A man who survived a 244-day coma has been killed in a traffic accident in Florida. In 2017, Drew Kohn was in a motorcycle crash, where he sustained injuries including traumatic brain damage, impaled lungs, and a broken shoulder, pelvis, and ribs. Doctors thought there was little chance of survival and discussed switching off life-support and harvesting his organs. However, after just over eight months, the then-23-year-old woke up and immediately called his mom.
On a GoFundMe page, Yolanda Osborne-Kohn attributed her son’s survival to “the power of faith and prayer.” She wrote that she effectively had to fight the doctors to keep him breathing, saying it took “boldness to speak up.”
Roughly seven years later, in July 2024, Mr. Kohn endured yet another accident – this time fatal. The 30-year-old was hit by a truck while on an early morning walk in Jacksonville. The driver ran to Kohn’s aid and called an ambulance, but when first responders arrived, they pronounced him dead on the scene.
Osborne-Kohn told reporters that she was philosophical about the unusual but tragic events. “I’m not angry. I’m at peace,” she said before adding that she was grateful for the extra seven years she could spend with her son.
When he awoke in 2018, Drew Kohn’s first words to his mom were, “I love you.” She then spent the following years nursing her son back to health as he underwent extensive rehabilitation and physical therapy.
Doctors described Kohn as a “modern-day miracle” in 2018, and today, his mother says he is in heaven with a “football in one hand and a Bible in the other.”
While most people who are declared brain-dead by physicians do not recover, there are occasions when doctors are stunned. The longest time a person has spent in a coma before waking, on record, is just over 27 years. Manira Abdulla was seriously injured in a car accident in the United Arab Emirates in 1991. Doctors there did not believe she would survive, and she was flown for treatment in the UK and Germany, where she received a similar diagnosis. She woke up in 2018.
