AN anorexic college student named Xiaoqian who went into a coma for almost two months after surgery dramatically woke up Aug. 20, but doctors say she can’t remember anything from the past three years, according to China’s Modern Evening Times newspaper. It is a miracle that she is even still alive, doctors went on to say, however, the 21-year-old’s brain is now as fragile as that of an elderly person.

When she was sent to the hospital in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province in May she was suffering from severe brain and skin issues and weighed only 25 kilograms.

It is believed that Xiaoqian began trying to starve herself to death during her freshman year of university, three years ago.

She thought it was embarrassing to be 55 kilograms and 1.67 meters tall, so she began isolating herself from her peers and classmates, and her eating disorder deteriorated even further when a member of the faculty told her she seemed to have gained some weight.

This is believed to be the incident that made Xiaoqian start eating only one small meal a day, but this wasn’t enough for her, and she either followed this with an intense period of exercise or, worse still, purged the food from her body – typically in the form of self-induced vomiting – in order to keep her caloric intake as low as possible.

“It was totally astonishing,” said Xiaoqian’s doctor, surnamed Yan. “I was shocked. Judging by the photos, I thought the girl must have a severe blood disease.”

Dr. Yan later discovered that Xiaoqian kept to a strict diet of only 400 calories per day, significantly lower than the recommended caloric intake of 2,000 for a woman of her age. And yet, even when she was hospitalized, she thought she was fat and refused to eat. This profoundly negative mental state made her reluctant to accept help from the medical staff at the hospital, even though she desperately needed it.

Her situation worsened when she fell and hit her head, which caused a cerebral hemorrhage. The doctors had to conduct two surgeries to repair it. Her starvation diet had weakened the vessels in her brain, making it as delicate as that of someone in their 60s.

Xiaoqian stayed unconscious for 40 days following the operation, leading the doctors to predict she would live the rest of her life in a vegetative state.

Xiaoqian suddenly woke up at the end of June. Upon regaining consciousness, she surprised everyone by immediately asking for food.

While this may have initially seemed positive, it quickly became clear that she had no recollection of her time at college or her anorexic condition. According to the doctors, this amnesia may have stemmed from the brain hemorrhage. (CGTN)