Terry Wallis

Survivor of 19 year long coma

Terry Wayne Wallis (April 7, 1964 – March 29, 2022) was an American man from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas who, on June 11, 2003, regained awareness after spending 19 years in a minimally conscious state.

Wallis was born on April 7, 1964, in Marianna, Arkansas, to Angilee and Jerry Wallis. Six weeks before his accident, Wallis became a father when his wife Sandi gave birth to a daughter.

On July 13, 1984, Wallis was driving his pickup truck with two passengers when it smashed into a railing fence on a small bridge near Stone County, Arkansas, and skidded over the edge. The truck was found upside down in the dry riverbed 25 feet (8 m) below.

In 2003, Wallis spontaneously awoke and began talking. When a nurse asked him who the woman walking toward him was, he identified her as "mama." He believed that he was still 20 and that it was still 1984. Wallis was the subject of the BodyShock special for 2005 "The Man Who Slept for 19 Years" made for Channel 4 in the UK. It showed his mother and daughter encouraging him to talk to neurologists to try to find out how he had regained speech after such a long time. The program featured several prominent physicians, including Caroline McCagg, the medical director of the JFK Center for head injury in New Jersey; Joe Giacino, a neuropsychologist who said that Wallis' brain retained a lot of information from before 1984 but little after 1984, because he had lost the ability to store new memories a condition known as anterograde amnesia; and Martin Gizzi, a neurologist who showed that damage to the frontal lobes made Wallis unable to process experiences into memories. Also featured in the program was the neuropsychologist Roger Llewellyn Wood. Using new technology, brain scans were done on Wallis by Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College. The hypothesis built from the imaging studies is that Wallis' brain reconnected neurons that remained intact and formed new connections to circumvent damaged areas.

Wallis died in Searcy, Arkansas, on March 29, 2022, at the age of 57.