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.”
>>Yes, I understand you prefer murderous anarchy to government, but that IS NOT a principle that the United States of America was founded upon:<<
Allowing someone to decide their own ending when they can no longer think is not murder. It is only you fascists who want to decide for people when they have expressed their desires.
The government (which you love so much) did not murder anyone. It allowed nature to take its course.
Poor Charlie - a friend of the elites and those from all over the globe with deep pockets, the well connected; a killer of Terri Schindler Schiavo, Florida's current governor.
God help us all if he beats Rubio for Martinez' senate seat.
You’re right. What was forced on Terri Schiavo can’t accurately be called euthanasia. That’s a poor euphemism for the torturous murder that was forced on her.
I thought you said the spouse got to decide.
The government (which you love so much) did not murder anyone.
A JUDGE signed an order mandating starvation and dehydration, that IS the government.
His court testimony on that subject was that she was expected to live to a ripe old age, and that he had promised to take care of her for all those years.
When someone's posts are clueless, they are entitled to their opinion but they are not entitled to change facts which is what it appears you are attempting to do.
Why? You've already said that in the absence of such a document, the presumption should be for death. If that's what you want anyway, why pay a lawyer to put it in writing?
>> I thought you said the spouse got to decide.<<
He passed along her desires — but he is the final legal step.
>>A JUDGE signed an order mandating starvation and dehydration, that IS the government. <<
A judge ordered that her wishes, as stated legally by her spouse, be granted. It was STOPPING busybody fascists like you who were trying to use the government to implement your political agenda.
A Will to Live is based upon life. Living Wills are based upon death.
>>You’ve already said that in the absence of such a document, the presumption should be for death. If that’s what you want anyway, why pay a lawyer to put it in writing?<<
I never said such a thing. I see lying comes a second nature to you big government fascists.
metmom, I know lots of these things first hand and besides, I don’t know where they are now, but court documents clearly spell out the facts. Judge Greer, Judge Whittemore and their other paid off judges murdered Terri by ignoring the facts. It’s awfully hot where they’re going when they leave this earth.
Everyone else has said everything that needs to be said.
Plus, it’s obvious your heart, mind and intelligence are totally closed to truth, which is very unfortunate for you (and anyone close to you).
>>If a spouse has a vested interest in the death of their spouse and Mikey Schiavo had PLENTY, they should be removed as guardian. <<
Says who? You better show me where in common or Constitutional law such a concept is laid out.
And who decides? You? Your ilk?
Hardly.
I stand for the law. You guys can stand for anarchy and fascism all you want.
How can anybody who professes to be a conservative be so content on killing another living person just because her husband wants to be relieved from her and get what is left of a settlement?
So you agree that in the absence of such a document the presumption should be for life? Make up your mind. Life, or death? Which is it?
ADDENDUM: I have 3 Terri books (not Fuhrman's cuz he was just trying to make a buck). I don't pour through them. Terri's gone and so is her father who passed this summer. Terri is one of the reasons imo that the RNC got in such hot water gee, in 2006, not even a year after Terri was tortured to death. Their fundraising dropped off and lots of conservatives quit the GOP the week Terri was finally murdered. It was back in 2005 many people realized that the political parties didn't give a rat's behind about their constituents of which Terri was one. She was the first American in history to be ordered for execution hvg committed no crimes.
Couple of things are amazing (actually connected).
1. Leftists want the government to force their will on everyone else, even though there are far fewer of them.
2. They accuse conservatives of doing the above, when they are the ones guilty.
3. They dance around strange legalisms like people discussing angels dancing on heads of pins, to support their immoral and unconstitutional agendas.
It's worse than that. They (or at least greer) outright lied about the facts.
>>Plus, it’s obvious your heart, mind and intelligence are totally closed to truth, which is very unfortunate for you (and anyone close to you).<<
Yes. I stand for law and against fascism.
You Nanny stater fascists have said all that need be said. Law and the Constitution are fictions to be knocked away when they interfere with your agenda.
Remember that when your fascism comes to bite you. If you tell your spouse your final desires, the government, backed by pitchfork-wielding fanatics can do whatever it wants. It can brush aside laws, legal precedents, your desires, anything.
The important thing is that some, somewhere, thinks he/she is Right and Good. The law cannot stand under such an assault.
Until, that is, the definition of morality is not what you had in mind. Then, you will feel the lash of your own fascism.
>>1. Leftists want the government to force their will on everyone else, even though there are far fewer of them.<<
Yes, you do.
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