After nearly ten years’ silence, a severely brain-damaged man has confounded doctors by asking for his wife.

Donald Herbert, a firefighter in Buffalo, New York, was badly injured in a house fire in December 1995. He was deprived of oxygen for minutes before being rescued.

The 43-year-old was in a coma for more than two months and has spent the last few years in a nursing home, brain-damaged, blind and barely able to speak, with little or no memory. Video footage of his treatment shows him apparently unable to communicate and with little awareness of his surroundings.

Yet on Saturday, nearly a decade after the accident, he astounded staff at the nursing home by looking up and announcing: “I want to talk to my wife.”

Nurses raced to get Linda Herbert on the telephone. The conversation that followed was the first of many the patient has since had with his wife, four sons and other family and friends.

Herbert’s uncle, Simon Manka, said that he had asked how long he had been away. “We told him almost ten years,” he said, “He thought it was only three months.”

Asked how he felt, Mr Herbert replied: “I feel great.”

Mr Manka declined to discuss his nephew’s current condition, or whether the apparent progress was continuing this week. The family was seeking privacy while doctors investigate, he said. “He’s resting comfortably,” he said.

As word of Herbert’s progress spread, a steady stream of visitors arrived at the Father Baker Manor nursing home in Buffalo.

“He stayed up ’til early morning talking with his boys and catching up on what they’ve been doing over the last several years,” firefighter Anthony Liberatore told WIVB-TV. Herbert’s sons were 14, 13, 11 and 3 when he was injured.

Dr. Rose Lynn Sherr of New York University Medical Center said that when patients recover from brain injuries, they usually do so within two or three years.

“It’s almost unheard of after 10 years,” she said, “but sometimes things do happen and people suddenly improve and we don’t understand why.” Mr Herbert will be 44 on Saturday.

There have been a few other widely publicised examples of brain-damage patients showing sudden improvement after a number of years.

In 2003, an Arkansas man, Terry Wallis, returned to consciousness 19 years after he was injured in a car accident, stunning his mother by saying “Mom; and then asking for a soda. His brain function remained limited, his family said months later.

Gary Dockery, a Tennessee police officer who was brain damaged in a 1988 shooting, began speaking to his family one day in 1996, telling jokes and recounting annual winter camping trips. But after 18 hours, he never repeated the unbridled conversation of that day, though he remained more alert than he had been. He died the following year of a blood clot on his lung.

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