Saved ... by a wiggling toe!
Walking tall, student who was seconds away from having life support switched off
A GRADUATE left in a coma after a car crash wiggled her toe moments before doctors were set to turn off her life-support machine. Sam Hemming, 22, was given no chance of recovery when she suffered devastating head injuries in a motorway smash.
After 19 days in hospital, doctors confirmed her parents’ worst fears and declared she was brain dead.
But as they were about to switch off her life support machine a medic accidentally brushed her big toe with an ice-cold wipe – and it moved.
Signs of brain activity were then picked up and doctors at University Hospital Coventry were convinced they had to keep Miss Hemming alive.
Just eight weeks after coming so close to losing her fight for life, Miss Hemming has now been discharged and is back at the family home in Hereford.
She has had to learn how to talk and walk again after suffering brain damage but still hopes to fulfil her dream of becoming a solicitor. Miss Hemming said: ‘I can’t remember the crash at all but I know I was coming home at the time. When I look at the pictures of me in the coma it seems unreal and when I hear that my toe saved me it’s amazing.’
Miss Hemming, who graduated in law from Bangor University, was on her way to Birmingham with her boyfriend Tom Curtis on July 20 when he crashed on the M6. Mr Curtis, 21, escaped with minor injuries but Miss Hemming was thrown through the windscreen as the car flipped and hit her head on the motorway’s central reservation.
Airlifted to hospital, she underwent six hours of surgery before she was placed in a medicallyinduced coma. The life-support machine was switched off and on three times to see if Miss Hemming could breathe unaided, but her toe moved before it was turned off for a fourth and final time.
Days later she was given a tracheotomy and when her lifesupport machine was turned off again, she could breathe on her own. One side of her brain was left dead, but she has learnt to walk and talk using the ‘other’ side.
Her mother Carol, 44, has quit her job renting bouncy castles to care for her daughter. She said: ‘She has literally come back from the dead. If she hadn’t wiggled her toe she wouldn’t be here today. Because of the steps she has taken, she is a walking miracle.’