VICTORIA OFFICER LAID TO REST
JORDAN SPENT 30 YEARS MOSTLY UNRESPONSIVE AFTER CAR CRASH ON EMERGENCY CALL
Hundreds of people lined a procession route of uniformed officers as some wiped away tears outside a church Thursday before the funeral of a Victoria constable who had been in an unresponsive state for most of 30 years.
Const. Ian Jordan’s wife Hilary Jordan and their son Mark walked arm in arm up the steps of Christ Church Cathedral, where about 1,000 mourners, mostly lawenforcement personnel, paid their respects to the officer who died last week.
His coffin, draped with the Canadian flag, was carried in by uniformed pall bearers after officers from Canada and the United States marched there from the headquarters of the Victoria Police Department.
Chief Const. Del Manak said earlier Thursday that he provided regular department updates to Jordan as he lay in hospital.
Manak said Jordan never acknowledged his presence during the visits, but the officer’s emotional presence could not be denied.
“I would talk to him,” Manak said. “I would give him updates and let him know what was going on in the police department. I would let him know of the men and women who are always thinking of him.”
Jordan was injured in a crash with another police cruiser as both officers raced toward the same emergency call in September 1987.
The chief said he always looked for signs of responsiveness from Jordan during his visits.
“I don’t know to what level of awareness he could understand but I do believe in my heart that he knew people were there, that people were talking to him,” Manak said.
Hilary Jordan said her husband’s eyes would light up when she spoke of their son, who was 16 months old when the crash happened.
She said unlike comatose states, Jordan seemed to experience sleep and wake cycles, yawn, sneeze and cough. He appeared to respond positively to music, often looking at whoever was in the room when a song was playing, she said.
“He did show some signs of responsiveness. In the early days, you could feel a little pressure in his hand if you asked him to squeeze. We’re not sure if it was a reflex or not, but he would communicate through his eyes,” she said.
“His eyes would widen, often times, when I spoke about Mark, his son.”
Mark was 16 months old at the time of the accident on Sept. 22, 1987.
Hilary Jordan said her husband was in a coma for the first few months of care, then reverted into a mostly unresponsive state.
She said she never got an answer about whether her husband was conscious and unable to communicate, as is the case in locked-in syndrome, or if the responses he exhibited were simply reflexes.
“That’s an age-old question I’ve been asking myself for 30 years.”
The Coma Science Group, based in Belgium, defines “coma” as a “unarousable unresponsiveness,” a category that Jordan didn’t fit into, Hilary Jordan said. Alongside that condition, the group describes varying states of consciousness, ranging from locked-in syndrome to brain death.
Locked-in syndrome describes patients who are awake and conscious but have no means of producing speech, limb or face movements. When a patient can open his eyes, but it’s only accompanied by reflexive motor activity and devoid of any voluntary interaction with the environment, he is considered to be in a vegetative state, the group said on its website.
The group is made up of dozens of doctors and scientists aiming to improve the medical care and understanding of disorders of consciousness following an acute injury.
Dr. Adrian Owen, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at The Brain and Mind Institute at Western University, said it’s rare for a patient to remain in a state of coma for longer than a few weeks before entering a vegetative state.
By studying brain imaging that uses similar technology to MRIs, his lab has identified multiple cases where someone who appears to be in a coma or vegetative state actually has some awareness.
In 2006, they showed a patient who appeared to be entirely vegetative was actually conscious. In 2010, they proved communication for the first time with a patient who had supposedly been vegetative for five years, Owen said.
“In our experience, about 20 per cent of patients who appear to be entirely unresponsive turn out to be aware,” Owen said.
Jordan’s friend, retired Sgt. Ole Jorgensen, said Jordan sometimes seemed awake during visits. His eyes were open and he would moan and groan.
Jorgensen said Jordan was not on life support and was breathing on his own. “I can’t say whether he recognized us or not,” said Jorgensen, who sat at Jordan’s beside about once and month and filled him in on the goings-on at the police department.
“We don’t know whether he was hearing us, so, just in case (I was) keeping him up to date,” Jorgensen said.
Manak said Jordan never left the minds and hearts of the department’s officers, who are like a family. “It’s tight knit and you never leave somebody behind and forget about them, regardless of how much passage of time there’s been.”