Crash Victim Wakes Up After 20 Years in a Coma

An Arkansas man who went into a coma after a serious car crash during his late teens has awoken nearly two decades later as a middle-aged man with an adult daughter.

Terry Wallis was 19 and newly married with a baby daughter when his truck plunged through a guard rail, falling 25 feet.

He was left paralysed and in a coma by the crash in the summer of 1984. One of his companions was killed outright.

He remained outwardly unresponsive for years, and news reports yesterday described his recovery as all the more remarkable because Mr Wallis was never given specialist care.

His father, a farmer, was reportedly too poor to afford a neurological examination and state medical insurance was reluctant to pay for a man not expected to return to the work force.

But, according to the popular legend now taking root which promises to turn Mr Wallis into a hero for the pro-life movement, the family never gave up hope.

His parents and wife continued to hold one-sided conversations at his bedside, and brought him home from hospital on alternate weekends. Doctors now believe the stimulation kept his mind functioning.

A few years ago, he began re sponding to questions by blinking his eyes.

Three weeks ago, he spoke for the first time calling out for his mother.

"He just said, 'Mom'," his mother, Angilee Wallis, told CNN. "I like to fell over."

Since then, Mr Wallis's powers of speech have slowly returned, and he has been able to tell his family that he remembers snatches of the conversation from around his bedside.

However, his speech remains laboured, he has problems with short-term memory, and his entire frame of thinking is stuck in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term as president, and Mr Wallis had his life-changing crash.