As news surfaced this morning of the death of former French international footballer, Jean-Pierre Adams, persons across the world would have been shocked to learn that the 73-year-old Senegal-born centre back had spent the past 39 years in a coma.

Adams, who last played for France in 1976, and was with Paris St Germain up to 1979, retired at age 33.

In March 1982, following a ligament rupture injury, he was hospitalised for surgery at the Édouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon. But, after an error made by his anesthesiologist, he suffered a bronchospasm which starved his brain of oxygen and he slipped into a coma.

In the mid 1990s, when a court of law adjudicated on the case, both the anaesthetist and trainee were given one-month suspended sentences and fines of less than the equivalent of US$1,000.

His wife, Bernadette, who has been hailed as a remarkable woman, reportedly never once considered turning off his life support machine.

Considering that the 73-year-old Adams spent more than half his life in a vegetative state, one could easily assume he held a record for longest time in a coma.

But that would be wrong.

In fact, at the time Adams went into a coma, the record holder, Elaine Esposito, had just died a few years earlier, in 1978, after spending 37 years in a coma. Esposito had lost consciousness in 1941 after being anaesthetised to undergo an appendectomy. She never awoke.

But before Adams surpassed Esposito’s number of years in a coma, Edwarda O’Bara and Aruna Shanbaug would also exceed the record, both dying after spending around 42 years in their individual comas.

O’Bara, an American, died at her home in Miami Gardens, Florida on November 21, 2012 at age of 59, after falling into a diabetic coma January 1970 when she was just 16 years old. She had contracted pneumonia the previous December.

Shanbaug, an Indian nurse, died at age 66 after spending nearly 42 years in a vegetative state as a result of being choked during a sexual assault.

She died of pneumonia on May 18, 2015.