A Nigerian based Georgia teenager Rueben Nsemoh, has shocked the world when he woke from a coma speaking fluent Spanish for the first time in his life.
He opened his eyes after a three-day coma and began uttering sentences in Spanish, despite having known only a few words before his accident.
“It started flowing out,” “I felt like it was like second nature for me. I wasn’t speaking my English right, and every time I tried to speak it I would have a seizure. It was weird,“It was not scary at all. I actually liked it a lot. It was really unique to me.”
Another teenager accidentally kicked Rueben on the right side of his head during a game on Sept. 24 after Rueben dove for a loose ball and suffered a severe concussion, went into shock and had to be airlifted to a hospital.
Days after being treated in the intensive care unit, Rueben finally started stirring again. He began moving his hand and gesturing for food. And then he blurted out: “Tengo hambre,” or “I am hungry” in Spanish.
“I was very shocked. That’s something he’s never done before. When he got up and he started speaking Spanish, I was confused,” said the mother and she ran out of the room to find help and brought back a nurse.
“A nurse asked me what language does he speak. I said, ‘I speak English. He speaks English. We’re not Spanish-based people,’” Nsemoh said.
That case was diagnosed as foreign accent syndrome, a very rare condition in which people speak with a different accent, usually after head trauma or stroke.