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.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you! EVERYONE needs to see this video - this proves that she was NOT, NOT, NOT brain dead, and what was done to her was an atrocity!!!!
Freedumb2003 - why don’t you view that video that Bykrbayb posted in #27 - then get back to us. K?
And, what IF he really was trying to murder her? Then what? Anything he does or says is A-0K, just because he is the husband?
Here's an image of the hardcopy of this article. St. Petersburg Beach has special day for coma victim
Coincidentally, my earlier post was to freedumb2003. So freedumb2003 already knows this, but let's refresh that rusty memory anyway.
To: freedumb2003
She was clinically brain-dead.
Not according to the doctors hired by her estranged husband with money embezzled from her rehabilitation funds. As a matter of fact, none of the medical professionals who examined her, nor the ones who testified without examining her, nor the lawyers retained to clear the way for her death by forced dehydration ever claimed she was brain dead. Only ignorant nobodies with no connection to the case, but with an agenda of corrupting our medical and legal systems have ever made that claim.
Her so-called "progress" was an invention of the lay observers.
So now Michael Schiavo is a "lay observer?" 
St. Petersburg Beach has special day for coma victim
I really think this situation was too much government trying to insinuate itself on a private matter.
The government ordered that an innocent woman be killed using a method too barbaric for a dog. If the government had stayed out of Terri Schiavo's private life, and simply maintained its pre-existing status, she'd be alive today, and probably experiencing some level of improvement as a result of the rehabilitation the jury decided she was entitled to.
27 posted on January 9, 2009 1:13:16 AM EST by BykrBayb (May God have mercy on our souls. ~ Þ)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]
Oops. I meant to ping you to post 144. I hope I didn’t forget anyone else.
Not so fast. I also want freedumb2003 to view the content of post 144, again. I don’t know how many times Michael Schiavo has to say that Terri was making progress before the FRiberals will believe it.
It seems I left quite a few important people off the ping to post 144. Sorry about that.
I’ve now hosted some of this on my profile page, so it won’t be so hard to find a year from now when the troll asks the same silly question again.
Not counting the times he used the words *big government*, *nanny staters*, *pro-Big-Government*, *Big Government Nanny Liberal Statists (shrews)*, *Holier Than Thou Big Government types*, *fascism*,....
By my count from posting history review, 13.
Post 50 - twice.
Posts 52, 57, 61, 68, 70, 79, 84, 86, 95, 113, and 115 once each.
All from someone who supports the government's right to murder a person on the verbal say so of a spouse.
Yeah, isn't that ironic. According to freedumb2003, it was not OK for the government to stop SHIAVO from murdering his spouse, but it was OK for the GOVERNMENT to murder that same spouse. Boy, is he mixed up. Wonder what he has in mind for HIS spouse. Just sayin.
Just sayin’ what I think everyone on this thread was wondering.
Now and again, anarchists land on free republic. They want everyone to be bumped off imo.
not marrying any time soon. being a spinster agrees with me. If someone is up to no good here in Floriduh, I’m calling the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation before some medical creeps one so they can’t place a phone call. Yes, visit any nursing home in Fla. EVERYBODY’S HIGH ON MEDS THEY DO NOT EVEN NEED! Try to hold a phone much less talk on one when you on uppers and downers, all sorts of other psycho meds, laxatives and to beat all, nursing homes SERVE PORK CHOPS to people who have bad teeth or no teeth.
Mikey’s PAC got in trouble and I believe it folded. www.terrisfight.org is still going strong. They receive thousands of calls cuz killing relatives and friends is big business. The Tug of war is between killing for cash v. let them live until natural death. Cash wins a lot but not always. wait until the death tax kicks in next dec. 31, 2010. Watch the death rate go up before that date. There will be a lot of dead millionaires who may or may not have been terminally ill, they were just terminally rich.
FYI: I can spell, honest, but my keyboard is bumpy today. It’s either an old coca cola spill or the cold.
Why are you directing this at me? I made no comment on her passing other than it should be a wake up call for people to get THEIR act together to avoid this kind of sad mess.
You are assuming I think it was OK to starve this woman to death. I have not opined on that at all.
Why are you directing this at me? I made no comment on her passing other than it should be a wake up call for people to get THEIR act together to avoid this kind of sad mess.
You are assuming I think it was OK to starve this woman to death. I have not opined on that at all.
It seems to me that athletes are treated with kid gloves compared to just regular folk. After what some athletes have done to people and to animals, let's not treat athletes better than anyone else. I wish this guy well but I bet nobody's in a hurry to "pull his plug".
Women seem to be the easiest targets for euthanasists but they'll advocate for the murder of either gender if there's money in it.
You know how this all began? Mikey was going to rehab Terri but he got a letter from DEBRA BUSHNELL telling Mikey he could do something in the alternative, i.e. kill her. WHEN Bushnell wrote to Mikey that was the moment killing her became the goal.
Felos was nothing compared to BUSHNELL on a scale of evil imo but they were and are both very twisted and evil imo.
I looked at the post you replied to (#126). It wasn’t directed at you. It was directed at the person who made post #126, freedumb2003. Metmom gave you a courtesy ping, because the post she was replying to was directed at you.
This post is directed at Vermont Lt. I’ve given a courtesy ping to Metmom and freedumb2003.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.