From reader “CJ” commenting on the 9 year old heart attack girl, whose parents couldn’t wait to pull the plug and vivisect her…
In the late 80s, a friend of ours was in a terrible car accident. He sustained serious head injuries and went into a coma.
Almost immediately, the doctors began telling his family and all of his friends at the hospital that he was, in all likelihood, permanently “brain dead”. It became a mantra that was repeated to the family daily, which was then forcefully relayed to all of us (as in “go home, he’s gone”).
Still, being the thick-headed teenagers that we were, we kept coming to the hospital every day. We would spend hours hanging out in his room, playing music for him, watching the Eagles’ games and the baseball playoffs, telling our comatose buddy old stories and inside jokes… keeping him company, ignoring the doctors, and never giving up.
A couple of weeks into his coma, we were in his room recounting one particularly absurd story to him about the night we went and got drunk at an abandoned mental institution in Northeast Philly and got chased out by a gang of devil worshippers throwing M-80s at us from a pickup truck (it was hysterical at the time). When we got to the end of the story and we were all cracking up, his lips turned up in an unmistakable smile. We immediately told him another one… and again, his lips formed another smile at exactly the right moment.
We ran out and found the doctor, told him what had just happened. The doctor blew us off, said something about involuntary reflexes, and implored us not to give the family false hope. Our friend was never coming back, and that was that. The doctor wouldn’t even come into the room to see what we were talking about. He had zero interest.
This persisted for a few more days… more stupid stories and jokes, more smiles. We were also holding his hand and telling him when to squeeze, which he did consistently. He was hearing us, and we knew it. The doctors remained uninterested and oblivious.
One day, his hand moved and brushed away his trach tube, disconnecting it. It was the most dramatic movement we’d seen from him, so we were obviously very excited. The nurse came in, gave us another spiel about involuntary reflexes or some such, and reconnected the tube. As she was about to walk away, she muttered to him “Now, stop doing that”. At which point his hand came up and knocked the tube away again. Then, his eyes opened and he rasped back at her with all the defiance he could muster: “NO”. And the room went absolutely wild. It was an indescribably glorious moment.
Turns out, our buddy remembered everything. He remembered who won the games we watched, the songs we played, the stories we told him… and he remembered the doctors all but pronouncing him dead and pushing to pull the plug on him. I can’t imagine the terror he felt while that was happening, and never pressed him to recall it. What I do know is that the only thing that kept him from losing all hope (and his mind) were his friends who never left him, never listened to the doctors, and created enough doubt in the minds of his parents that they never agreed to sign the death warrant on their son. He survived the health care industry because he had a room full of advocates who were too young and too stubborn to listen to the experts… Praise God.
