Unvaccinated mother, 69, with COVID wakes from month-long coma on the day her family were due to take her off life support and after they had chosen her gravestone 

• Bettina Lerman's children were making funeral arrangements for their mom
• Doctors told the family: 'Your mother is never going to wake up'
• But her son Andrew Lerman was called by doctors who said she had woken up
• 'I was completely beside myself,' Andrew said. 'I dropped the phone because I was going to be terminating life support that day'  

An unvaccinated 69-year-old mother who was in a month-long coma battling Covid has woken up on the day her family were due to turn off her life support. 

Andrew Lerman and his siblings had even picked out a gravestone for their mom Bettina Lerman, 69, and were planning her funeral after doctors told them 'there was no chance of survival'. 

He was supposed to be terminating her life support at the hospital in Portland, Maine, on October 29 when doctors called him to say his mother was awake.

'I was completely beside myself,' Andrew told the Washington Post. 'I dropped the phone because I was going to be terminating life support that day.'  

When he got to the hospital with his wife he asked his mom if she remembered anyone coming to visit her after she fell ill with Covid in September.

'We asked her, do you remember anybody talking to you and coming to see you? And she shook her head yes. So, even though she couldn't respond, even though she was in that coma, she knew people came to visit her,' Lerman told WMTV. 

He said that his mother had not experienced any of the mental fogginess that you would expect from someone who has been in a coma. 

'She knows where she is, who she is - she's as sharp as a tack,' Lerman told CNN. 

'Usually, when somebody comes out of a coma like that, they say that the patients have delirium where they're very confused. From day one, she hasn't experienced any of that.' 

He also said that his mother had not suffered any organ failure, which had surprised medics.

'My mother is very religious and so are a lot of her friends, and church, and everything else and they've all been praying for her,' he said.

'So they can't explain it on the medical side. Maybe it's on the religious side. I'm not that religious, but I'm starting to believe that there's something that helped her. I don't know.' 

Bettina is a diabetic and had recently undergone a quadruple heart bypass, as well as being unvaccinated, when she was infected in September.

After just a week she was put on a ventilator and went into a coma.

Doctors told Andrew that because of her age and recent surgery 'there was no chance of survival.'

Andrew and his siblings even travelled to Bettina's home in Tavares, Florida, to cancel her lease and donate her possessions. 

Although she is no longer in the hospital Andrew says that the virus has destroyed Bettina's lungs and done serious long-term damage.

'We give her words of encouragement every day. We tell her to keep on fighting,' Andrew said. 

Despite the fact that she still needs assistance breathing, doctors described the recovery as a 'miracle.'

Bettina is receiving physiotherapy to help regain the muscle that she shed during the coma. 

Andrew told WMTW that his mom plans to get vaccinated in the near future and the experience has changed the whole family's previously hesitant stance towards the vaccine.

He told the Post: 'She was planning on getting vaccinated before she left Florida, but she ran out of time.

'She was going to get vaccinated up here, but she came down with covid.'

Andrew's sister, Jennifer Miele, wrote on a GoFundMe page: 'It's a miracle and we are by her side as she fights to get better every day.

'Her doctors are saying she is a medical miracle and have never seen anyone go through what she has and woken up.'