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Nights at Fiancée's Bedside Inspire 'Idol' Contestant Chris Medina

Chris Medina rarely left fiancée Juliana Ramos as she lay in recovery from a 2009 car accident. Medina wrote for her, singing to her while he waited for her to wake from a coma.

Juliana Ramos was rarely alone during her two-month stay in three different facilities after her car accident in October 2009.

Two visitors were allowed in her room at once while family and friends flooded the waiting room—many arriving with food for the families. For Chris and Juliana, everyone was in that hospital limbo with them, said Medina's friends Dave Alyinovich and Glenn Curran, bandmates in The Able Body.

"It’s everyone we know, 50 years before we’re supposed to be doing this," Alyinovich said of the mood in the waiting room in the days after the accident. "It was seeing your friends, as you've never seen them before. ... Everybody came out in full force for her.

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"It was something we shouldn't have been doing yet."

With close friends and acquaintances nearby, Medina hardly left Ramos, said her cousin Allison Carroll.

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"One night, we went to the movies. He didn't want to go, I dragged him," she said. "When he's able to, he's absolutely by her side."

In rare moments spent away from the hospital, Medina turned to his guitar.

"Music was his escape," Alyinovich said.

"It was cathartic," Curran added.

During the time Juli was comatose, Medina crafted the song What's Become of Me, singing of his love and need for her in his life, and his state of mind in the days following her accident.

Medina laid the track down solo and acoustic. The band later tried to re-record it, but found they couldn't reproduce the raw emotion behind that first recording. They later shaped and wound guitars and drums around Medina's original recording, Curran said.

While at the hospital, Medina worked with Ramos, flexing her extremities, challenging her, attempting to increase and improve her brain activity.

"His attitude was, 'I have to pull through this.' I don't think he ever thought about the end game, just about what she needs now," Curran said.

Medina and Ramos' mother kept up recommended tests during late-night hours, like asking Juli to respond to verbal cues with physical signs. They recorded their results and offered them to doctors who observed Ramos during the daytime and were unable to duplicate their results. As proof of Juliana's improvement, her mother and Medina videotaped Ramos' progress during their nighttime therapy sessions. Doctors eventually upgraded Ramos on the Glasgow Coma Scale, a scale used to assess level of consciousness after head injury.

The band's EP (too little material for an album, too much material for a single) would later be named The Glasgow EP, and one year to the day after Juli's accident on Oct. 2, 2010, Medina would stand before Jennifer Lopez, Steven Tyler and Randy Jackson of American Idol, .

"It’s amazing, the hell he went through, and then he’s on television, all over the place—dreams you have as a little kid," Alyinovich said. "And he’s so content with it. All of it."


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