Cardinal Hill program helps victim of car wreck come out of coma, work toward recovery

Louetta Hetrick learned that her daughter Naomi had been seriously injured in a car accident after images of the mangled car appeared on the local news.

Naomi had been pulling out of the parking lot of Bluegrass Technical and Community College where she was studying to be a social worker when her car was broadsided.

Louetta Hetrick, who was near their Richmond home, rushed to her daughter's side. She found Naomi in a coma. So she and her husband Mike waited and waited and waited for a sign that their daughter was still lingering inside a body frozen in trauma.

A few days after the accident on Halloween 2012, as Naomi was in intensive care at University of Kentucky Medical Center, Louetta asked the doctor to perform a test to determine her daughter's brain function. She didn't want her baby suffering through any more operations if she was never coming back.

"He refused the test," she said, "but he told me, 'She's still in there.'"

"I told him, 'I am listening to you but I don't believe a word you are saying,'" she said.

But slowly there were signs. Naomi would wiggle her foot. She would seem more aware.

By February, Naomi's physical condition had improved enough for her to enter Cardinal Hill Rehabilitation Hospital. She was admitted under a new program that Louetta credits, along with the family's strong faith, for bringing her daughter back to her.

In the program, patients with minimal brain functioning receive therapy to help them reform the damaged neurological connections even before they can respond to their environment.

Since the program started in August 2011, 45 patients have been referred to the Disorders of Consciousness Program from 15 hospitals in five states, said Samantha Richardson, Cardinal Hill's marketing coordinator. Many patients have emerged from their comas and have gone on through Cardinal Hill traditional brain injury treatment and from there worked with outpatient therapists to gain further function and independence.

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Cardinal Hill program helps victim of car wreck come out of coma, work toward recovery