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Outlook: Don't Turn Off my Life Support Machine

Rich and Lili Marsh

01/07/2014

Don't Turn Off my Life Support Machine

BBC World Service - Outlook, Don't Turn Off my Life Support Machine

With locked in syndrome, Richard Marsh heard doctors asking to turn off his life support

Richard Marsh and his wife Lili tell Alan Kasujja about surviving locked in syndrome, a condition which left him paralysed but fully conscious.

Five years ago Richard Marsh was a gym-obsessed retired police officer living in California. He was happily married and life was good. Then he had a catastrophic stroke that shut down his entire body, but not his mind. He was left paralysed but www, what's called 'locked in' syndrome. As he writes in his memoir Locked In, Richard confounded doctors to make an astonishing recovery, helped in no small part by his wife, Lili and her decision not to turn off his life support machine.

Prince Rama Varma likes to play down his membership of the royal family of Travancore in southern India.  He prefers to concentrate on his career as a  vocalist and veena player in the tradition of Indian classical music. But, as he explains to Nicki Paxman, there have been some tensions between the two.

Niels Hobbs is the son of two great travellers with an adventure story of his own. In 1955 his father Alfred Hobbs and his wife, Jakobine, drove a 1930's London taxi around the world. In 2009 Niels and his father, then 84 years old, restored the same taxi his parents had lived and travelled in 50 years before. The plan was for Niels and Alfred to drive the taxi across America  to pay a surprise visit to Jakobine. She and Alfred had been divorced for over 40 years and she had no idea that she was about to see her ex-husband or the taxi again. There is a film about this latest adventure - Alfred and Jakobine.

(Photo: Rich and Lili Marsh)

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