Rekindling a Patient’s Desire for Life

To most of us, I think, it would seem to be the ultimate challenge. How in the world do you tell someone who has just become a quadriplegic that life isn’t over? They realize they’re still alive, of course, but they probably think it’s over. And if someone would help them speed up the end game, so much the better.

How to show them there’s a life yet to be lived?

These questions beckon, because two movies in current release deal with a quadriplegic’s assertion of a right to die. To any of us who have ever contemplated how we’d deal with such a moment, the assertion makes perfect sense.

Gary Baffa has heard it. As a psychologist, he treats patients recovering from serious ailments, including catastrophic accidents that leave people paralyzed.

Some quickly tell Baffa they wish they were dead, the daunting prelude to a first meeting. But while most new quadriplegics at some point question their existence, it would be misleading to suggest that they all carry those thoughts with them forever, Baffa says.

“It’s amazing how people value life,” Baffa says in his basement office at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton. “You value it more sometimes when you have less of it.”

By that, of course, he means the diminished ability to do what defines many people’s lives -- getting around, doing things, taking care of yourself.

For quadriplegics, the gargantuan task is to believe that those things do not exclusively define life.

Baffa describes it as a “path” he tries to lead them to -- a steadily building awareness that life has dimension beyond our physical abilities. He neither speeds them toward it nor pretends it will be easily traveled, but he can tell them honestly that people in their situation have found it.

With quadriplegics, therapists face an overflowing plate of potential issues: the patient’s denial, the loss of physical sensation, the guilt over what their condition means to family or friends, their need for constant care and the realization that life will never be the same as it was.

“Sometimes it’s so overwhelming they don’t even quite understand it,” Baffa says. “They hear the words but don’t know what they mean. They’re just words.”

Suicide is not a taboo subject. If it were, Baffa says, he would lose credibility with his patients. “I say to people, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re asking yourself if life is worth living,’ ” Baffa says. “They may have those feelings but don’t have words to attach to those feelings. Part of [my role] is putting words to what’s going through their minds.”

Baffa can talk anecdotally about quadriplegic patients who either failed at suicide or died under mysterious circumstances.

He refuses to judge them, but acknowledges he’s more bothered when people who have just been paralyzed talk about ending their lives -- that is, before they learn that a post-accident life can have meaning and enjoyment.

The job sounds like endless bad days at the office, but Baffa begs to differ.

And after digesting what he says, I think I get it. His job is about people who at first feel that all is lost. By listening and suggesting and gently leading, he can take them to a psychological place they never thought they’d go.

That sounds like a very good day at the office.

The sense of loss probably never leaves quadriplegic patients, Baffa says. And, over time, the question for some patients becomes not whether they can survive but whether they want to.

That is the soul-stirring question served up by the two movies.

Baffa would have offered the central figures options and perspective, not condemnation or sermons.

And as he describes his quest for his patients, it sounds both simple and profound: “To help them restore a life for themselves.”