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.”
From the injury HE gave her. How convenient....
fd: And he did.
Until he got tired of it and murdered her.
There is no legitimate reason in the world that he could not simply have divorced her and let her parents take over the care.
All your championing of freedom from government intrusion have the same hollow ring to it that all the pro-choicers have when they claim that a woman has a *right* to murder her own baby because it's her body and the government doesn't have the right to interfere and tell her she can't murder it.
Ability to "think" is totally subjective and has NOTHING to do with brain death.
The final provisions of a person has always been held with the closest family. There is no legal relationship closer than spouse.
So, in the absence of a legal document you believe that a spouse should be allowed to kill someone?
You can presume all you want. Many of us want to be let go when we are are vegetables.
So, YOU want to impose YOUR desires on EVERYONE else?
She wasn’t married. Schaivo was.
What does that have to do with her response to therapy.
>> It’s already been proven. Michael’s court testimony was documented.
Your troll-tactic of changing the subject mid-sentence is an old one. Okay, so now you want to make it about the laws that were violated. Or is it about Terri’s knowledge of law? Could you try to say something that actually makes sense? <<
OK. Ms. Schaivo told her husband to not let her stay if she was a vegetable. You weren’t there, so you don’t know.
>>He did what? Take care of her for the rest of their lives? The context in which he gave that testimony suggested that he promised to take care of her in the true sense of caring, not in the sense of “I’ll take care of that bitch.” Killing her was the direct opposite of what he testified he promised to do for her.<<
He did the best he could with meddling parents and other nosey types getting in their personal business.
>>What does that have to do with anything we were discussing? Nothing. But trolls must change the subject frequently. So okay, you want to talk about Terri’s estranged husband violating more than just his vow not to kill her. You want to introduce his sexual infidelity. But how do his sexual escapades support small government? I don’t get the connection you’re trying to make there.<<
It was you all that introduced the husband’s peccadilloes. My point is they are irrelevant, no matter how much you Nanny-Staters want to bring them up.
>>So now you’re saying that when she grew up her family should have severed all involvement in her life? That’s what you claimed they did in your previous post. Make up your mind. Pick a belief, and defend that belief. Only trolls change their belief midstream to enable them to continue arguing.<<
You are very slow. I will go slowly. When you marry, you give up almost all legal ties to your previous family. And if an adult leaves his/her home the legal ties to the original family become tenuous. Marriage severs them altogether.
Of coure, you Nanny Staters will say anything an build any straw man to make sure you defend Big Government to support your political agenda.
>>Mixed what up? Are you now trying to suggest that it’s their fault Michael embezzled Terri’s rehab money?<<
You can’t embezzle what is yours. The parents only started “caring” substantially when there was money involved. They had no legal standing and I continue to be amazed the court let them in.
FOTFLOL!!!!
You nailed it.
fd: No, I want it to mean the ability to think.
And your excuse is????
This is getting old, so I’ll answet the obly question that is of import:
>>So, in the absence of a legal document you believe that a spouse should be allowed to kill someone?<<
No, I the spouse is the only person who is legally allowed to express the stated desires of someone who is unable to think for themselves. You may want the government to think for you and break the law for you, but I think the law is more important than a narrow and political pro-Government agenda.
Unless and until you can produce a witness to gainsay the husband, your entire argument is sophistry and just more pro-Big-Government propaganda.
No, he simply cannot conceive of someone thinking differently than he does, so he projects onto others.
And yes, he does. That is readily apparent on other threads on which I've seen him post. His posting history, there for all to see, bears it out.
>>And your excuse is????<<
I don’t have hate and evil in my heart like you do.
That is sufficient.
>>No, he simply cannot conceive of someone thinking differently than he does, so he projects onto others.<<
OMG the irony.
>>And yes, he does. That is readily apparent on other threads on which I’ve seen him post. His posting history, there for all to see, bears it out.<<
OMG the irony.
But it always makes me happy to see my paparazzi stalkers doing what they do so well.
Were YOU there?
How do you know she told him? Did you hear it yourself?
According to the AMA, brain death means “irreversible cessation of the functions of the ENTIRE brain, including brain stem.”
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/369/ceja_4i94.pdf
>>How do you know she told him? Did you hear it yourself?<<
That isn’t the way evidence nor logic works.
But that concept is wasted on you.
That's ironic coming from someone who believes that a husband should be able to decide to kill his own wife.
So, answer the other question....Why didn't he just divorce her and let her family take over the care?
If marriage severs the ties to the immediate family like you claim, then divorce should restore them.
What skin was it off his back if they got divorced and he let her family take over her care?
Why are you such an advocate for allowing spouses to kill their mates if they want to?
My DIL is going to school to become an Occupational Therapist, one of the guys with her in the program had a Truamatic Brain Injury. He had a PhD. in biology before the accident and he credits the OT’s for getting him back as far as they did and wants to be able to return the favor.
You’re ignoring most of the evidence.
Florida law at the time of Terri's injury DID NOT allow for dehydration/starvation, so that point is moot.
I realize you are anti-government and pro-anarchy, but government DOES EXIST to protect people.
Unless and until you can produce a witness to gainsay the husband, your entire argument is sophistry and just more pro-Big-Government propaganda.
Here is an affidavit showing the Mikey Schiavo had no idea what Terri wanted:
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