Alumna fights for her life

In the corner of a small lounge of the intensive care unit in an Indianapolis hospital, a group of people, many unknown to each other just days before, gathered to wait and hope. \nAll are friends of IU alumna Ada Silapiruti. The journey to visit Silapiruti was the same every day: walk down a long hall with fluorescent lights, through a pair of double doors and past nurses who knew them all well by now. Then they got to Silapiruti, hooked up to a feeding tube, swollen and scratched, part of her hair shaved off so the doctors could perform brain surgery. Her best friend, IU alumna Tina Barniak, would sit by her bedside and read to her. \n“Then you’d walk back and go to that calm corner of Silapiruti’s memories,” Barniak said. “Her mom brought books of childhood pictures on the walls. Things from high school and middle school. So many little things. We’d sit in circles of strangers and become friends.” \nAfter Silapiruti’s car was struck by a drunk driver on March 2, Barniak has spent as many days as financially possible with Silapiruti and her family. After about a month in intensive care, 23-year-old Silapiruti was transferred to a nursing home but is now back in the hospital in a “persistent, vegetative state,” Barniak said. \nSilapiruti was just a week back from studying abroad in Paris for a semester when her car was hit head-on at 56th Street and Kessler Boulevard in her hometown of Indianapolis. Severe brain injuries keep Silapiruti from communicating with anyone, but her eyes remain open. \nWhile her family and friends set up court dates and battle legal issues with organizing a fund in her name, Silapiruti rests in the hospital in Indianapolis. Her mother is constantly nearby while her father works to try to support the family. \nAnother of Silapiruti’s friends, Macey Thompson, is part of the constant support provided by Silapiruti’s mother Ponsawan. Thompson compared Silapiruti’s condition to Terri Schiavo, a woman whose condition was subject to much debate after she lived dependent on a feeding tube for seven years before she died. Silapiruti is also on a feeding tube and suffers from a lot of brain damage, she said. \n“We don’t know how it will progress, if it will progress,” Thompson said. “We don’t know if she can hear, we don’t know if she can see. One of her eyes is halfway shut most of the time ... Her brain injuries are very complicated. ... She’s made some progress. It really is a day to day. No one can say.” \nBarniak, who says she can’t afford to be with Silapiruti everyday, has made the trip from Bloomington a couple times to be with Silapiruti, one which was paid for through her co-workers’ support at the Scholars Inn Bakehouse. \n“This is me working a day just to pay for a day,” Barniak said. “If I could go and spend my time just to lay next to her, I would.” \nBarniak remembers the last time she saw her best friend before the accident. It was last November, when they were both living in Indianapolis, just before they knew they’d spend a semester apart.\n“We stayed up all night sitting on the porch and talking,” Barniak said. “She never knew what to do for her family to help enough. She wanted her brothers to go to school and have it easier for them. She knew how hard it was for her to go to school.” \nFinances are another roadblock to Silapiruti’s recovery, Barniak said. Though the family wants to set up a fund in her name to get help, legal issues make that difficult and time-consuming, she said. While at IU, Silapiruti was a resident assistant in Eigenmann, in addition to working other jobs to pay her way through school. Silapiruti was planning on attending graduate school to study psychology next year. Since Silapiruti and her mother are both not working, only her father’s income is sustaining them and it’s simply not enough, Barniak said. \nSilapiruti was also involved with Y’ALL, Youth Advocating Leadership & Learning, and helped to organize one of the two trips the group took to Biloxi, Miss., for Hurricane Katrina relief, Barniak said. She quickly emphasized that Silapiruti never helped because she had to, nor for a resume-builder. \n“It was like just because they knew she needed help and she could do it,” she said. “And then she went again.” \nWith a lot of her family in Thailand and her boyfriend still living in Paris, Silapiruti rests in the hospital as a rotating group of friends wait in that small corner of the hospital lounge for her improvement.\n“If anybody could ever bring people together and have a scene like that, it was Ada,” Barniak said. “The nurses have never seen anything like it.” \nTo help donate money to support Silapiruti and her family, contact Tina Barniak at cbarniak@indiana.edu or through the Facebook group “Ada for President.”