Fear gives way to progress, hope as nephew recovers from crash

The profile picture on my personal Facebook account is a shot of me cradling my oldest nephew, Giuliano, and feeding him a water bottle. He was 6 feet tall, 18, and sporting facial hair at the time, but had no problem appeasing his aunt. She just wanted photographic evidence that no matter how old her three nephews got they would always be her "babies."

Giuliano is now 20 years old, but since May 22 has all but become a baby again.

He went out on a Saturday night. There was a head-on vehicle collision. There was a brain injury and a coma. There was an 18-day stay in intensive care. There was hope, there was fear and there was the unknown.

Today he opens his eyes every morning in a long-term rehabilitation hospital. And today there is hope, there is fear and there is the unknown.

Although he can look around, follow certain commands, respond to pain and attempt to sit up, he isn't medically considered "awake." Doctors call it a semivegetative state. His family calls it progress.

His first days in the hospital had him connected to so many machines he looked like a human surge protector. Little by little the machines and tubes got disconnected. No more breathing respirator, no more tracheostomy tube, no more heart rate monitor, no more neck brace, no more stitches.

Families familiar with the agony of having a loved one straddling the life-and-death fence, know the milestones each of these represent. You hold onto the good news with as tight a grip as possible. The logic being the tighter you hold on, the harder it is for the bad news to squeeze its way in.

At first we thought of the progress as baby steps toward life. Now we think of it as baby steps toward Giuliano becoming Giuliano again.

A few months back, a neurologist went over CT results with his dad, my brother. The doctor sat on one side of his bed and my brother sat on the other. The doc concluded Giuliano had a stroke on the right side of his brain the night of the accident and it could very well mean he would never move the left side of his body again.

Before he could finish his diagnosis, my notoriously stubborn nephew disproved it. In what we believe to be his own personal protest, he raised his left arm. Give him a few months and I'm sure he'll do the same with his middle finger.

It's moments like this that assure us Giuliano is in there. The Giuliano we watched go through a goth phase and cowboy phase in junior high. The college student who loved Thor, could impersonate Jim Carrey, mastered the art of Pokemon training, and loved a good Will Ferrell flick. The kid who, at age 7, insisted on combing his hair for hours in the bathroom mirror before going to the hospital when his little brother was born. When his aunt Xazmin asked what was taking so long, he rolled his eyes at the audacity of the question: "Um, I'm meeting my baby brother for the first time! I kind of need to look good."

He must have made one hell of a first impression because that littler brother, now 12, idolizes him. That's why it's difficult for him and my other nephew to visit their big brother in his current condition. He's not the same Giuliano. There are days when we wonder if he ever will be.

It's one thing to have those thoughts as his aunt, brother, grandparent or best friend. It's another to have them as his father or mother.

My sister-in-law Liz spends six days a week, eight hours a day by her son's side. She brushes his teeth, shaves his stubble, massages his legs, takes him for rolls in his wheelchair, shows him flashcards to trigger his memory, helps him with physical therapy three times a week and patiently awaits his first words. The same way she did when he was a baby and she was a single mom.

My family met Giuliano when he was the 2-year-old son of Liz, my brother's then-girlfriend. Less than a year later, she and my brother married and Giuliano became the only nephew to me and my two sisters. We missed out on the first couple of years of his life, but the developments we've witnessed over the past five months have made it seem otherwise.

During a visit to his rehab hospital just a couple of months ago, my mom and I greeted him, told him who we were and what we had in store that day. He stared at us a couple of seconds before he started crying. I'd seen him shed tears since the accident, but never with the kind of facial expression that could justify it as a real cry. This time he furrowed his brow and manipulated his face into a frown.

My mom leaned in real close to him, wiped his tears and said the kind of things grandmas say to make it better. She asked him for a smile and he gave her one. She asked him for a kiss and he puckered his lips.

When we think of how serious the car accident was and how grim the outlook seemed, it's hard to believe how far he has come. In fact, news websites where he and the rest of my family live, falsely reported he had died that first night. The error couldn't have been more brutally inaccurate.

Giuliano is indeed alive. And you better believe that hope is, too.

Contact columnist Xazmin Garza at xgarza@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0477.
Follow her on Twitter at @startswithanx.