In May 2006, Englishwoman Helen Rudd was on her way home, in the city of Hastings, England, on a very rainy day with poor visibility.
While crossing the street on foot, a white van hit her, throwing her away. Helen reports that she doesn't remember anything from that day. Only four years after the fateful event did she begin to remember what had happened.
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This unfortunate accident caused Helen to be in induced coma for three weeks in the neurological unit at Haywards Heath Hospital. Doctors report that the woman was in the 3rd degree on the Glasgow Coma Scale, the deepest one can be.
When he woke up, his first words were French. But interestingly, Helen had no knowledge of this language before the incident.
“A friend asked the nurses if he should speak to me in French, they thought it was a good idea to encourage communication. Then he would ask me a question in French and I would answer in fluent French. Nobody knew why.
After a while, the doctors decided that French wasn't helping me, because I'm English. So posters were put up on the wall asking people not to speak French,” she said in her account.
This is a case known as bilingual aphasia. There are no concrete explanations about its exact functioning so far. But experts suspect that this is due to damage to the area of the brain that learns a language.
Although it seems unusual, cases like this have already been reported in several nationalities. An example is Dujumir Marasovic, a Croatian woman who fell into a coma for 24 hours, and when she woke up, she could only speak German, a language completely unknown to her before.
Not knowing how to speak the language of her country, the girl needed a translator to communicate with her own family.
