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Teen wakes up from coma

By The Associated Press



TUSTIN, Calif. — A teenager defied a hopeless prognosis and awoke from a coma she slipped into more than a year ago after giving birth.

Doctors had told Jessica Diaz's mother, Eva Diaz, that her daughter would never awake from the coma. But now with help, she can cuddle her son, Julio Jr., and touch his face. She even gave a television interview Sunday.

Diaz, then 17, gave birth Jan. 13, 2002. She could hardly see her newborn because a brain tumor had blinded one eye and obscured vision in the other. But she held her son, named after boyfriend Julio Ortiz, and told him she would be back later to take care of him.

Doctors removed the fast-growing tumor a day after she gave birth. Within 10 minutes of surgery, Diaz became comatose.

But last Tuesday, Eva Diaz knocked on the open door of her daughter's room at Tustin Hospital and Medical Center and for the first time in a year, her daughter turned her head toward the sound.

"I just froze," Eva Diaz said, choking back tears. "The nurses came, and I said, 'She turned her head! She moved!' They said, 'Go on, Mom. Go, go.' "

She said she had never given up on her daughter, even when doctors told her Jessica was likely to die from medullablastoma, a particularly aggressive brain tumor.

Doctors said Diaz probably emerged from the coma because her brain became accustomed to the pressure inside her skull and developed new neurological pathways to make up for ones she had lost when half her brain was surgically removed.

They want to get her into aggressive physical, occupational and speech therapy.

Diaz can lift her arms, but she can't smile, talk or walk. She communicates mostly by rolling her eyes back: once for no, twice for yes.

On Sunday, she was briefly interviewed by Los Angeles television station KCBS. She rolled her eyes for yes when asked if she had been aware of her mother at her bedside.