Twenty three years ago, a car crash left Rom Houben totally paralyzed. Doctors gave him a battery of tests and concluded that he was in a vegetative state or a coma. Except that they were wrong: he was conscious the whole time but unable to tell anyone about it.

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46.

Doctors used a range of coma tests, recognised worldwide, before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was 'extinct'.

But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Mr Houben describes the moment as 'my second birth'.

Link