Libby Perry Stuffle
Libbi’s learning that she ‘can do this’
By Craig Harris
Libbi Perry Stuffle has endured multiple challenges over the past five years.
He suffered a grand mal seizure in late January and never came out of the hospital.
However, the finality of the most recent of those challenges will leave her changed forever.
“All of this happened on a Monday night,” Stuffle explains. “On Thursday, the neurologist came. They had him hooked up to EEGs (Electroencephalograms) all week. The neurologist came in and said, ‘I have to honest with you … I’m a little worried.’ For the last five years, I had never had a neurologist say, ‘I’m a little worried.’ At that time, he was already on a ventilator. He said, ‘You’ll have to make a decision to put a trach in or take him off the machine, but you have several days to decide.’ That was on Thursday. Another doctor came in on Saturday morning and said, ‘we need a decision today.’ The other doctor had said I have several days. She said, ‘Nothing has changed. We need to make a decision on the trach.’ I said, ‘Ok, what’s his quality of life?’ She said, ‘Just what you see right there.’ At that point, he was not responding.
Libbi’s husband of 30 years – Tracy Stuffle – died on Feb. 4 at the age of 51. “The first five or six weeks, I didn’t cry a lot,” Stuffle says. “That first stage of trying to decipher what happened … it was so out of the blue and so quick. It caught us totally off guard. “If you asked us if anything would ever take Tracy’s life, I would have said his heart or maybe another stroke … but another seizure. He was notorious for always coming out it and bouncing back. I thought this would be the same way.” Tracy Stuffle suffered a massive stroke in 2013, and despite recovering from considerably from the stroke, a series of ailments ensued over the next five years.
“He had said that if anything else came up that he didn’t want to be put on a machine to live. I had already gotten them to let him be put on a breathing machine at the Hendersonville Hospital. I told the nurse that he didn’t want to live this way. That’s no quality of life. If he had
