.
dr. Schiff said Mr Wallis and other patients are “still teaching us” about the brain’s potential to deal with trauma.
“I think Terry’s legacy to top-level neuroscience,” he said, “is to instill our abiding, undiluted, and deep interest in understanding how to restore human consciousness after severe brain injury.”