Racing in his Range Rover to New York Hospital, a doctor relays urgent instructions to ER physicians through his speakerphone. A little boy, hit by a car, lies unconscious with massive head trauma, hovering between life and death.

In a gripping real-life drama, NOVA is on the scene as famous neurosurgeon Jam Ghajar rushes in with a controversial technique for treating coma patients. Known for his role in the “miraculous” recovery of a young woman severely beaten in Manhattan’s Central Park in 1996, Dr. Ghajar orders a CT scan and inserts a tube to drain fluid from the boy’s swelling skull. As the boy’s parents wait anxiously at New York Hospital’s pediatric intensive-care unit, Dr. Ghajar’s team monitors the child’s brain pressure in an intense around-the-clock vigil he says is key to survival in the first week after head injury- but dangerously missing from standard procedure at some 70 percent of hospitals across the country.

Will nine-year-old Alex survive? If so, will he be one of the 10 percent of coma patients never to emerge from a vegetative state? So much depends on crucial early intervention, which Dr. Ghajar is campaigning to making routine-- simple techniques that could one day save your own loved one’s life.