Ever since my grandfather had a stroke and has been slowly losing control over his bodily functions, our family hired a full-time caretaker for him. She has been doing this for many years and often tells us about the patients she has worked with.
During dinner last night, she told us the story of this 23-year-old kid who was riding with his friend on a motorcycle. The rider was drunk and they were not wearing helmets. They crashed into a tree.
The travesty is that the rider was fine, but this kid hit his head on the pavement and had severe brain damage. He was completely paralysed. Could not move a single muscle. Pretty much became a vegetable. She says it doesn’t help that the kid was rather lanky, not as muscular as I am.
So after the incident, his mother moved into the hospital to take care of him. The mum was egregiously negligent. She would leave him on the hospital bed to go out partying in the evening. She constantly forgot to change her son’s diapers.
After a couple of months, the family hired the caretaker because the mum refused to do it anymore. By this time, the kid had developed nasty infections in his hip from the urine. The infection had eaten deep into his bone.
I didn’t even know this was possible, but that’s just what happened. Seems like diapers create this damp and confined environment that destroys skin tissues and fosters bacteria growth. She says even with our grandpa, she has to change his diapers three to four times every day for this precise reason.
Anyway, as for the brain-dead kid, the caretaker could not do much. She said she held his hand and told him if he was her son, she would never have left him in such degrading agony. The worst part is that right then, the kid had tears running down his face.
It turns out that the kid could open his eyes and blink. He would go to sleep on a regular schedule and open his eyes in the morning. He would cry when his dad visited and hugged him. He could even turn his neck sideways. When they treated his infection, he would squirm and shiver his body, just like a person in pain.
The kid ended up dying from the infection a couple of months later. They tried to take skin from his calf to patch the wound but to no avail. His total bed-bound time was close to a year.
It’s an utterly heartbreaking story. I kept thinking about how horrifying that final year must have been for that kid, being fully aware of the outside world but helplessly trapped in a slowly decomposing body. If there is a list of the worst possible ways to die, his must be among the top 5.
Anyway, life is fragile. Take care on the road. Wear a helmet. The next time you drive like an idiot, think of this kid dying from his own piss.
PS The kid’s name is Vũ Đình Long. He was 24. May his soul rest in peace.