Terry Shiavo

So it's been all over the news for the last little while about that poor woman and what they are going to do with her. I'm of two minds on what they should be doing - starvation is a horrible way to go but I know a little too much about people in a vegetative state to believe that she is someday going to recover. You see, my ex's youngest brother is very much like Terry S. including the feeding tube although he does have a trach tube just to keep his lungs healthy.

Wayne was a healthy, vital funny 21 year old who was going to take his real estate exam the following day, at night he delivered pizzas for money to pay for his car so that his parents wouldn't have to. It was in May of 1990 and he was three blocks away from his home returning to the pizza place after delivering an order. He was turning left on a green light when a car from his right ran the red light and slammed into him. His car was hit so hard the passenger side of his car crumpled in and hit him on the side of the head. His head was bounced between his door window and the crumpled remains of his passenger door several times knocking him out. The car was propelled out of the intersection and into a parking lot where it then came to a rest by crashing into the rear of a parked car. The first people to make it to Wayne thought that he was dead because the footwell on the drivers side was two inches deep in his blood. He regained conciousness while the ambulance was removing him from the car, and he didn't look too bad, no broken bones , a few cuts on his face and hands , and a cut on the right side of his head. Wayne lost conciousness on the way to the hospital and that was when they realized that his head injury might be worse than they thought. He was transferred to a trauma centre a couple of hours later and that was when Potsie and I got the call to come as he wasn't expected to live through the night. By the time we got to the hospital he was in surgery so they could put an intercranial bolt in his head to determine how much his brain was swelling. Eventually, it was determined that the swelling in his brain caused tears in his brain stem and cortex - injuries that would not repair themselves and there was nothing that the doctors could do. Wayne is not on life support, just a feeding tube. There was a point when he was in a coma that his parents could have pulled the life support but they are Jehova's Witnesses and refused. Eventually, Wayne came out of his coma and he was taken off a ventilator and all he requires now is the feeding tube and after a few bouts of pneumonia, a trach tube that has a kind of humidifier attached to keep his lungs healthy. Wayne is not aware, oh his eyes are open but he's not in there any more hard as that is to say.
Wayne is one of the lucky few brain injured people that has excellent care. His mother was a nurse and he lives at home with 24 hour nursing care. His parents converted part of their house to a room for him with his own sun porch and all the things that he needs. Katie was born approx. a month and a half after Wayne's accident so this May will be 15 years that he has been like this and I have to say he's had great care - not a single bed sore and physical therapy has kept his hands and feet from becoming too badly curled with posturing. The doctors say that he could live to be 60 and his mother is terrified about what will happen to him when she is gone, Potsie's dad died last year and she is 68.
I'll probably get roasted for saying this but I sometimes wish that he HAD died in the accident rather than be sentenced to this half life. Looking into his eyes you can see that he's just not there anymore. At first I had nightmares that he was still AWARE in his head, unable to move or talk and knowing that his mother was changing his diapers but over the years nothing has changed, he's blank with no signs of awareness at all and believe me it's been tested by so many doctors that I was very thankful his parents lived in Canada with its socialized medicine. They even flew him to a special hospital in Florida that specializes in head trauma and air ambulances don't come cheap. His mother still holds out the faint hope that someday a miracle will happen and he'll just...wake up but even she admits that it's 99.9% never going to happen. So I can understand why Terry's husband is fighting to let her go and I can also understand her parents not wanting to, I don't think I could make that kind of decision. I know I wouldn't want to live like that but if it were one of my children I'd probably fight just as hard as her parents are.

BTW the driver that hit Wayne was drunk.