A comatose grandmother who was due to have her life support equipment turned off woke up in the nick of time.

Yahoo! News reported that 56-year-old Teri Roberts, a grandmother of five children from Valley, Nebraska, woke up on December 22 just four hours before her family was to pull the plug on her life support equipment.

Mrs Roberts had fallen into a coma due to streptococcal toxic-shock syndrome. The doctors who attended to her in the Methodist Physicians' Clinic thought that she would not make it.

"She just magically woke up," her 35-year-old son, Ryan Roberts told members of the press last week. "Literally four hours before we moved to take her off life support."

After recovering from the coma, Teri Roberts underwent surgery to have her hands and wrists amputated. Her doctors required quadruple amputations to spare her vital organs from succumbing to the infection.

Her family described Mrs Roberts as being "in good spirits," despite losing her limbs. "She doesn't care if they cut off her hands and her feet," Ryan revealed.

The Roberts family is looking to raise $25,000 to pay for Teri's medical bills, as well as to pay for the prosthetic limbs that she would have be fitted with after the amputation. They have set up a GoFundMe page for her. The campaign reached 613 people in 13 days and has raised more than $30,000.

Teri's predicament is similar to Martin Pistorius, who was in a comatose state for 12 years before waking up in 1999. Pistorius had contracted an unknown disease in South Africa that left him wheelchair-bound and subsequently in a coma. Doctors suspected he had contracted cryptococcal meningitis that led to an unknown degenerative disease.

Pistorius claimed to be aware of everything while he was in a coma, and to have willed himself to recover after "getting fed up with his situation."