Schiavo situation hits home
Palatka woman's son was in same state Woman saw her son through same thing
By Noreen Marcus
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
FORT LAUDERDALE
- If there's one phrase in the English language that riles Betty Clough, it is this: "persistent vegetative state."
Doctors attached that label to her son Charles "Chucky" Clough Jr. after he was struck by lightning at T.Y. Park in Hollywood 22 years ago, when he was 15.
Chucky Clough died March 8 in his mother's mobile home in Palatka. Because he never walked or talked after the accident and had to be fed through a tube every four hours, because his frail body finally gave out, it is possible to make a direct connection between the accident and his death.
But according to Betty Clough and the rest of his family, there is more to his story. Between the accident and his death there was a remarkable journey.
"We were blessed every day with him," said his sister Beverly Crews. "He was really an inspiration, because God could have taken him a long time ago."
So it's not hard to guess where Betty Clough comes out on the question of Terri Schiavo, the Clearwater woman also described by doctors as being in a "persistent vegetative state."
"I hate that," she said this week. "Even if they're in a coma, they're still there; they're not in a vegetative state. They've got to come up with some new words."
As his mother and sister describe Chucky after the accident, he never left his community or family, but he became the still center of each.
Before the accident he was a typical teen who loved pranks and hunting - only what he could eat - and chatting up the girls. He planned to join the Army when he graduated from South Broward High. That summer he was tanned and buff from working out with weights.
During a family outing on Labor Day 1983, a sudden storm came up, sending Chucky, his nephew, sister and brother-in-law to huddle under a big oak tree. His sister was pregnant, and when water started dripping on her stomach, "He said, 'Trade places with me,'" Crews recalled. Seconds after the switch, lightning singled him out.
Medicaid covered a lot of the bills, but not everything. South Broward cheerleaders washed cars to raise money; women from the American Cancer Society came by weekly with "Chuck pads" for his incontinence. An elderly woman on a fixed income sent the family a $5 check once a month.
"It was a really good support system," Crews said. The extra money bought a special tub, an inflatable mattress to prevent bedsores and a therapeutic chair to support Chucky's curved spine so he could look out the window.
For five years he lay in a coma. Then one day when two of his sisters were standing by his bed, mimicking a friend, he laughed.
Laughter fed the family's hope. "We used to have dreams about Chucky just waking up," Crews said. "He would get up and stretch and say, 'Mom, I'm hungry, come feed me.'"
In 1989, soon after that first laugh, the family moved to Palatka, their previous home, near St. Augustine. Chucky's room was the activity center of the house, where Crews' children took their toys and everybody went to tell jokes. Betty Clough is a Jehovah's Witness, and the Witnesses would meet in Chucky's room for Bible study.
He took it all in, they were sure.
"I think Chucky understood everything that was being said to him," said his mother. "He just had no way of responding."
Clough said Terri Schiavo's plight breaks her heart. "She had a lot of the responses Chucky had."
And she identifies with Schiavo's parents, who are fighting her husband to control her fate. "You never give up hope. You don't know what God's got planned," Clough said.
A few weeks ago Chucky Clough seemed even quieter than usual. He didn't resist when his sister and caregiver Marcia Gall washed his face, the way he always had. On the morning of March 8, between his 4 and 8 a.m. feedings, he slipped away. He was 37.
In addition to his mother and sisters Marcia Gall and Beverly Crews, of Palatka, Chucky Clough is survived by his father, Charles Clough Sr., of Washington State; sisters Cynthia Nicol of Interlocken and Valerie Thompson of Venus; brothers Dereck Clough of Hollywood and John Clough of Palatka; and many nieces and nephews.
Services have already been conducted
