Perspective
Five years ago, I walked into her home to find her chain smoking on the couch, listening to gospel on the radio and singing softly to her daughter. Melissa stirred a little and moaned as she rested in her hospital bed in her mother's living room, age 24 and in that purgatory of consciousness that results from a traumatic brain injury.
Melissa was uncomfortably close to my age. Three months before her wedding, she was broadsided by a speeding truck on her way to work. To her misfortune (or so I thought at the time), she survived, only to remain in a persistive vegetative state. She had made no progress in the intense brain-injury rehabilitation program at the hospital, so she was sent home with home-based therapy as her last resort.
"Can you help her?" Her mother implored of me at our first session. So I turned my self inside out for the better part of six months to get any meaningful response from Melissa. Seeing myself in Melissa's eyes, I was desperate for her to show some sign of recovery. She never did. Nor did she make progress with the speech therapist or the physical therapist. To make matters worse, every neurologist that saw her insisted that she would never wake up. And because she wasn't making progress, insurance was about to cancel her coverage.
As the situation disintegrated, so did my relationship with her mother. She was openly hostile with me, and although I knew it wasn't my fault, I still felt awful. A meeting was called for all of us therapists to meet with our supervisor.
"Can you document change?" My supervisor asked pointedly, and we knew the writing was on the wall. Because we couldn't show progress in our notes, Melissa would have to be discharged from our services. It wasn't a choice for us--- to keep her on with therapy would constitute insurance fraud, and each of our licenses---heck, our careers-- were on the line. Since I had the next appointment with Melissa, I had to set the wheels in motion with her mother.
Naturally, she exploded, she ranted, she threatened to sue me, she cried. No matter how I explained the situation, what it came down to, in her mother's eyes, was that I had given up hope. But what she didn't know is that I had lost hope for Melissa within the first few weeks of working with her. Once I had seen her CAT scans and MRI's, I saw that letting Melissa survive was a cruel trick that God to played on her mother, and I would pray that Melissa would quietly die in her sleep, so that she and her mother could be out of misery and find some peace, some closure.
The next day at work, I found out that Melissa's mom had basically cursed my name to the other two therapists. And surprisingly, my co-workers never discharged her. They went against the plan, hung me out to dry, made me look like the bad guy. Why was I the only one that could see the reality of the situation? Melissa would never get better. Never. And yet they kept plodding on, furtively. Foolishly, I thought that I was the only one of the three of us who had cajones.
But in thinking about it today, I realized what made the other two therapists keep going---why they didn't give up, even though the situation was hopeless. Quite simply, they were mothers, and at the time, I wasn't. Although I could put myself in Melissa's place and never want to live like that, the other therapists identified with her mother. To them, it was their child on that bed. It was they who were desperate and bargaining with God for a miracle for their daughter. Melissa's mom was living a nightmare, and as mothers, my co-workers needed to help pull her out.
I finally understand that once you're a mom, every child is your child. And no amount of science, no matter how well proven, can convince you that a miracle can't happen. Because honestly, whether you're watching your child take his first steps in the kitchen or toward his bride, you're seeing miracles every day.
