Terry wayne Wallis

Long after a car accident left him in a minimally conscious state in 1984, he woke up one day and said, “Mom.” Then he kept talking.

“And Terry said, ‘She’s way too pretty and way too old for him.’ He was thinking that I was still 12 years old.” Until he was moved to a rehabilitation facility eight months ago, Mr. Wallis spent nearly all of the last 19 years living at his parents’ home, cared for by family members, including his daughter and his mother, who died in 2018. “He was disoriented,” Dr. Schiff, in a phone interview, said of Mr. Wallis’s emergence. He added: “He could talk to us, but it was like time had stopped for him. His marriage to Sandi Wallis ended in divorce. “Within a three-day period, from saying ‘Mom’ and ‘Pepsi,’ he had regained verbal fluency,” said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan who led imaging studies of Mr. Wallis’s brain. Terry Wallis was 19 when the pickup truck he was in with two friends skidded off a small bridge in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas and landed upside down in a dry riverbed. This is Lindsey. She’s George’s wife,’” Mr. Wallis said. Mr. Wallis’s family believes that regular visits home while he was minimally conscious had an impact. His mother, Angilee (Marshall) Wallis, worked in a shirt factory. “He’s a unicorn in the sense that he emerged so late,” Dr. Schiff said. Her feeding tube had been removed after a bitter national debate over patients’ rights.