Posted on 09/19/2002 3:36:17 AM PDT by ResistorSister
Stacy Gamery would do anything to reverse 60 seconds of her life.
If only she could rewind the clock to the minute she gave in to her 3-year-old's desire to sit in the front seat of a car. This time, she wouldn't deviate from her policy of insisting that Carmen get in a car seat in the back, just as she had on all the other trips they'd made since she was born, no matter how special the occasion.
If she had done this, she said, she wouldn't have found herself on the evening of July 7 pleading with onlookers as little Carmen lay lifeless.
“Somebody, anybody, help my baby,” she screamed.
“I knew she wasn't breathing.”
As toddlers will, Carmen had squirmed out of a seatbelt. Her father attempted to relatch the belt and looked up just in time to see a red light. He slammed on the brakes.
Carmen was thrown against the windshield and paralyzed from the neck down.
Taken by medical helicopter from Aultman Hospital to Cleveland Metro Medical Center, she was not given much chance for survival.
But she did survived.
Doctors predicted she'd never talk again.
She has.
“The first thing she said was, ‘I want my momma,’” said Stacy, a 1987 graduate of Washington High.
Stacy embraces such small joys.
“I haven’t been able to hold my daughter for more than two months,” she said. “I'll put my hands on her neck just so she can feel them.”
Now in the Cleveland Clinic children's rehabilitation unit, Carmen lays in bed with a metal halo locked around her skull. Her mother tells her it’s as cool as Buzz Lightyear's space helmet.
In between physical and occupational therapy and preschool tutoring, Carmen wants to know where her hands are and if the muscle spasms mean that she can move again.
“We have to tell her the truth,” Stacy said.
Her mother braids Carmen's long, dark hair and puts princess-pink nail polish on her fingers and toes. She pulls the blanket over dimpled little arms.
Nearly every thought is consumed by Carmen's well-being but Stacy can't help but wonder where the money will come from to pay for hospital bills and special equipment and home renovations and nursing care.
“I'm a single mom and I was waiting tables when this happened and was just going to start at Denny’s,” Stacy said. “Now, I really have no income.
Looking at Carmen’s bicycle sitting in the garage, her mother thinks now of her little girl using her mouth to steer a wheelchair, of oxygen hook-ups and tracheotomy suctioning, bathroom modifications, a lift-equipped van and special toys operated by breath alone.
“It's overwhelming,” Stacy said, her voice quivering.
She and family and friends are praying for Medicaid assistance.
Reality is nightmarish enough, but Stacy also has dreams.
“I have terrible dreams about her,” Stacy said. “I dream she fell out of bed or somebody took her halo.”
In the light of day, Stacy is confident that technology and time are on her daughter’s side. Carmen’s fracture is similar to that suffered by actor Christopher Reeve. Reeve recently made headlines by regaining feeling and movement using the latest medical technology.
“But I wonder how you get in these research projects,” Stacy said. “Do you have to be rich and famous? I'm afraid that when she leaves the hospital, she’ll just be forgotten.”
Stacy cannot forget what has happened or foresee the future.
Doctors, she pointed out, “are just God's helpers. It's up to a higher power than them.”
Stacy herself proved the doctors wrong when she was 3 years old. Tracing her own heavily scarred leg, she tells the story of her father accidentally running over her leg with a lawn mower.
She wants to spare other parents the pain of an injured child.
“I tell anybody I see to always, always make your child sit in their car seat,” Stacy said. “Put them in the back seat, no matter what. We were only five streets away from home. In one day, it can be all gone.
“I don’t even ask God anymore for things,” she continued. “I just thank God my baby is alive, that she can talk and eat and is not brain damaged. It’s just the best gift for her to smile in such adversity.”
Carmen, however, is asking for more.
“She'll tell me, ‘It’s all right, Mom. It’s OK. I talk to Jesus. I ask him all the time to let me move.”
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A charitable fund for Carmen has been established at branches of FirstMerit Bank and The Savings Bank and Trust Co. Family and friends welcome any information about spinal cord injuries and available assistance and can be reached by e-mail at tavia@sssnet.com.
I do not know this family, but when I saw the picture of little Carmen, my heart went out to her. Please pray for her recovery.
But, generally speaking, keeping a large distance between children and explosives is a good idea, so keeping kids away from the passenger seat airbag makes sense.
The best thing to do about spinal cord injuries is to prevent them, I'm afraid.
Seat belts for kids are a must. Kids will play with the latch, but when they do, they must be corrected severely. When my daughter so much as touches her seat-belt latch, the car stops, a correction is administered, and we re-strap her in, just to be sure. The problem is, unless you are super-consistent about this, seat belts often become a way for kids to "test" their parents with a minor defiance. My sweet little thing tried to test me on this a couple of times, but she has always gotten the message that this is not a good idea.
Sad to see the mother mentioning Christoper Reeve in this context, since he has been used by abortion activists to promote embryonic stem cell research. I hope this mother is careful not to wind up in the same trap.
Abortion advocates are very eager to use embryonic stem cell research to get people to accept a utilitarian argument about abortion. It is a pretty easy argue that abortions are going to happen anyway, so something good might as well come from them. However, once you accept one utilitarian argument, then you have opened the door to them all. Instead of arguing over bright lines of right and wrong, you are arguing over muddled grey areas of greater goods and lesser evils.
Protectors of life will lose this argument every single time, which is why advocates of abortion are so eager to advance it. People like Christopher Reeve are just pawns in that game.
He doesn't even realize that he is hurting his own cause since embryonic stem cell research has so far been a dead end. Adult stem cell research seems to be where the action is.
The abortionists are intentionally sabotaging adult stem cell research (by focusing funding and attention on ESC research) in order to benefit abortion.
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