Posted on 01/02/2010 1:38:55 PM PST by wagglebee
Jodie Beckner demonstrated a move at Pilates Plus in La Jolla, where she teaches classes. Six years ago, Beckner suffered a permanent traumatic brain injury after a head-on collision on an icy Vermont road. She graduated from SDSU in December and hopes to go to nursing school. Peggie Peattie / Union-Tribune
Mike Beckner was fixing dinner when he got the phone call parents dread — the one from a doctor trying to break awful news gently.
Earlier that day, Nov. 11, 2003, his daughter, Jodie, had driven up a mountain to catch the first day of snowboarding season at a ski resort when her SUV spun out on a patch of ice and hit another vehicle.
“They were starting to tell me there was a car crash,” recalled Mike Beckner, 60, of Encinitas. “I couldn’t process it. I was in shock. I handed the phone to my wife.”
The Beckners reached the bedside of their comatose daughter the next afternoon, the beginning of a six-year rehabilitation struggle. Jodie Beckner was a top-notch college student and competitive gymnast, swimmer and diver at the time of the crash. Afterward, she fought her way back from an almost infantile state to become a woman as smart, funny and capable — though profoundly changed — as the one who drove up the mountain that day.
In December, Beckner, 24, of Ocean Beach earned her bachelor’s degree in public policy from San Diego State University. She hopes to enter an accelerated nursing program next fall and perhaps use her skills in the Peace Corps one day.
“Jodie has been knocked down so many times over the past few years, but she keeps getting back up,” said her mother, Kathy Beckner.
Today, all Jodie knows of the crash is what she has heard from others: Her car slid across the road into oncoming traffic. Her head slammed into an air bag, and the force rattled her brain, impairing her cognitive and emotional states.
She barely stirred for five days in the hospital and didn’t recognize her family for three weeks. She said her last memory from before the accident is of a camping trip she took a week or two earlier.
The first three years of recovery were filled with intensive physical and occupational therapy, including neurological treatments that ultimately helped to restore the damaged circuitry in her brain.
Mike and Kathy Beckner said their daughter was emotionless and isolationist at first. Once she started a task, such as brushing her hair or working on a word puzzle book, she would keep at it continuously unless someone told her to stop.
“She was like a zombie,” Michael Beckner said.
“You would look at her and look right through her, because there didn’t seem to be anything there.”
But Jodie Beckner soon made astonishing progress. Just six months after the crash, she took a job stocking shelves at a store. In summer 2004, she began college-level classes again.
“At the rehab center, they said she was taking quantum leaps,” Kathy Beckner said.
Jodie Beckner doesn’t remember her decision to apply to SDSU in 2004, though she told her mother about wanting to live near her older sister, Mary Beth, in San Diego. She started fall courses on the campus with a vigor that astonished her parents, who moved from New Jersey to Encinitas in 2007 to keep the family close together.
Beckner juggled a full-time job and a full class load, studying extra to make up for shortcomings in her short-term memory. An SDSU program for students with disabilities helped ensure that classrooms accommodated her needs, such as letting her sit near the front so she could hear better. The car crash had damaged her hearing.
“I’m sure I had” doubts, Jodie Beckner said. “But I’ve never said, ‘I can’t do this.’”
She claims no great spiritual rebirth from her close call, but said it has spurred her desire to help disadvantaged patients.
Kathy Beckner sees her daughter’s turnaround as a purposeful blessing.
“I’ve told her, ‘You have a mission on Earth,’ ” Kathy Beckner said.
“It’s a miracle she has come this far.”
Funny - it was the fascists who really liked the practice of killing innocent people. You’re awfully “free” with insults of the worst kind based on nothing other than people defending the right of the helpless not to be murdered.
Says who? Her husband, IIRC.
And you're sure he didn't lie? How?
He carried out her desires.
He carried out HIS desires.
My final desires are in writing with my lawyer.
Which is better than going on hearsay by someone who has every reason in the world to lie.
Thank you for posting Jim Robinson’s post.
DU must be running out of competent trolls to send over here.
If you were in the hospital and your husband moved in with another woman, bought her an engagement ring, referred to her as his fiancee, had children with her, and openly queried about you, "when is this bitch going to die?", would I be a FASCIST because I wanted to let you live?
The baseless opinions of some on this thread make me ill.
You called it a *blessing* in post five. What now? A blessing isn't good?
And you didn't call it cold blooded torturous murder like it was, but couched it in liberalspeak calling it a *release*.
Since when is starving and dehydrating someone to death a *blessing* and how can it be *good* that she died in such a gruesome way?
She didn't *pass* either. She was shoved, essentially.
Don’t ever get married FV, because as far as the Florida courts are concerned if you were disabled your husband could destroy any sort of advanced medical directive you might have and exercise his “right” to kill you and it wouldn’t matter what “nanny state fascists” in the pro-life movement have to say about it.
The leftists in America (and this most certainly includes many libertarians) has succeeded in creating a “right” to kill, they have murdered more than 50 million unborn Americans and now they are going after the disabled and elderly.
Barack Obama called his vote to let Terri live a MISTAKE and some FReepers AGREE WITH HIM.
Prevent ANYBODY, at gunpoint no less, from having food and water and they WILL die. The fact that Terri lasted thirteen days is a testimony to her overall health and will to live.
And we are to accept YOUR version of morality where people get to kill each other based on say so? Apparently in your (im)moral world, those who champion death are the ones who get to force their (im)morality on others.
If there is doubt as to what she wanted, they should have erred on the side of caution and let her live.
He could have divorced her, turned her care over to her family completely and washed his hands of the situation. Except for the fact that HE was the one who caused her injuries and if she regained the ability to speak, could have really mucked up his life with her testimony.
And you're defending the actions of a worthless piece of work like that?
Very telling of you.....
You wouldn't know logic if it hit you over the head.
You have done nothing but support the use of the government as a tool by which Terri's worthless piece of excrement husband killed her.
You scream about fascism and yet support the very thing that you condemn. He used the COURTS to have her murdered. For all your screeds about not having government interference, at least be consistent about it and say that he should have just done the deed with his own hands. He dragged the government you condemn into it and here you're applauding it while condemning us for wanting the government to protect us from murderers like him.
Debating is not making unfounded assumptions and then treating them like facts.
Do you know for a fact that she was unable to think? If she couldn't talk, how did you arrive at that conclusion? Could you read her mind?
Are you a medical professional who examined her yourself and determined, based on medical tests that she was, indeed, unable to think? Would any medical professional ever be really qualified to state that some one cannot think based on their ability to respond as expected?
Do you KNOW FOR A FACT that she did indeed tell her husband what he claimed? Were you there and did you hear it? Did you tape record it?
Your concept of *debate* is to state what you want to be true and defend it and call everyone who disagrees with you a fascist and proclaim yourself the victor in the debate, when everyone but you knows you aren't.
The level of delusion you're displaying on this thread about your reasoning skills does partly explain your stand on this situation, but is still awe inspiring in its scope.
This thread needs renamed to ‘into the tortured twisted mind of freedumb2003’
People who advocate the murder of the helpless in the name of - well, freedom, non-nannystatism, or legalities - need to be honest.
They should just say the truth - “I love death (for other people). Helpless people who can’t take care of themselves should just be killed. Anyone who doesn’t like it has no right to say anything.”
Then at least they’d be honest.
One can only hope.
You don't kill someone, even if they say they want it.
It's still murder. Even if they want to die, that doesn't change the morality of the situation.
And yet no death penalty for someone who was demonstrated to be a murdered if there is one objection on the jury.
And no executing the murderer in an inhumane fashion either. After all, we can't have him suffer unnecessarily, now can we?
What a twisted world we live in.
Without even a jury. Just the order of one out of control judge with an agenda.
I don’t have it, but I did post it on one of the Terri threads before Wagglebee started doing the Terri dailies.
Going by his previous posts dumb2003 supports Terri Schiavo’s husband doing whatever the heck he wants because dumb2003 fears his own living will will be messed with. He has stated a few times that he and his wife have “made their wishes known” about medical intervention
Two totally different cases.
Dumb2003 and wive have living wills
Terri Sciavo had no living will. Nothing
So instead the courts obeyed the husband’s wishes. The very same person who probably injured Terri and put her in her present state and neglected her for years as she languished in the hospital
Terri’s family stayed loyal and visited her and begged the courts to be allowed to take care of her
Only a total idiot can’t tell who wanted the best for Terri and who loved her.
How many times did dumbass2003 use the word fascist?
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