ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 5, 1996 TAG: 9607050094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL DALY NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SONNY VON BULOW'S children began financing brain research after their mother lapsed into a vegetative state after an overdose of insulin.
Sunny von Bulow drifts through the 15th year of her vegetative state, her eyes sometimes opening but registering nothing, revealing not a glimmer of consciousness.
Her children continue to visit her, though she remains beyond their words and touch. They cannot make her know that some good is arising from her protracted misfortune. They cannot reassure her that she has achieved a far greater distinction than being an heiress whose second husband was convicted, then acquitted on appeal, of attempting to murder her with an insulin overdose.
Sunny von Bulow is now a woman in whose memory a foundation is helping to save thousands from a fate such as hers. These include the 32-year-old pianist whose remarkable progress has given von Bulow's daughter and son by her first marriage cause to smile through their own tragedy.
``It's fantastic!'' the daughter, Ala Isham, said. ``The young woman in New York Hospital has been on all our minds. I'm thrilled!''
Ala speaks as somebody whose mother was three years into a living death when a car accident left her father with severe head injuries. Prince Alfred von Auersperg also lapsed into a coma, and his children once again heard the best of doctors suggest the brain remained largely a mystery.
``I kept thinking, `I don't understand why we don't know more,''' Isham said. ``I had a sense it was really a new frontier.''
Wealth could rescue neither mother nor father from coma, but it could finance research that might help others. Ala and her brother, Alexander von Auersperg, were creating the Brain Trauma Foundation when they chanced to meet a fledgling neurosurgeon.
Dr. Jam Ghajar had been fascinated by the brain since his teens, perhaps because his older sister had been left retarded by a shortage of oxygen at birth. By the early 1980s, he had begun to focus on severe head trauma, and he pondered a basic question concerning the victims.
``Some didn't make it and some did, and why was that?'' Ghajar said.
With assistance from the new foundation, Ghajar opened a lab with several colleagues. They noted that at the time of injury, the brain is flooded with white blood cells that stick inside the veins.
Ghajar's lab deduced that the best protocol was to drain fluid from the brain while simultaneously raising the blood pressure and forcing more red cells through the traffic jam. The research was never proven more right than on June 4, when the 32-year-old pianist who had been attacked in Central Park was rushed into New York Hospital.
Ghajar was summoned, and he has no doubt that the woman would have died had she been treated using the older methods. The new protocol got her through the first perilous days.
The pianist opened her eyes, and everyone could only pray that she would proceed to tracking moving objects.
``Every day, the parents come running, saying, `Did you see what she did today?''' Ghajar said. ``It's kind of like a child growing up all over again. The brain is going through its developmental phases. ... Talking, purposeful motions, then, hopefully, walk to Daddy.''
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB