News values Part 1.

3.Mom tormented by inability to end her sons life

1. Human interest.
2. i think it shows Human Interest because the character in the story is conflicted by emotions.



4.When Diane Anderson comes to visit her son, sitting quietly by his bed as he lies there with his clenched fists resting on his upper chest, she has to wonder.

Does he know she's there? Does the radio playing in the background mean anything to him? Is the part of his brain that once made Ryan "Ryan" now lost, or does a voice inside scream to be released from this horror?

Not that the answers matter much any more.

Though others might dispute this, Diane Anderson has no doubt: The human being who was her fun-loving-if-not-hyperactive 18-year-old son died May 20, 2000, when a bullet ripped through his mouth and filled his throat with a pool of blood that blocked the oxygen to his brain.

They were left with this body confined to a bed in a persistent vegetative state that breathes and sleeps and is fed through a tube but doesn't talk, doesn't respond, doesn't move beyond an occasional reflex and can't push a button to summon help.

Her son doesn't want to live this way, Diane Anderson says. Nobody, she insists, wants to live this way. So for 14 years, she has pleaded and begged and fought this end-of-life battle with his South Dakota health care providers over allowing him to die.

Every time, she says, the answer has been "no."

"I will get hate mail," Anderson, 56, predicts, "because this kind of thing generates that kind of stuff.

"But I would challenge anybody, before they send me hate mail about being uncaring and all that. ... to either personally or to have their child spend 30 days like my son does."


She rattles the chains of Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan and Terri Schiavo — three women, all incapacitated, who have driven the national conversation about how and when families can decide to withdraw nourishment or medical treatment to bring about the death of loved ones.

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed an individual's right to die with Cruzan but established no national guidelines, leaving it to states to set those standards. With no advance directive, and no "clear and convincing" evidence initially that Cruzan had told anyone about her desire to die in such a situation, the Missouri Supreme Court had denied her parents' request to remove her feeding tube.

It was only later, after friends and co-workers came forward and testified that she had indeed said she never wanted to live "like a vegetable" that the state eventually let the feeding tube to be removed, and she died.

State requires 'clear, convincing evidence'

South Dakota has similar "clear and convincing evidence" language in its laws, and Ryan's siblings say he had talked about not wanting to live in such a condition. But Anderson hasn't tested it yet. Beyond friends, relatives and acquaintances, she's never talked publicly about this before. Only recently, when the national spotlight turned to a pregnant woman in Texas and a teen in California — both brain dead — did she reluctantly agree to share her son's story.




Diane Anderson talks about her son, Ryan, 32, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 14 years, Feb 24, 2014.(Photo: Elisha Page, The Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader)



"This is why I agreed" to talk, says Anderson. It might not help her son. It might not help her. But maybe by speaking out, "some other mother won't have to suffer for 14 years," she says. "There has to be a limit."

What can she tell you about her son, Anderson says? He was 6-foot-4. He loved dill pickles. He would ask for them when he went to area high school football games. If the concession stands didn't have them then, they do now, in Ryan's honor.

He played football for about one month in high school "so he could get the jersey with his name on it," his mother says. He ran cross country for a while "so he could run in front of a car carrying the game ball (for a football game) and get his picture in the paper."

Kelli Doyle remembers when her younger brother borrowed her video camera once for what he said was a class project. Instead he drove around town, honking the car horn, making conversation with anyone outside his window and videotaping it all. He even followed a student teacher he liked around the school with the camera rolling, asking her for a date as she scolded him and told him to stop.

"He was kind of a jokester," Doyle, 38, says.

Joking with friend went horribly wrong

On the day it all changed, just hours before his high school graduation, Ryan had stopped at the community hall to reserve a table for a surprise celebration he planned to spring on family members who weren't even sure he was going to graduate.

I would challenge anybody, before they send me hate mail about being uncaring and all that. ... to either personally or to have their child spend 30 days like my son does.
Diane Anderson

Later, he swung by a buddy's place out in the country. The friend had something he wanted to show Ryan. As he went to retrieve it — a gun he had found in a safe — Ryan the prankster was off filling up a water pistol he had brought with him.

When the friend returned, Diane Anderson understands that her son started squirting him. The friend told him to stop; he didn't want to get wet. As the hijinks escalated, the two were standing on opposite sides of a door, their arms reaching around it as each held a pistol that was pointed at the other.

That's when the friend's gun went off. The bullet caught Ryan in the side of the mouth and blew out six teeth. As he collapsed to the floor, his throat filled with blood, cutting off the oxygen to his brain.

His mother says his heart stopped on the way to a hospital in Brookings and again in the helicopter on his way to Avera McKennan in Sioux Falls. Because Ryan had indicated on his driver's license that he wanted to be a donor, emergency personnel worked feverishly to preserve his organs.

In Sioux Falls, he was hooked up to a ventilator to keep his lungs moving. A feeding tube was inserted into his stomach, and another tube was inserted into his trachea.

Seven weeks, he remained on the Avera campus. On July 6, 2000, having spent the Fourth of July weekend with an old friend in Aberdeen, Diane Anderson returned to Sioux Falls to hear this news from Ryan's doctor:

"He said, 'the part of Ryan's brain that allows him to see works. The part of Ryan's brain that allows him to hear works. The part of Ryan's brain that feels and does all those things works,'" Anderson recalls. "'The part of Ryan's brain that makes Ryan Ryan and interprets all that stuff is gone.' So for me at least, Ryan died that day."

Despite mother's pleas, Ryan can't be let go

Let's just let him go then, Anderson told the doctor. Just unplug him. He told her he couldn't, that once the feeding tube is in, it must stay.

A month later, in a Sioux Falls nursing home where he had been transferred after Avera, his oxygen levels plummeted one night. Anderson says her phone rang at 2 in the morning. If you want to see your son before he goes, the caller said, you better get here now.

Friends and family scrambled to his bedside, but Ryan began to pull through. Let's just let him go, Anderson says she advised the doctors again. Her son has been through enough. Everyone's been through enough.

We can't do that, she was told.

In the first years after the accident, Anderson says her son became sick with pneumonia or flu a half-dozen times and started vomiting. As his legal guardian, with the ability to make medical decisions for him, she was prepared to let him die each time his feeding tube was turned off. In South Dakota, state law allows for artificial hydration and nutrition to be withheld and the feeding tube to be turned off if food and water make the patient sick. That's often how most people in persistent vegetative states end up dying.

But each time in those first few years, nursing home staff pushed Anderson to give Ryan antibiotics to treat the illnesses, and she says she relented.




Diane Anderson talks about her son, Ryan, 32, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 14 years, since being shot in May 2000.(Photo: Elisha Page, The Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader)

But Ryan, now 32, has been resilient under the nursing home's care. The past eight years, his mother says he's tested positive for pneumonia only once. That lasted only 48 hours.

And so he just lies there in his bed as he has for years. His long legs are pulled up under the sheet to keep him comfortable. His head occasionally moves from side to side. Rubbing the back of his neck seems to calm him. At other times, he becomes rigid and contorted, a sign that something is bothering him.

His family doesn't always agree on what any of this means.

"On one hand, I would like to see ... just see him go to sleep and be done and it be over," Doyle, his oldest sister, says. "But part of me feels like he is still serving a purpose here. I've had many sleepless nights over the whys, the what ifs. It isn't fair, but I get no answers for that. So I have to believe that he's here for a reason."

Keeping Ryan alive in minds of his family

Family members have tried to keep Ryan in their lives. Because he had dyed his hair blond in high school, they continued to dye it after the accident. "It got expensive," Anderson says. "It got hard, and after a while, it didn't make sense."

An injured Ryan is there in his sister's wedding photograph that hangs on the wall in his room. He's there surrounded by his high school classmates in a 10-year reunion photo. He even has his own Facebook page, something his mother started about four years ago so friends had a place to go and share photos and memories of Ryan.

Anderson wanted Ryan's friends to remember him, "but I don't know that I'll do that any more," she says of the Facebook page. "I'm not sure what to say; nothing much changes for him any more. It's hard on everybody."

Among Ryan's five siblings, at least some of them believe he wouldn't want to go on like this.

His sister, Diana Stacy, 33, remembers the casual conversations where they talked about patients and residents in nursing homes, and Ryan's comment that he wouldn't want to live like that.

His brother, Jason, says Ryan came to that realization even before he was exposed to nursing home life as an employee.

"He never wanted to be like a vegetable," Jason says. "I do remember" him saying that.

Whether that's the "clear and convincing evidence" that ultimately gives Anderson the power to turn off her son's feeding tube, allowing him to die, probably will have to be tested.

Anderson says the physician who manages Ryan's care, Dr. Daniel Cecil of the Avera Brookings Medical Clinic, has told her he will not turn the feeding tube off. Cecil declined to comment when reached through Avera's marketing department.

Though state law says Cecil is obligated to transfer Ryan to another physician who will honor Anderson's wishes, she has not yet found a doctor who will grant that request.

She has looked at putting him in different nursing homes as well. But they have told her they won't take him because their staff is unable to deal with his tracheotomy tube.

And so as she ponders her next step, he continues to lie in that bed, every day, every week, every year.

"Of all the people in this world that love Ryan, I love him more than anybody," she says. But what is the right decision here, she asks?

"I don't want him dead, but he died 14 years ago," she says, "It's time to let him go; I've said that for 14 years now. And I've said this, too, 'this isn't living;' this is inhumane. Really, that's what this is."

5. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/17/mom-wants-to-end-son-life-14-years-in-coma/6522021/