Music helped pull BBC host out of 17-day coma
By Sunday Telegraph Reporter
A BBC classical radio presenter has revealed she spent 17 days in a coma and that music played to her in her sleep helped her pull through.
Clemency Burton-Hill said she suffered a serious brain haemorrhage earlier this year.
The presenter of Radio 3’s Classical
Fix had emergency brain surgery after she collapsed during a meeting in New York, where she is creative director of classical station WQXR.
The 39-year-old had suffered a massive haemorrhage caused by a previously undiagnosed condition: an arteriovenous malformation, an uncommon and abnormal cluster of blood vessels meshing the arteries and veins in her brain. Burton-Hill was unconscious for the following 17 days but music was played to her all day and all night through a small speaker by her bed and she now remembers that music provided her with hope, saying that just before she regained consciousness, she seemed to make a choice of whether to give up or to live.
She told BBC Arts Online: “It was literally: I can do this, I’m going to get through this. Music is the opposite of despair. It was going to be worth the fight.” She has begun the process of relearning to speak and walk, and is undergoing physical therapy to strengthen the right side of her body, which was affected by the bleed, and says music has kept her going, describing it as “the ultimate motivation”. Burton-Hill has also managed to play music with her friend, the violinist Nicola Benedetti, as she plays the left hand on the violin and Benedetti bows.