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Imagine being 31 years old and having to make the agonizing decision to discontinue the life-support keeping your comatose spouse alive. Now imagine that spouse waking up and asking for Mexican food.
“It’s crazy. It’s absolutely crazy,” Jill Finley, the woman who was supposed to die, told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira during an interview Monday. “It is truly a miracle that I’m here talking to you today.”
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Ryan had made his agonizing decision. He would pull the plug.
“She’s my soul mate and my wife, my everything in this whole world,” Ryan told Vieira, the words struggling against his emotions. “And it was up to me whether or not she lived or not. That’s a bad thing to go through.”
On June 9, at about 6 p.m., Ryan and Jill’s family said their goodbyes and doctors disconnected Jill from the machines that had been keeping her alive. She didn’t die immediately, and after a time, Ryan had to go to a judge to sign papers relating to the decision to disconnect Jill from life support.One last ‘rally’
He returned around 11 p.m. to sit with her and wait for the end in the hospice where she was being cared for.
“About 11:45, she started getting restless,” he said, an eventuality he had been prepared for. “People told me they call it the last rally. When a person is about to pass, they tend to regain some body function, be able to talk or move — things that they hadn’t been able to do previously.”
She also started mumbling. “I thought that was it, that was the last rally,” he said.
But it was soon clear she wasn’t just mumbling. She said, “Get me out of here.” Then she added another request: “Take me to Ted’s and take me to the Melting Pot,” naming two restaurants where she liked to indulge her passion for Mexican food.
8mm
Thanks 8mm.
What a wonderful story!
FYI, in case you missed this story:
“Republican Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, addressing some Florida-specific questions for a Tampa Bay-area cable program, says he doesn’t have an opinion about a national catastrophic insurance fund or the 2005 congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.
“I don’t know enough about it yet…I’ll give it serious consideration,” Thompson said of the national cat fund after being asked about it by Adam Smith of The St. Petersburg Times during a taping of the Bay News 9 “Political Connections” show.
Thompson also said he didn’t have an opinion on the Schiavo case.
“I don’t know the facts surrounding that case…That’s going back in history. I don’t remember the details of it,” Thompson said. In 2005, in an attempt to keep the brain-damaged Schiavo alive against the wishes of her husband and rulings by Florida courts, Congress voted to have federal courts review the case. Federal courts ultimately declined to intervene and Schiavo died a few weeks after the vote.”