The doctor thinks Michael will never recover

Nov 3, 2014 14:57 GMT  ·  By
Friends and family are more reserved about Michael Schumacher's recovery these days
   Friends and family are more reserved about Michael Schumacher's recovery these days

After six months of waiting for good news on Michael Schumacher's coma situation, the world now finds itself waiting for good news on Michael's post-coma situation. Though the driver is conscious and able to communicate with his family and doctors by blinking, the hopes that he will recover to a point that he is capable of leading a normal life are slowly fading day by day.

His wife, Corinna, who brought Michael at home and built for him a special wing in his house where he can recover, tells Daily Mail that she hopes that the former F1 champion will be able to “walk, talk and feel again.”

Michael is being tended by a team of specialists day and night, but hope is still small that he will fully recover

Over a month ago, hopes were high for Michael as he was taken from the clinic in Lausanne to his home in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. It is now reported that the construction near his home is actually a fully equipped and fully staffed clinic which focuses only on bringing back Schumacher to a condition where he can walk, talk and lead a normal life.

The team is made up of physiotherapists who massage his atrophying limbs, doctors, nutritionist and nurses. The weekly bill is said to be around €127,000 ($159,000) each week but the family feel that it's a small price to pay for bringing back Michael to his former self.

But doctor Gary Hartstein, the man who has known and treated Michael throughout his career, is not that optimistic. He is quoted as saying, “As time goes on it becomes less and less likely that Michael will emerge to any significant extent.”

Doctors fear that if Michael doesn't show a significant improvement in the following months, he doesn't stand a chance for a long life

Though he is not in a coma anymore, he is in a state of what doctors call “minimal consciousness,” that is he is able to move his eyes towards people or objects closer to him and he can answer simple questions by blinking his eyelids and nodding slightly. Doctors say that he has sleeping and waking cycles and reacts to loud noises.

But he is also unable to speak or follow instructions, he has no form of communicating with others apart from winks and nods, no means of breathing, feeding and removing his bodily waste without the use of machines.

Dr. Hartstein would like to remind everyone that Michael's coma was artificial, so the fact that he came out does not necessarily mean that he made progress. He also warns that “Life expectancy for a comatose patient who does not improve neurologically is measured in months to a relatively few years.”

As a result, he adds that the current state of the driver is simply a form of “long goodbye” before Michael's body is finally unable to cope with his neurological problems.

This comes in stark contrast to the updates we've been getting so far, that spoke of slow but certain progress in Schumacher's condition. His legions of fans hoped that he was going to get better even if the process took years.