Misidentified as Dead in Crash, a Teen Struggles With Injuries

Tiffany Moshier looks fragile propped up in a mustard-colored armchair in her living room, two tiny kittens crawling over her skinny legs.

But she’s alive.

And that’s all that matters to the 15-year-old and to her parents, who were told last fall that she had died in a traffic accident. Four days later, as they prepared for her funeral, they learned she had been misidentified and was in a hospital.

Going from grief to joy in an instant, her family’s emotions were dragged down again a few weeks later when Tiffany, nearly recovered, lapsed into a coma. When she emerged, she couldn’t see or speak and could barely move.

She’s getting better--she can walk, talks in whispers and has blurred vision--but there’s a long road ahead.

Back home in this Nashville suburb, Tiffany watches visitors from her chair, so still it’s easy to forget she’s there, until she starts to cough and a shocking wheeze racks her tiny body. Her mother, Giselle Moshier, stops folding laundry to wipe her daughter’s mouth.

The Moshiers, Giselle and Bruce and their five children, moved to Tennessee from Minnesota a few months before the accident. Tiffany, a slender, boy-crazy brunet with glasses, had just started to make friends at Centennial High, mostly through choir.

Her closest friend was 16-year-old Tiffany Getty, who played in the band. On the day before Thanksgiving, the girls were riding in a pickup truck with a friend. The truck collided with another pickup.

Tiffany Getty was one of two people killed. Tiffany Moshier was among the injured.

A relative of the driver the girls were riding with said he knew both Tiffanys but misidentified them at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Tiffany Getty’s mother spent four days sitting by what she thought was her daughter’s bedside. The Moshiers were told their daughter was dead.

Mrs. Moshier insisted on seeing the body at the funeral home. Though the face was disfigured, she felt certain the ID was wrong: The fingernails weren’t chewed like her daughter’s. Her assertion was dismissed as the last hope of a grief-stricken mother.

Tiffany Getty’s mother continued her vigil. But when doctors removed a tube from the throat of the child she watched over, the girl dispelled any doubt. She whispered her name: “Tiffany Moshier.”

It was the day before the Moshiers planned to bury their daughter.

Tiffany made quick progress at the hospital, and doctors thought she would be home in mid-December. Four days before her scheduled discharge, she went into surgery to have a breathing tube removed from her throat and ended up in a coma.

When she awoke three weeks later, the Moshiers were given devastating news.

“They told us she was going to be paralyzed and that she couldn’t see,” Mrs. Moshier says. Her vocal cords had accidentally been severed in surgery, so she also couldn’t speak.

The Moshiers fault the hospital, saying they believe a resident performed the surgery without supervision. The hospital has declined to comment.

Tiffany has been too busy healing to worry about blame. It took weeks in rehab before she could move her arms, but she still couldn’t even whisper. She communicated by blinking for “yes” and twitching her head for “no.”

“One day, she was crying and crying and her dad asked her, ‘What do you want? Are you hungry? Does it hurt?”’ Mrs. Moshier says.

“Finally he said, ‘What? Do you want to get up and walk?’ And she blinked ‘yes.’ ”

Tiffany listens to the story and smiles. Every few minutes she raises her hand to her chin, showing her mother she needs to spit into a blue plastic cup. Two tubes in her throat keep her from swallowing.

Her mouth empty, she squeezes her eyes shut and thrusts her chin forward. It takes all her breath just to make a sound. Raspy words come out one at a time.

“Hungry,” she breathes.

“In one minute,” her mother replies.

Tiffany needs full-time help and gets it from her parents and four siblings: Amber, 16; Jade, 11; Adam, 10; and even 4-year-old Megan, who clambers over her big sister’s chair to dump another kitten in her lap.

Tiffany is playful with her brother and sisters.

“Sometimes if they’re here and it’s their turn to help, she kicks them or she stomps her feet,” Mrs. Moshier says.

To prove the point, Tiffany jokingly kicks toward her mother. Then she taps her wrist with her fingers.

“One . . . minute,” she whispers. “Been . . . one . . . minute.”

Lunch comes from a can, poured into a stomach tube under Tiffany’s shirt.

Tasting food is one of the things she misses. And talking on the phone. She sees double, so she can’t read or focus on television.

But her family believes she’ll be able to do all those things. Her dad already has promised her lobster for her first meal.

Part of their optimism is due to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Three days after Tiffany was released from Vanderbilt on Feb. 12, she was at Mayo, where her esophagus was reconnected and her airway straightened.

More recently, doctors performed an operation so she can breathe through her mouth. If all goes well, they’ll repair her severed vocal cords this fall.

Tiffany now walks as far as the park up the street from her home. But she still bumps into things because of her poor eyesight. Grasping objects is nearly impossible. Mayo doctors think she’ll need two years of rehab to get close to her full range of motion.

“When we started, she couldn’t even sit up,” Mrs. Moshier says. “Now she scares the daylights out of me when she walks into the other room. She did that this morning! I’m in the kitchen and all of a sudden I hear breathing and I turn around and she’s there.”

Tiffany laughs again. Her mom laughs with her, resting her hand on her daughter’s thigh. Mrs. Moshier quit her job at a bank to take her daughter to Minnesota, and the whole family may move back there if Tiffany needs more treatment.

None of that matters, Mrs. Moshier says. The important thing is Tiffany is alive. And home.

“It was rough to think that we lost her and then got her and then lost her again,” she says. “But now she’s back again, so we’re happy.”