Couple sits bedside for “daughter” in a coma, but it’s not their daughter who in fact has been dead for a month.

Some stories are just so upside-down that you can’t imagine what the people involved must be going through. The tragic mistaken identity in Indianapolis is one such case:

A couple sat by their daughter’s hospital bedside for weeks after an auto accident until she came out of a coma and they realized she was not their daughter after all, but another blond-haired young woman injured in the same wreck.

Their own daughter [Laura VanRyn], it turned out, was dead and buried.

In a tragic mix-up, one family had been incorrectly told their daughter had died in the April 26 crash in Indiana, and another was erroneously informed their daughter was in a coma.

The only “upside” to this story is that the family who had believed they had buried their daughter found out that she was in fact still alive.

I don’t know much about people in comas, but I’ve read that they can sometimes hear and understand voices. If that was true in this case I wonder what it was like listening to people call you by the wrong name for a month and not be able to do anything about it. Like we said, very sad.

tags: Laura VanRyn

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 10:40 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.