Englishwoman Fiona Smith is supposed to be dead. Well, maybe just in a persistent vegetative state. But she is alive and well today. So what happened?

She was on a vacation with her family in France and near Tours got into a car accident. Her husband was dead, her three children weretrapped and injured in the back of the car, and the rescuers at first thought she was dead, too. But the children were convinced she was breathing and they convinced the rescuers that there was hope. At the hospital, a very highly rated center for the tretment of brain injuries, neurologists told her relatives that she was badly injured and that the coma would probably last three or four months but that she could look forward to a return to consciousness.

Back in England a few weeks later, the doctors were much more pessimistic. They said she was in a vegetative state and offered little to no hope of recovery. The family tells of being told that they should begin to think about whether to remove life support.

Two months after the accident, discouraged by the lack of progress, the family moved her to a Catholic hospital, where they said she got much more stimulation, including physical therapy three times a day, being dressed every day ,and being taken to the television lounge. Her family noticed an immediate difference and three weeks later she was conscious.

Months of therapy enabled her to go home eleven months after the accident.

What haunts her and her family is the advice the family got immediately after their return to England. If they had gone along with the advice they were hearing from the medical establishment, the three children would have lost a mother and she would have missed out on the joys that are hers now.

After efforts to get an effective review of her medical treatments have failed, she has initiated a lawsuit. She says, . "I truly feel that if my family had not been so well informed and so confident about challenging the views of the medics that I might not be here to share whatever comes with them."

She adds, "On a personal front, that makes me angry, but the bigger issue here is the fact that in years to come, other patients will be as vulnerable as I was. They might not have any family, or their family might be in awe of doctors and feel that they cannot be challenged. I want to make sure they do everything they can for those patients because I don’t believe they did it for me."

Smith contends, as do many experts, that diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state is a diagnosis that is far too simple to make, but is, in many cases, completely wrong. An accurate assessment takes an advanced level of expertise and a significant investment of time. She says that medical care should not be removed from patients in a persistent vegetative state, calling it "playing God."  Doctors should not be deciding who lives and who dies for patients in a vegetative state.

Sources: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/newsid_1033000/1033502.stm

Quotes from London Telegraph; September 5, 2002, as quoted in the Pro-Life Infonet 9/11/02 #2786

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Updated 10/26/2002