Belgian Rom Houben (C), 46, stays next to his mother Fina (R) and an assistant at Weyerke institute in Heusden-Zolder November 25, 2009. ©Reuters

BEIJING, Nov. 26 — A Belgian man, who was thought to have been in a vegetative state but then found conscious for the past 23 years, said he got a “second birth” after doctors worked out a way for him to communicate.

Rom Houben, now 46, had been wrongly diagnosed in a vegetative state after a serious car accident when he was 20.

But doctors found his brain was still functioning; he was simply paralyzed and unable to communicate.

Using a specially-adapted computer to type messages, Houben now has been able to describe the ordeal he endured for more than two decades.

Tapping on a computer touchscreen with his finger, Houben wrote he felt “alone, lonely, frustrated” in the 23 years he was trapped inside a paralyzed body.

He could hear what was being said around him throughout but was unable to respond.

“I would scream, but no sound would come out,” he wrote, “Just imagine. You hear, see, feel and think but no one can see that. You undergo things. You cannot participate in life.”

“I became the witness to my own suffering as doctors and nurses tried to speak to me and eventually gave up,” he wrote.

But Houben’s mother, Fina Houben, never gave up hope. “I always knew our son was still there,” she said.

Houben is still unable to move, but he now can finally communicate through the computer.

“I want to read, to talk to my friends with the computer and to live life now people know I’m not dead,” he wrote. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/26/content_12542655.htm