My father-in-law, at 79, was helping to repair and renovate a small cemetery when he accidentally severed his carotid artery causing a major stroke.
When he came to in the hospital he had changed from an very personable, affable, outgoing, independent character to a quiet, meek, mild-mannered person who was unable to speak at first but later started to put words together with thoughts. As my wife said “That is not my dad, not really”.
He completely lost the use of one side of his body. Scans showed absolutely no activity in half his brain with a definite, clear demarcation down the center. The family decided that this was not how he would want to spend the rest of his life, confined to a hospital bed, with limited communication skills and asked the doctors to treat it aggressively and we saw periods of marked improvement followed by days of regression. We believe he reached the point where he could understand and communicate and we know he was recognizing us but are not sure whether it was based on past history or just that we were the faces he saw every day.
He died about 20 days later. We got the call one evening on the way home from the hospital.
My sister-in-law, who was present at the time, swears to this day that he finally comprehended what had happened to him and decided he did not want to go on.