I trust you had a great weekend. It's good to get back together again on a Monday. I hope you are enjoying TN&V and sharing it with family and friends.

One person initially (and then several others subsequently) e-mailed me a story that appeared last week on ABC News. The title is off-putting, "Trapped in Your Own Body," but if you read through Carol Berczuk's story [http://a.abcnews.com/Health/story?id=2835149&page=1]you'll feel much better by the end.

It's obvious that there is a continuum of brain injuries, from mild to devastating. But it is no less true that because the brain is such a marvelously complex organ and "consciousness" so tricky to pin down, patients do get misdiagnosed.

Patients with "Locked-in Syndrome" can "see, hear, feel and understand everything," according to Berczuk. "They just can't move." The culprit is a massive stroke that is "different from other strokes in both its location and severity."

According to Berczuk, locked-in syndrome is very rare and so hard to properly diagnose that "doctors often believe their patients are vegetables when they are not." (You'd expect a medical correspondent to be above dubbing people "vegetables," but that's what she wrote.)

The ABC News story is actually quite encouraging, focusing as it does on two patients who've made partial recoveries. Two things stand out, beyond the most important: the refusal of loved ones to passively accept inaccurate medical diagnoses and "allow" their spouses to die.

First, even though Steve Chiappa was making ever-so-gradual progress, for a long time he wished he could die.

"He would say to me, 'I want to die. I want to die. You've gotta help me, you have to help me. I can't do it myself,'" his wife, Cindy, told Berczuk.

The turning point, Steve told Berczuk, came "when he realized that Cindy and his family still loved him."

The second, as illustrated by Kevin and Glenda Hickey, was the resolute determination to keep as normal a life as the situation allowed. That unexpectedly included Glenda becoming pregnant. Read the following and be uplifted:

"At first, their doctor urged them to terminate the pregnancy because it was so risky for Glenda. But in the delivery room the doctor apologized, telling Kevin, 'You know, I think God had a little hand in this one.'

"Hope Hickey was born 20 months ago. Doctors believe that this is the first time that a woman living with locked-in syndrome has given birth.

"It is clearly not the life they'd planned. But Glenda and Kevin still find joy in the life they're living. And they say that, in the end, is all anyone can ask for."

There are treatments in the pipeline, including, of all things, Viagra. In experiments with rats, the drug assisted their brain to make new cells, helping them recover from strokes, according to Dr. Michael Chopp, a neuroscientist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

"I think we are poised to revolutionize the treatment of neurologic disease," he told Berczuk.

Again, you can read the full article at http://a.abcnews.com/Health/story?id=2835149&page=1

If you have any questions or comments, please write Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com