Fighting for Dear Life (30 page)

I'd say that's a life worth living.

CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

EVERY DAY'S A GIFT

The fatalistic attitude toward treating brain disease is very
prevalent—and untrue. All too often, people give up. We've
all been humbled by the brain's ability to recover.

—D
R.
O
WEN
B. S
AMUELS
, C
HIEF OF
N
EUROINTENSIVE
C
ARE
, E
MORY
U
NIVERSITY
1

W
hen Judge George Greer ordered the suspension of Terri's nutrition and hydration on November 22, 2002, he was preoccupied with the quality of Terri's life. He wrote, ‘‘The real issue in this case, however, deals with treatment options for Terry [
sic
] Schiavo and whether or not they will have any positive affect [
sic
] so as to ‘significantly improve her quality of life.' '' He concluded that Terri's chance of improving was slim to none, and therefore, without even offering a window of opportunity to try therapy, she should die.

I wish Judge Greer had invited any one of the following seven living miracles to the witness stand before taking such a dim view of Terri's chances for improvement. Each has emerged from a comatose or persistent vegetative state, often continuing to live amazing lives. Come to think of it, arranging an appearance would have been easy to accomplish. After all, one of these formerly comatose patients attended several days of Terri's trial in Judge Greer's own courtroom.

Meet Brooke Becker of Clearwater, Florida, who lived near to where Terri's tragedy unfolded.

At age twenty, Brooke and her boyfriend were driving home from her summer job when a truck slammed into her car door. Rescue teams struggled for forty-five minutes to cut her free from the mangled vehicle. Precious minutes were lost at a time when life and death were measured in seconds. A helicopter rushed Brooke to the Bayfront Medical Center, where trauma specialists assessed her condition.

In short, Brooke suffered from a ruptured spleen, a fractured liver, a pelvis that had been crushed, a broken collarbone, and a jaw broken in two places. Two collapsed lungs complicated her condition—and that wasn't even the worse part of her injuries. She experienced such traumatic brain damage, she fell into a deep coma. Even though Brooke was given no chance of survival—let alone a quality of life on par with Terri's disabled condition—her doctors performed a seven-hour emergency surgery that required more than thirty pints of blood supplements.

Her parents waited and prayed.

Four months after remaining in a comatose state, fed through a feeding tube, the miraculous occurred: Brooke began to improve. Six months after the near-death accident, in spite of the fact that the doctors had no hope for her survival, Brooke was sent home partially paralyzed yet alert. She remained on a feeding tube for two years while receiving physical therapy.

Today she lives with her parents. Although requiring the aid of a wheelchair, Brooke attends and participates at Calvary Baptist Church with her family. And though her eyesight was damaged by the accident and she cannot speak without the help of a computerized voice synthesizer, Brooke has learned to express herself through art. In fact, her paintings are so stunning, they're frequently sold by commission.

From comatose to competent artist—that's remarkable.

I first met Brooke during a hearing before Judge Greer. I found her smile infectious. Here was a formerly healthy, young college woman whose life had been forever impaired in an instant, yet who felt compelled to support Terri by coming to court. Why? She knew from personal experience what beating the odds was all about. She was living proof. Thankful that her family and her doctors had not given up on her, Brooke hoped her story would encourage the Schindlers in their battle to give Terri the same chance at a new beginning.

I know her presence inspired me.

COMATOSE IN CALIFORNIA

In 1996 twenty-one-year-old Theresa de Vera was a junior at Loyola Marymount University, where she was actively involved in campus life. Volleyball, outdoor water sports, socializing with friends—all of that would change in a split second. Theresa was riding with her mother, Rudy, on the freeway when she passed out from a severe asthmatic attack. By the time Rudy reached Glendale Adventist Hospital, Theresa was blue, unresponsive, and not breathing.

She was slumped over in the backseat, dead.

The nursing staff rushed Theresa inside, where they confirmed she wasn't breathing, she had no pulse, and she had no blood pressure. According to the emergency personnel who first assessed her condition, Theresa was clinically dead, having suffered cardiopulmonary arrest. After aggressive measures to resuscitate her, Theresa jerked back to life and then, thirty minutes later, went into a seizure. She settled into a deep coma and continued on a respirator for two weeks with no change in her condition.

At that point her doctors worked to persuade the family to give up hope and harvest Theresa's organs while they were still viable. A shouting match erupted in the hospital; the family argued for her life while the doctors maintained she was in a persistent vegetative state. They assured the family there was nothing more to be done.

Theresa was gone.

For four months Theresa remained in a deep coma.

She didn't smile. She didn't laugh.

She didn't move. She didn't cry.

She exhibited none of these signs of life that Terri routinely displayed. As a spokeswoman from the hospital later reported, ‘‘Her condition was so severe and her chance of recovery so small—virtually zero—that any recovery would be like Karen Ann Quinlan, really never waking up again. They did recommend that the family terminate treatment.''

That would have been a big mistake. Why? With her family and her church praying, Theresa defied the prognosis.

She awakened.

Not only that, she regained her upper body mobility, her speech, and the ability to feed herself. As Theresa is now fond of saying to others with disabilities, ‘‘Never allow your disability to become your inability.'' Those are not empty words. With persistence and hard work, Theresa returned to Loyola Marymount University and graduated with the class of 2004.

Theresa's comeback was so dramatic, she and her family appeared on
Oprah
. One of Theresa's attending physicians sat in the front row of the audience. After confirming the details of her trauma, the clearly stunned doctor said, ‘‘I have to tell you, [her condition is] usually associated with really, really severe brain damage. I've never seen anybody come back from something like that. What has happened here defies medical logic. . . . It's a miracle.''

His assessment echoed that of the hospital spokeswoman, who said, ‘‘This is such an unusual outcome that we call it a miracle because we can't explain it medically. There is no reason this child should have woken up.''
2
Of course, while God doesn't always heal in such dramatic ways, He is fully able to do the impossible—medically or otherwise. That's the message of Jeremiah 32:27, ‘‘Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for Me?''

On March 19, 2005, when news reached Theresa that Terri's feeding tube had been removed, she knew what she needed to do. She and her mother packed her wheelchair and took the red-eye flight from California to join Terri's vigil outside the hospice, where she had an opportunity to meet and share her journey of healing and restoration with Bob and Mary Schindler.

TRIAL BY FIRE

The year was 1995. Bill Clinton was in the White House. The Atlanta Braves won their first World Series in almost thirty years. And a jury took less than four hours to acquit O. J. Simpson for a double murder charge. While not national news at the time, that was also the year when firefighter Donald Herbert sustained severe brain damage.

Four days after Christmas, an early morning blaze ravaged a two-story apartment building in the snow-covered town of Buffalo, New York. Donald, a thirty-four-year-old rescue squad veteran, cited numerous times for bravery, strapped on his breathing mask and attacked the flames in hopes of finding any survivors. This time, however, the building fought back, dropping its roof on the rescue effort. Trapped in the attic by fiery debris, knocked unconscious by falling timbers, and deprived of oxygen for six minutes, Donald slipped into a coma for several months. He was later diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state.
3
Unable to feed himself, walk, or talk, Donald was restricted to his bed or a wheelchair. Buffalo firefighters banded together to support his family with chores and financial support. And, they took turns visiting their unresponsive colleague for years on end. While those efforts appeared to be fruitless, his wife, family, and friends continued to lavish love on him.

For the better part of ten years, Donald remained speechless and noncommunicative and resided in a nursing care facility. His wife, Linda, however, was the one who became speechless after the nursing staff called one day to inform her that Donald suddenly ‘‘woke up.'' His first words were, ‘‘I want to talk to my wife.''
4
Linda and his four sons rushed to the nursing home and, for a marathon fourteen hours of hugs and conversation, got reacquainted. After all, Donald's youngest son Nicholas, thirteen, was a toddler at the time of the accident.

Donald Herbert spent nearly a year reconnecting with his family. And though the initial fourteen hours with his family were his most lucid, he was able to communicate with them and get reacquainted. Sadly, he passed away in February 2006 after a battle with pneumonia. Was his life worth saving? Just ask his wife and children, who had the precious gift of spending nearly a full year with their husband and dad.

When asked to comment about Donald Herbert's amazing recovery by WebMD, neurologist Nancy Childs, who works at the Texas Neuro-Rehab Center in Austin, Texas, admitted that scientists know ‘‘practically nothing'' about the inner processes of the human brain in an injury case like this. She said, ‘‘Some of the basic science and basic questions about what happens with the neurophysiology of the brain as patients move through levels of consciousness are just beginning to be explored.''
5
In other words, even highly specialized scientists and neurologists are still learning about the way the brain operates.

Just ask Donald Herbert's family, after his long-dormant tongue was loosened after ten years of nonuse.

Or ask Tracy Gaskill.

On September 3, 2002, Tracy's pickup truck rolled over on a Kansas highway causing extreme trauma to her head and neck. Taken by helicopter to the emergency room at a Wichita hospital, she was placed on a ventilator. The injuries to her brain were so severe, doctors informed the family that she'd be lucky to survive the night. They were wrong. Tracy pulled through, and though semicomatose and unable to speak or feed herself in the years following, she began to heal.

About two and a half years after suffering brain damage, the non-communicative Tracy stunned her doctors and family by suddenly speaking. Her doctor, David Schmeidler, said, ‘‘I have never seen this happen in my career. I've read about it happening, the severely brain damaged recovering suddenly, but never seen it until now.''
6

Dr. Schmeidler didn't miss the parallel to Terri Schiavo's case. He said Tracy ‘‘is actually able to speak and to speak coherently. In light of all this stuff on Terri Schiavo, it makes you pause and think. For three years or so, [Tracy] was fed through a tube, then she swallowed a little bit and now she speaks.''
7
In fact, she's rediscovered the pleasure of strawberry shakes from Sonic.

Tracy's doctor believes four things contributed to her unexplainable return from death's door: constant medical care, prayer, speech therapy, and the daily visits from her grandparents. Tracy's mother had died prior to her accident, and her father lived in a different city. But grandparents Don and Stella Gaskill made Tracy their top priority. I can only imagine what would have happened if Terri had been permitted the same level of medical care and speech therapy afforded to Tracy.

THE PHONE'S FOR YOU

Just after midnight on September 21, 1984, Sarah Scantlin, then eighteen, was crossing the street with friends when she was mowed down by a hit-and-run drunk driver. Her father, Jim Scantlin, reflected upon his first visit to see Sarah that fateful night: ‘‘I take one look in there and it's just gruesome. She is horribly mangled, especially in the head because she was hit by a teenager, slung over in the path of another car—and that's the one that really got her, right in the head. I couldn't handle it.''
8
Unlike Terri Schiavo or Donald Herbert, Sarah's oxygen supply wasn't cut off. She could breathe on her own, but that was about the extent of the good news. She was little more than a breathing corpse. Her brain damage was severe and extensive, caused by the impact of two cars and the pavement onto which she fell. Sarah's mother, Betsy, recalled the doctor's ominous verdict in the emergency ward:

‘‘Sarah's not going to wake up tonight.''
9
For reasons nobody could explain, her doctor was wrong. She survived. Six weeks later, this brain-injured college freshman remained motionless and in a coma, fed by a feeding tube. Gradually she progressed, but only to a semicomatose, minimally conscious state where she remained locked out from the rest of the world. Her family, friends, and the nursing staff where she lived never saw Sarah attempt to speak.

For twenty years . . . not one peep.

On February 4, 2005, Jim Scantlin was at his office when his wife arrived and quickly directed him to a conference call from the nursing home. ‘‘Someone wants to talk to you,'' Betsy said, anxiously pointing to the speakerphone. Jim was in for the shock of his life when five precious words spoken by his daughter filled the room: