Anybody In There?

   There are a lot of things that are often said about someone who is in a vegetative (absence of responsiveness and awareness due to overwhelming dysfunction of the cerebral hemispheres) state. Many people make comments such as, "There's nobody home" and "Anybody in there?"
   There have been many people through the years, myself included, who KNEW that "someone was home."
   As I priest for almost 27 years, I have seen people who were in a vegetative state but whom, I felt, were experiencing their surroundings much more than people where giving them credit for.
   Even before that, about 37 years ago, when I was an orderly at a local hospital, I know that vegetative states did not mean that a person was unaware. It just meant that they could not respond in ways that we would understand.
   I took care of a patient who had been in a persistent vegetative state from the time that he was shot several years before. Every so often his health would require hospital intervention in order to stabilize him. There was never any response from him.
   However, if a certain family member would come in to "visit," that family member always made the comment that we should turn off the respirators, that we should abandon any kind of care, because the patient "was not there."
   Wouldn't you know it . . . after those comments, the patients blood pressure would rise alarmingly. We knew that "someone was home." That someone just was not able to communicate with us.
   On the news yesterday, there was a report done about patients in a vegetative state who were able to "answer questions" by reading their brain wave patterns. They were told to think about doing one thing for "yes" and think about doing another thing for "no."
   They were able to answer questions!
   Which might be a wake up call to some people in the medical field who treat vegetative patients differently because they think the patient does not know what is happening.
   And which brings me to my main thought for today.
   We often treat people differently in a spiritual manner because we think some people are incapable of "getting it" when we tell them something. There are times when we even give up on others because we write them off as not being about to understand.
   However, sometimes years later, we find out that something we said or something that we did made a profound impact on the person and their lives were changed for the better and they even became a great witness to others.
   The lesson for each and every one of us today, pure and simple, is to not give up on others. Even when we think no one is home, the house IS inhabited!