{"id":230708,"date":"2020-09-14T14:33:14","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T19:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=230708"},"modified":"2020-09-13T22:32:54","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T03:32:54","slug":"love-endures-doctors-hope-proved-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/love-endures-doctors-hope-proved-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Love endures all things’: After doctors said there was ‘no hope’ for her husband, she proved them all wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our current culture embraces assisted suicide as the appropriate response when someone is no longer considered “useful” to society. But usefulness, it turns out, is an inadequate measure of a person’s value. Mary Lou Beers and her husband Jim were married in 1964, just after she had open heart surgery. Their marriage would go on to become one of extraordinary suffering and extraordinary love.<\/p>\n

On Catholic psychologist Dr. Ray Guarendi’s show, “Living Right with Dr. Ray,” in 2018, Mary Lou said that seven years and four children into her marriage to Jim, a “wonderful man,” he suffered a stroke.<\/p>\n

“He was 30 years old and he suffered a massive stroke. He would never walk again, he would never talk, never be able to chew or swallow or close his own eyes or dress himself,” she said. “Those beginning days at a hospital, I kept hearing the words, ‘there’s no hope. there’s no hope. there’s no hope’…. But there was something about his eyes when I would walk into that room. I knew he wasn’t in a coma. They might tell me that he was in a coma but he would look at me with those big brown eyes like ‘help me.’ And even though his whole body was paralyzed and unable to breathe [on his own], there was something about those eyes. And so I stayed 12 hours a day by his side, I prayed with him, I sang to him.” She joked, “One day I was so desperate I brought the [hospital] bills [as if to say] I’ll shock you out of a coma!”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Miracle: Mother wakes from a coma after 30 years, says son\u2019s name<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

She recalled that after 90 days of no major change in Jim’s condition, someone suggested that she file for divorce to put herself in a better financial situation due to Medicaid regulations at the time. She went into her husband’s hospital room, distraught, and said, “Jim, I can’t do this anymore. I give up. I just can’t do this. I’m here every day. If you know it’s me, just wiggle a toe. Blink your eyes. Do anything, Jim!”<\/p>\n

She saw the faintest wiggle from his right thumb. That wiggle caused an emotional avalanche as Mary Lou realized that though physically paralyzed, Jim was completely cognitively intact. She asked him to wiggle his thumb as many times as the number of children he had. Right away, he wiggled his thumb four times.<\/p>\n

A teacher by training, Mary Lou said all the letters of the alphabet, and Jim would move his thumb when she got to the right letter in the word he was trying to spell. His first word that day was “breakfast.” He had not had any oral intake in 90 days. Mary Lou was ecstatic.<\/p>\n