This Woman Was Told To Let Her Husband Die ... But She Didn’t Give Up
Never say never. (Photo: Matt Davis Recovery / Facebook)
In July 2011, Danielle Josey Davis, a then 24-year-old newlywed from Savannah, Georgia, was given devastating advice by a team of doctors — she was told to allow her husband to die since he only had a 10 percent chance to live.
At the time, 23-year-old Matt was in a coma and on life support after a serious motor cycle accident left him with traumatic brain injury — Severe Diffuse Axonal Injury, a widespread brain injury which results from the brain moving back and forth in the skull. It’s one of the leading causes of death in people with traumatic brain injury and often leaves the patient in a permanent vegetative state.
Even though doctors didn’t think the odds were in Matt’s favor, Danielle, his bride of seven months, had no intention of giving up just nine days after the accident. “This was a difficult choice for me, being his wife I knew that he did not want to remain a vegetable and here the doctors were telling me that’s exactly what will happen,” she wrote on her blog, according to ABC7 Los Angeles. “I prayed a lot and choose not to take him off of life support. The next day Matthew opened his eyes.”
“This is the face of brain injury,” says Danielle. “ It’s almost impossible to tell, without the tubes and machines, the severity of someone’s injury.” (Photo: Matt Davis Recovery / Facebook)
While Matt was still in a vegetative state, he was sent home, where Danielle and her mother cared for him around the clock. “If we’ve got to bring him home, let’s make sure he has the best view in the world,” she told her mother, as reported by ABC News. “If he’s going to be a body in a bed, let’s give him something to look at.”
Then about three months later, Matt spoke his first words since the accident. “I’m trying,” he said.
Danielle had even more hope the day Matt whispered what he wanted to eat — a buffalo chicken wrap from Cheddar’s, his favorite meal. “We all whipped around because we all knew what he said.”
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Matt’s incredible turnaround leads to the next question: what should a family do if doctors say their loved should be taken off life support? That question has been top of many people’s minds since January 31 when Bobbi Kristina Brown, the 22-year-old daughter of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, was found unconscious in her home, placed in a medically induced coma and on life support. The case has been making headlines ever since.
(Photo: Matt Davis Recovery / Facebook)
It’s not an easy call, Robert E. Harbaugh, MD, Director, Penn State Institute of the Neurosciences and President of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, tells Yahoo Health. “It’s going to be different for every individual because there are so many things that need to be taken into consideration,” he says. “A person who meets brain death criteria, even if you struggled to keep them alive, is going to die in the near future. However, with a person who is in a coma or in a minimally responsive state, it is much more difficult to predict with assurance if they’re always going to stay in a coma.”
The factors that need to be considered are age (the younger the patient, the better their chances for coming out of the coma and having neurological recovery), the amount of time they’ve been in a coma (the shorter the time, the better the outlook), other medical issues the person may be suffering from, as well as the reason behind their injury.
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“People can go into a coma from a drug overdose and they can be deeply comatose,” explains Harbaugh. “But their chance of coming out of a coma and having an excellent recovery is very good if you can support them until the drugs wash out of their system. And that’s much different from somebody who’s in a coma from a gunshot wound to the head where so much of the brain has been destroyed.”
He refers to recent studies that have been conducted with healthy patients and patients in a minimally responsive state (where they can open their eyes yet may not speak or respond appropriately). With the use of functional MRI scans, it was discovered that the same areas of the brain “lit up” when the patients were asked to think about performing certain tasks, like navigating around their kitchen or playing a game of tennis. “So even if we look at people from the outside and they don’t seem like they’re interacting with the environment, they may be more interaction than we appreciate,” says Harbaugh. “And if we could figure out a way to translate those signals, we could start communicating with these people again.”
As for Matt’s extraordinary story, Harbaugh has this to say: “I think anyone who ever denies that this ever happens just hasn’t been watching. It’s just one of the things you keep in the back of your mind.”
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Today, Matt is still in recovery, yet is able to walk, do yoga and even empty the dishwasher, as shown on the couples’ Facebook page, Matt Davis Recovery. While it can still be difficult for Matt to communicate (“his voice is scratchy and hard to understand,” his wife wrote on March 26th) and he has no memory of marrying Danielle, he found a way to tell his wife just how much she means to him via text message on March 30th:
“Instead of busting a usual poem, I will tell you straight up, point blank how I feel about you once in a while. I love, no, cherish every breath, text, call, smile, and step you make! You are an amazing woman and I ONLY want to make you happy in any and every way I can. I am so thrilled and proud to be able to call myself and be called your husband. I suspect husbands say their wives are the most beautiful women in the world and I always thought, "yeah yeah, you’re just saying that!” But I was wrong because I fully, wholeheartedly,and honestly think that about you Baby! Thank you so much for sticking with me and helping me through every little thing Baby.“
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