brain damaged fireman regains consciousness after ten years of silence.
from the article:
While Mr. Herbert regained consciousness in 1996, his speech was slurred, he was unable to eat without assistance, he was confined to a bed or a wheelchair and his vision was reduced to a series of blurs...Moreover, Mr. Herbert's memory seemed all but nonexistent. He could not say how old he was or what his job had been. He seemed unable to recognize family members and friends, and firefighting comrades had become virtual strangers.
In 1999, a year after he was moved to the nursing home, Linda Herbert prevailed in a brief legal fight with Mr. Herbert's parents, Geraldine and Donald P. Herbert, over who should have control over decisions in a medical emergency, like pneumonia or a serious infection. All agreed that extraordinary resuscitative measures should not be taken in the event of a stroke or a heart attack.
[bold emphasis from the smock]
Ah yes, of course had Mrs. Herbert had the sudden recollection of a conversation in which he expressed, "I wouldn't want to live that way," he and his 13 year-old son might not have had THEIR miraculous conversation. I cannot shake the Schiavo travesty from my soul. Maybe I'm not supposed to. It seems we're quite far from the understanding that we don't have the right to take our own lives. We are now fully in the arena of "quality of life"... the identical propaganda used in an earlier euthanasia movement when the handicapped and "undesirables" were wiped out in Germany before they marched on to wipe out the Jews.