heres a hard question:

[zhou]

my grandfather is 85 years old and about 2 weeks ago, he slipped and fell onto some rather sharp rocks. His forehead recevied quite a nasty cut, and he was rushed to hospital to get stitched up. The doctors managed to clean most of the gravel and other dirt out of the wound and stitched it up. He was sent home the next day.

Now heres where it gets harder:

He also suffers from pollups in the intestine. A few days after he was released from hospital after gettin his forehead stiched up, he started to pass dark, lumpy blood when he went to the toilet.

Again, he went to the hospital, doctors just said it was pollups as usual, and said the bleeding should fix itself in a few days. However, the day or so after, his jaw locked up. i.e Lockjaw.

The doctors didnt know what to do. They wearnt sure what had happened to cause the lockjaw, as pollups supposedly in no way could trigger lockjaw. He could not swallow or open his mouth properly. They ran some test + x rays, but there was no
answer.

The day after, he went into a coma. He awoke several days later, luckily, nothing had suffered damage eg. lungs and brain etc was ok. However, while he had been in a coma, doctors had come up with several possible causes.

They at first thought one of his teeth had gone rotten and it was infected. Thus causing lockjaw. So they proceeded to remove the tooth to see if the swelling would die down. Nothing.

So then they ran some MORE tests, but still nothing, until they thought it was being caused by tentanus from the dirt left in his forehead. They reopened the wound, and cleaned it out. Now he seems better, but has not seemed to make a full recovery. doctors are still not sure it was even tetanus to begin with, the recovery may just have been a coincidence.

Now heres the question:

what could possibly have been the problem, that it would cause lockjaw and send him into a coma?

[zhou]

i forgot to mention, before he went into the come say...12 hours before,

he was having trouble swallowing

and had a few spasms where he couldnt breath for a few minutes....

is this symptoms of tetanus infection?

[Cosmogal]

Sounds to me like he had some kind of infection. Maybe even staph. I think maybe he had gotten the infection when you was hit in the head that spread to the jaw which then in turn entered the bloodstream. At his age I can see it being severe enough to put him in a coma since as we age our ability to fight things off diminishes. I also think he may have been in a chemically induced coma. Sometimes they do that beause it is easier on the patient to recover. Not sure if that was the case with your grandfather,
Paula